RapidShare gets court order to clamp down on digital book piracy

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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