RapidShare Ordered To Proactively Filter Book Titles
Found on TorrentFreak on Friday, 26 February 2010
The Court ruled that RapidShare must monitor user uploads to ensure that none of the book titles are put onto their servers and go on to ensure that the public never gains access to copies that somehow slip through this filtering.
According to Inside Higher Ed, every time a prohibited book named in the injunction is made available on RapidShare it could cost the company up to 250,000 euros ($339,000) or even earn company bosses 2 years in jail.
Now I don't like RS at all, but this is just idiotic. The judge had obviously not the slightest clue. Sure they can block the upload of "whatever.pdf" and files with specific checksums, but amazingly, uploaders are intelligent enough to either change the name or simply put the file inside a password protected archive; once it's spotted by RS, add a little file to the archive to change the checksum and upload again. Now RS could block all archive files that are password protected and effectively kill itself. If they somehow manage to survive that, uploaders can simply continue by uploading encrypted containers which can't even be identified as anything but random data.