Is it legal for them? No, that is copyrighted material and they are in violation of it (assuming the music is copyrighted). For you, it depends on the situation. If you are located in the US, you can probably be perused unless you make a reasonable effort to remove them. Legal situations like this one can't be accurately predicted with as little information as you have provided. My advice is to remove the links when you can, if you want to let them to continue contact a lawyer to make sure you are safe.
I hope you don't mind me jumping in here. I'm assuming the music in question is not being distributed under a permissive licence, i.e. it's probably major label stuff. I'm also assuming you're running a site that hosts UGC and could be covered by the safe harbour provisions of the DMCA. Finally I'm assuming you're interested in US law. Posting links is not illegal. This would set up third party liability and this is not an offence, despite the best efforts of big content. Uploading and sharing infringing content through a site like RapidShare is illegal, but the offence is being committed by the uploader, not by RapidShare. RapidShare is safe providing they follow the DMCA takedown procedure. They are not under any obligation to proactively remove infringing content either, as the District Court in Viacom vs. YouTube recently affirmed. That said, you must be careful that you aren't inducing your users to infringe. You also need to bear in mind that recent rulings have established a new file sharing copyright law, which is much less permissive than normal copyright law. The standard for inducement is quite a bit lower and the link to the content can be much less direct (BitTorrent trackers have been shut down despite only providing links to files, not the files themselves - this is basically third party liability). If your site is not predominantly used for filesharing, you make reasonable efforts to remove infringing content and you follow the DMCA takedown procedure you should be safe. If you do not do that and your site appears to exist largely as a front for illegal filesharing, a judge may well twist the law to find you guilty. But I'd second c_programmer's advice: remove links you find, make sure you have a DMCA takedown procedure in place and contact a lawyer to make sure you're covered - I'm certainly not in a position to give you legal advice (I don't know your case and I'm not a lawyer ).
it is not illegal if the files that are being uploaded on rapid share are legal, in case of music , license from the original creator.
My personal thought is Allow them to continue at your own risk. I know they woud get kicked off any site in owned.
Keep in mind that if you monetize your site with Adsense, the Rapidshare links likely violate Adsense's policy on copyrighted material.
Well it may be semi-risky in my opinion. While usually there is little chance to get into serious trouble, links containing private property or any kind of the infamous warez are considered as digital piracy - thats why uploading sites often search and delete invalid content.
O.O I was just going to launch my first and new site about Omnia apps, I have written 20 very long articles for my website about downloading free apps for the Samsung Omnia and I've just found out that sharing ilegal links goes against google's TOS So I'll have to tart now a new thing Thank you all for this post, otherwise I would have continued writing useless articles for a website that sooner or later it would be closed by Google.
I personally would delete the links then ban the users. Then put a public notice on your site somewhere stating that this has happened and why. Not worth the risk to allow this, regardless of legality...
didn't the feds just bust a bunch of tv and movie sites that were basically link farms to megavideo and others? makes me think it's quite unlegal in the us at least.
I'm not sure how they worked (ie, link farms, hosted etc) but here's an article about it... http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-piracy-20100701,0,2871905.story
I found the official seizure release: http://www.cybercrime.gov/tvshackSeizure.pdf all but one of them were just linking to videos hosted elsewhere
Lets say your uploading music and posting them on your website, and these artist are form the 90's, they never made it commercial large, or it is rare song that went unreleased. Also, I have seen a lot of music websites use a disclaimer on ever page that says, any track you download is for promotional use, you must delete any downloaded content off your computer in 24 hours. Not phases exactly like that but its close. Wondering if that would make any deference thanks.
The legalities behind sharing links to rapidshare, megaupload, and all other file sharing sites is not in sharing the links. It is illegal to download copyrighted material that you do not have rights to.
You can get in trouble for this, it is not as bad as uploading the copyrighted material but pretty much the same idea.