In mid-March 2012, a German court took a first step toward judicial regulation of the cloud. A court in Hamburg ruled that the file-hosting site Rapidshare must proactively filter the content uploaded by its users.

The ruling may well be the first of its kind. In America, for example, as long as sites that host content take down any uploads that infringe a copyright when they receive notice, they are under no obligation to filter content as it is added to the site. In contrast, the Rapidshare decision (which came as the result of a lawsuit by German booksellers) requires the site to filter out infringing content before it is posted to the Web. Keep reading →