You probably think that bandwidth and storage costs have fueled that decision, but that’s far away from the truth. It seems that the German performance rights organization GEMA, the bane of all music on the Internet, has once again had its hand in play. The organization is for instance the reason that German users are not able to watch many music videos that are posted on YouTube.

GEMA in 2009 asked Google to pay $0,013 per song played on YouTube. Google declined back then and as a result, German users cannot watch the majority of music videos on YouTube.

Grooveshark likely faced a similar decision, and like Google, Grooveshark decided to pull out of the country instead.

A GEMA mail address is listed on the page for users to direct their complaints to. It may be more fruitful on the other hand to direct complaints directly to politicans and not the GEMA.

Grooveshark recommends the German Simfy service as an alternative. And while that service looks like a great alternative on first glance, it needs to be noted that free users (with an account) only get five hours of free music per month. Users who would like to listen to more music need to switch to the Premium account which sets them back €4.99 each month.

Existing Grooveshark users can export their music from the service. A link is provided in the announcement.

The mobile clients are currently still working. It will however only be a matter of time until they will be shut down as well. (via Caschy)

GEMA’s Chief Executive Officer Dr. Harald Heker commented: “The Court’s decision confirms that it cannot be the task of the rights owners to control at their own cost the continued operation of services, which generate commercial profit from unlawful use of their works. This decision will also send out a major signal to all services enlisting the help of the individual users to create a comprehensive illegal offer and then in the end to use this offer for generating revenue for themselves”.

Rapidshare announced the same day that they would appeal the ruling. The current ruling would have a drastic impact on every company that would operate from Germany (Europe) offering free disk space to their users. It is also important to note that it would be technically impossible to check every uploaded file if it would violate a copyright. It is for instance perfectly legal to upload a private copy of album to make it available to close friends. How would Rapidshare be able to verify if the uploaded file would violate copyright ?

It is in my opinion ridiculous to demand that Rapidshare, or any other company or individual who are providing webspace, is responsible for the copyright infringements of users who upload copyrighted files to the service. This would essentially mean that every webspace provider could be held responsible of a user would upload copyrighted files to rented webspace.