Last updated: 11:29 a.m., U.S. Eastern time
In a victory for textbook publishers, a German court has ruled that RapidShare, a file-trading Web site, must do more to stop the unauthorized swapping of some copyrighted books on its service.
The Landgericht in Hamburg, a district court, issued a preliminary ruling against RapidShare this month, prohibiting the company from making available certain copyrighted books on its site. The order took effect on February 17.
Six major publishers brought the legal action against RapidShare, and they specified a list of 148 titles that are frequently pirated on the site. Those are the works covered under the court order, and many of them are textbooks.
Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, said in an e-mail interview that the company planned to appeal the ruling. She said the company had quickly removed any copyrighted material that users had posted to the service once officials become aware of it. She added that the company follows all legal requirements regarding copyright.
The ruling said the company must go further: “It is not only necessary to promptly block access to the specific file, but rather to also take precautions going beyond this in order to prevent to the largest possible extent the occurrence of further similar infringements.”
The court said it would issue fines of up to 250,000 euros (about $340,000) or jail time for company executives of up to two years per instance that a specified book is present on the file-sharing site.
Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, said that installing filters that would check work for copyright violations before it is posted would violate strict German privacy laws. “So basically, this boils down to a discussion about how society wants to balance the need for protection of copyright versus the protection of data privacy,” she said. “As long as this conflict has not been resolved in Germany, there will be more trials regarding this matter.”
On Tuesday afternoon, one of the books, Advanced 2D Game Development, by Jonathan S. Harbour, was still listed on the service, but an attempt to download it drew only the following error message: “Due to a violation of our terms of use, the file has been removed from the server.”
An official for the book publishers said that their lawyers were monitoring the site to see if any of the books reappeared, and that if so, they would notify the court.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Tom Allen, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, called the decision “a big deal,” describing RapidShare as one of the largest providers of illegal books.
A recent study by the Attributor Corporation, which helps companies search for pirated works, found that the vast majority of pirated books appear on just two sites, and RapidShare was one of them.
The publishers involved are among the largest in the world when it comes to textbooks: Bedford, Freeman & Worth; Cengage Learning; Elsevier; the McGraw-Hill Companies; Pearson; and John Wiley & Sons.
They brought the suit in Germany because courts there have been friendly to publishers in the past. “The German courts had dealt with this issue and did it in a way that respected copyright and did it quickly,” said Mr. Allen, of the publishers’ association.
