Legal issues
On 19 January 2007, the German performance rights organisation GEMA claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com. "The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion."
RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal. By comparing the files' MD5-hash the site would now prevent illegal files from being reuploaded. While this would be sufficient under United States law, it was later established in court that under German law it is not. That decision forced RapidShare to check all the uploaded files before publishing them.
In April 2009, RapidShare handed over to major record labels the personal details of uploaders who uploaded copyright-protected files. The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band Metallica's Death Magnetic album.
A month later, RapidShare stated on their website: "we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link."
Six global publishers obtained an injunction against Swiss-based RapidShare AG. Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc. The judgment handed down by a German court in Hamburg on 10 February 2010, and effective on 17 February 2010, ordered RapidShare to implement measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 copyright-protected works cited in the lawsuit, which was filed on 4 February 2010. The court ruled that RapidShare must monitor its site to ensure the copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance.
The US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus stated that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works".
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The Düsseldorf higher regional court twice overturned injunctions filed against RapidShare by Capelight Pictures, a German film and DVD rental company. The court declared that the file host could not be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties and revoked the injunction initially upheld by the Düsseldorf district court in the main proceedings. The court also indicated that a file host is not obliged to use a word filter as this would also prevent legal copying for private use.
In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California rejected an injunction against RapidShare filed by the publisher of online erotic magazine Perfect 10. The presiding judge declared that the plaintiff had failed to make a credible case that RapidShare had directly infringed copyright or supported copyright violation.
In a 2009–2010 case brought against RapidShare by Atari Europe, the Düsseldorf higher regional court concluded on appeal that illegal use of RapidShare was by a small minority of its users and that to assume otherwise amounted to "a general suspicion of shared hosting services and their users that cannot be justified". The court also observed that the site removed copyrighted material upon request and did not provide search facilities for illegal material. It concluded that the plaintiff's suggestions for preventing sharing of copyrighted material were "unreasonable or pointless". It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which could impair legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP address analysis (as IP addresses can change frequently).
In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.
In March 2012, the Hamburg higher regional court upheld three earlier decisions that the file hoster could be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties.
In September 2018, over 3 years after its demise, Schmid, his wife, Alexandra, and one of their former lawyers were tried by the public prosecutor in Zug, Switzerland, where Rapidshare remained incorporated, on behalf of several copyright holders seeking financial restitution for commercial assistance to copyright violation. The trio were found not guilty in January 2021.
