Update: The initial version of this post said that RapidShare had been fined €24 million. Another look at GEMA's press release says that the group won a case against RapidShare "worth €24 million," but this appears to refer to the value of the songs in question, not to an actual damage award. We blame Google Translate and some really poor German classes for the confusion. Thanks to readers for pointing this out.

Story: German music trade group GEMA has won a court judgment against one-click file-sharing service RapidShare, and the Hamburg Regional Court has confirmed that services like RapidShare must implement proactive content filtering to avoid liability.

The decision has been building for more than a year. GEMA went after RapidShare after it became a popular hub for sharing albums online, and in relative safety. In January 2008, another regional court in D�sseldorf found that RapidShare was responsible for what its users uploaded to the service.

So RapidShare implemented a screening process—six full-time staff members vetted content and dealt with infringement complaints, and RapidShare maintained hashes of all files that were pulled down for infringement. Using the hashes, the site would prevent repeat uploads of identical content, though any alteration in the file would render the hash technique useless.

This wasn't good enough for GEMA, which went back to court. In October 2008, a court found that the these systems weren't robust enough and said that "a business model that doesn't use common methods of prevention cannot claim the protection of the law."

This week, GEMA won yet again (German), securing a court order absolutely requiring RapidShare to block 5,000 songs represented by GEMA.

In GEMA's view, this is all to the good; the court decisions of the last few years mean that GEMA and other rightsholders can go after the hosting and intermediary companies without having to sue end users instead.

Dr. Harald Heker, the boss of GEMA, said in a statement that "the decision of the Landgericht Hamburg [Hamburg Regional Court] is a milestone in GEMA's fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet. GEMA will continue to protect its members from online piracy. We are confident that we can reduce the illegal usage of GEMA's repertoire on the Internet to negligible levels."

The decision appears wide-reaching in its effect; user-generated content sites located in Germany will need to take proactive measures to screen copyrighted material, and those measures had better be effective.