Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders

[nsane.forums]

Like many new releases, Metallica’s latest album “Death Magnetic” was uploaded to the popular file hosting service Rapidshare one day prior to its official release date last year. Since users don’t broadcast their IP-address or distribute files to the public directly though Rapidshare, it came as a surprise when the police raided the house of an uploader a few weeks ago.

At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law. It turns out that several record labels are using this to take legal action against those who share music on Rapidshare.

Previously the paragraph was only used by rights holders to get the personal details of those who share copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. It basically enables the copyright holders to get “permission” from a civil judge to ask ISPs to disclose the personal details of a user behind a certain IP. Now, however, this also seems to be the case for file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, which is based in Germany.

This of course opens up the possibility for rights holders to go after a wide range of file-hosting services and potentially even BitTorrent sites. Indeed, everyone who now uploads a torrent file to a site hosted in Germany is at risk of having his personal details revealed. Although it will be impossible to prove that the uploader actually seeded the file it might be seen as assisting in copyright infringement.

Pretty much all torrent sites keep track of the IP-addresses of their (.torrent) uploaders, and if the rights holders can get the IP-address of people who upload to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, they can easily extend this to BitTorrent sites hosted in Germany. A dream come true for copyright holders, but a nightmare for the privacy of Internet users.

Too bad for Metallica’s Lars Ulrich who only just started sharing files himself.

Post from: TorrentFreak

View: Original Article

[Ambrocious]

Nothing is safe anymore...the P2P wars are soon to come and will I or will I not be willing to risk it all by even being affiliated with such things, I can't say yes or now but I only wish that there will be a positive outcome from all this.

[myidisbb]

if you just want to download then newsgroups is the way to do it.

if you want to upload tfor a certain person you encrypt the rar files and use a random file name.

right now we have to stop the isps in the usa from going to the monthly cap crap. problem being they want to sell their services and block you from using the internet for 3rd party access.