Question about Copyright

I recently started to upload videos in a forum but then removed all of them within a week after a regular poster's uploads in the thread were reported to RS for suspected "illegal" (i.e. copyrighted) material. None of my material (or any of the other material posted in the thread) was affected or blocked.

Even so I was still scared enough to remove all my copyrighted material form RS because I do not want to have someone take action against me for uploading their content. It simply is not worth it to me if I could be prosecuted or something.

So my question is this: What happens when a copyright infringement is reported to RS or this forum aside from being blocked or removed?

I am not against sharing but if the risks are much higher than the rewards then I feel that there is no incentive for me to post. I am pretty new at this whole uploading/posting thing so I may be over reacting, but I want to be smart about how I post if I post again in the future. Please give me your thoughts....

AFAIK, Rapidshare simply deletes the file and adds it to their blacklist. I've heard nothing (yet) about them handing over user info or IP addresses.

It has happened that RS have canceled a complete account with them if they have recieved excessive reports about violations to their terms of service, TOS.
No porn, no copyrighted material.
We all know that at least 90 % of the files on RS are just that, porn or copyrighted.
I have heard of members here who has been threathened directly from pornsites about being charged for copyright violations thrue filesharing if they don't stop their activity.
In those cases the members true identity has been tracked via their creditcards.
No evidence that RS have had anything to do with it.
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[URL=http://www.casimages.com][/URL]

I've had 4 Rapidshare (collectors) accounts closed for violation of their TOS, and i've yet to get a single letter(or email) from either RS or a copyright holder. So I think you are pretty safe on RS - eventhough it's a bit aggravating to find that 12000 of your files are gone.

By the way if you want to be 99.9 % sure that you don't get caught - get a anonymous VPN connection (google anonymous VPN), that means you exchange your own IP-adress for an IP-adress that you get from the VPN providor. And if you then choose a provider who doesn't give out their costumers data to any old copyright agency or better yet does have costumer data but have no log-files for what they are doing through their VPN-servers. Relakks does that but I don't know if any of the other providers do. And ofcourse if there's no logs there's no way they can backtrack to you.

Regards

RabidSquirrel