It seems that ebook reader owners free ride when it came to copyrighted materials illicitly downloaded could well be coming to an end with news that Rapidshare has been ordered to filter books out of its content.

We'll be curious to see how big an impact this filtering has...

Indeed, it seems that the web-based file-transfer company could well face some fairly serious consequences if it fails to comply with the order. According to TorrentFreak, the company could face fines of $339,000 or see some of its higher-ups jailed for a failure to comply with the ruling. As part of the ruling, Rapidshare will be required to actively police its service, ensuring that around 148 titles never find their way onto the file-sharing site.

It’s certainly an interesting development, but hardly one that will make a massive impact in the extent to which books are shared via services like Rapidshare. Indeed, given the order, there are two very simple moves that will likely see the illegal sharing of these texts continue almost uninterrupted. The first is that users will likely flock to other, smaller file-sharing services (of which there are, let’s face it, many).

The second, and perhaps the most likely, is that people will simply continue to share these books over Rapidshare illegally but, before uploading the illicit content, will simply change the filename of their uploads and continue as normal. Either way, it seems very much to be the case that there’s relatively little to be done about the sharing of books across services like Rapidshare, given the fact that the files themselves are so small and so relatively easily disguised.

As ebook readers rise in popularity, it seems likely that we’ll see the relative ease with which small files like ebooks can be pirated come to the fore. It’ll be interesting to see just how well the various publishers deal with the illegal piracy of ebooks, given the fact that previous efforts seem to have fallen a little short of the mark.