RapidShare gets court order to clamp down on digital book piracy

Book publishers are hoping to close a chapter on their fight against digital piracy, having won a key legal victory against RapidShare, a popular website that was found by the court host pirated copies of digital books.

The site, based in Switzerland, was ordered by a court in Hamburg, Germany, to take down or sever access to digital files for 148 book titles, the publishers announced Wednesday.

The court also ordered RapidShare to put measures in place to prevent pirated books from being made available on its site, which is visited by more than 42 million people a day who share or download files. Other companies, such as Scribd in San Francisco, have content-matching software that vets documents before they appear on the website.

To read more about the lawsuit, check out our post on the Times' Technology Blog.

-- Alex Pham

Photo credit: Amy_b via Flickr

Comments

[Rick Olivo]

This won't help. There are at least a dozen or more data hosts that do the same thing. Book Publishers will find that they are playing the same whack-a-mole game that the music industry has been contending with (unsuccessfully) for years. Let's not even talk about bit torrent sites which also do digital books, the Usenet, and all the other more specialized Internet protocols. Short of exercising China-like control, anything that can be digitized will get out on the net for free distribution. All the moralizing and lawsuits in the world won't change that. Get used to it, it's a new world out there and tut-tutting isn't going to change that. Find a new business model that works, and abandon antiquated notions like copyright, which generally only serve to enrich bloated corporate interests anyway, leaving artists and authors to get what the littlest pig got.