Internet fads are like memes, which in turn are like bottle rockets in a dense neighborhood: You see them shoot up from out of nowhere, explode, and dissipate just as quickly. Pets.com, Gnutella, and Friendster are examples of this. Another fine example: Rapidshare. Rapidshare is one of the last holdouts of an early internet phenomenon that, though convenient, was bound to be a problem somehow: personal internet file hosting. While the concept of internet storage was appealing, it became a rather quick source of such terrific work such as viruses, malware, and child porn. Furthermore, it wasn't very profitable, with most shutting down by around 2002. RS survived out of sheer will and subscription fees and actually became slightly less popular than The Pirate Bay. That's surprising, since these days, all I see on there are porn and Naruto episodes. Or worse, Naruto porn. Eewwwww.

Now, after those early days, it was inevitable that Grandpa Copyright would come walking and flail about his oversized walking stick, breaking everything to maintain order. The "collecting society" Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, or GEMA (I don't know how they could abbreiviate that so simply), a group of German-speaking music lobbyists, requested an injunction (their second) for the site to remove 5,000 music tracks from their collection. That request was granted this week in the Regional Court in Hamburg. The combined value of these tracks was worth €24 million (approximately $33.5 million), but does not constitute a fine against the website as previously reported by Hollywood Reporter and Billboard. Furthermore, it seems apparent that this will not completely impede the site's business.

The problem with this, however, is that the injunction explicitly asks for those files in the list (which has not been made public) to be removed. The majority of files on Rapidshare these days are archive files, many with obscure or irrelevant names. Weeding them out would take months. Furthermore, people could simply bypass this by changing the name or using a different file type other than music track files. And given the nature of the ruling, Rapidshare may continue running as a result, and thus users can still upload music tracks irregardless.

So, either this ruling was poorly done and GEMA failed to notice this or GEMA was simply paying lip service to Grandpa Copyright. Either way, this just keeps the site alive by giving it attention. There are better ways to send your friends music illegally, nowadays. Gmail, for starters.