Maybe you’ve heard that Rapidshare, everyone’s most/least favorite multi-petabyte hoster, was ordered to remove $34 million worth of content, and faces a potentially huge fine by order of a German court.

Could this injunction be painted as a victory of the small, artisan download blog (ahem) versus the corporate feed farm of file sharing? Probably not, but it’s interesting to consider it that way. Users have pointed out that with the passworded files and zip archives uploaded to Rapidshare, filtering the infringing content would be pretty much impossible.

I don’t mean to suggest that smaller blogs are more policeable, because they’re obviously not, but at least knowing where your music comes from is a rare thing these days. And if Rapidshare had been able to figure out where the offending files came from, the users might be penalized instead of the system.

Not that that’s any better, though. I still don’t see any of this having an impact until there are individual police who post up in people’s living rooms, watching for inconspicuous mp3 hand offs.