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German file-sharing site fined 24m euros

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

The Register reports that a German court has fined file-sharing service Rapidshare 24 million euros for copyright infringement in respect of 5,000 tracks which were shared through the site. The court has held that it is the responsibility of the hosting service, and not the copyright owners, to ensure that copyright infringement was not taking place.

The IPKat has relatively little sympathy for file-sharing websites when they know that the main use for their websites is to exchange copyright material. However, he wonders what this judgment means for services like UTube where some files may infringe but others may either be completely original, or at least involve transformative use.

Full post as published by IPKat on June 25, 2009 (boomark / email).