The GEMA has been on a rampage as of late, and it seems like their only target has been a Swiss website owned by Rapidshare AG, www.rapidshare.com.  On June 12, the German court, according to the ordered Rapidshare to disable access to 5000 files hosted on their site and the judgement could have much larger implications.  Up until now, webhosts were only required to remove infringing materials as soon as they had knowledge that the materials or files were infringing.

This is similar to U.S. DMCA law, where a filehost can host a file, but is required to remove it as soon as it receives a DMCA takedown notice, which could be labeled as the webhost having knowledge that the content is infringing or is likely to be infringing on someone else's copyright rights.  This recent judgement requires filehosts to implement measures to potentnially detect copyright infringment and prevent it completely, or at a minimum identify repeat infringers.  We see this similarly in actions taken by U.S. companies to minimize the threat of lawsuits such as Viacom v. Youtube (read Google for our purposes).  In the U.S., the DMCA provides for the implementation of measures to protect against copyright infringment, but the related industries have failed to implement or dictate a standard which companies would be required to implement.

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