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Revision as of 21:44, 20 December 2011

RapidShare
File:RapidShare Logo.svg
File:RapidShare.com screenshot.png
Screen-shot of rapidshare.com home page
Type of businessAktiengesellschaft
Type of site
One-click hosting
Available inEnglish
German
Spanish
Founded2006[1]
HeadquartersCham, Switzerland
Key peopleChristian Schmid
(CEO & COO)
URLrapidshare.com
AdvertisingSubscription
RegistrationOptional

RapidShare is a one-click hosting service that offers both free and commercial services. Operating from Switzerland, it is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. RapidShare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites, with 10 petabytes of files on its servers, and handling up to three million users simultaneously.[3]

History

RapidShare has been operating as a filehosting site since at least 2005.[4]

RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid, who also took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010.[5]

RapidShare used to operate two different websites. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland.[6] The second website, RapidShare.com, has been operated and maintained simultaneously with RapidShare.de. On March 1, 2010, RapidShare.de was permanently shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to RapidShare.com. Furthermore, files uploaded to RapidShare.de were no longer available for download.

In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites.[5]

Operation and services

Upon uploading, the user is supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone with whom the uploader shares the URL to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content.[3]

In April 2008, RapidShare had 5.4 petabytes of storage for users.[7] In March 2010 it stated, after a 120 Gbit/s upgrade, to have 600 Gbit/s of bandwidth.[8]

Registration and payment allow benefits such as unlimited download speed, immediate download (instead of experiencing a waiting period), download of several files simultaneously, queue skipping, the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads, uploading, downloading bigger files up to 2 GB, allowing Free Users to download their files with Premium privileges ("TrafficShare") and to store up to 50 GB of data that cannot expire.

Before 1 July 2010 there was a rewards program that allowed the user to trade "RapidPoints" for a selection of products depending on the number of points the user had collected. On June 18, 2010, RapidShare announced that it would stop this program along with RapidDonations on July 1, 2010, to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material.[9]

There are restrictions on downloads by non-account holders, for example a 167-minute waiting (increased in 2011 from 15-20 minutes) time between downloads; there is also a 5-minute (previously 1 minute) waiting period for each download once the user's waiting time between downloads has refreshed.[10]

Software

RapidShare offers two computer programs to simplify file managing: It allows for torrents to be uploaded to their own file server and quickly be seeded.

RapidShare Uploader

This software allows queuing of uploads. However, it cannot resume interrupted uploads. It is available for Windows and runs without installation.[11]

RapidShare Manager

This software has many more features than the Uploader, especially queuing and resuming the upload as well as the downloads (only for Premium Members—free users cannot resume). The version linked on the site works with Windows Vista and 7, Mac and Linux.[12] There is an older official client available for Windows XP, which may be obtained upon request from RapidShare or alternatively from various third-party sources.[13] RapidShare does not restrict automatic downloads to their downloader, however, they do not provide technical support to third-party downloaders as they do for RapidShare Manager.

Views on RapidShare differ to a great extent. On 19 January 2007 the German collections agency GEMA claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com. "The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion."[14][15]

RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal. By comparing the files' MD5-hash the site would now prevent illegal files from being reuploaded. While this would be sufficient under United States law, it was later established in court that under German law it is not. That decision forced RapidShare to check all the uploaded files before publishing them.[16]

In April 2009 RapidShare handed over to major record labels the personal details of uploaders who uploaded copyright-protected files.[17][18] The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band Metallica's Death Magnetic album.[19]

A month later, RapidShare stated on their website that "we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link."[20]

Six global publishers have obtained an injunction against Swiss-based RapidShare AG. Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc. The judgment handed down by a German court in Hamburg on February 10, 2010, and effective on February 17, 2010, ordered RapidShare to implement measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 copyright-protected works cited in the lawsuit, which was filed on February 4, 2010. The court ruled that RapidShare must monitor its site to ensure the copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance.[citation needed]

The US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus stated that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works".[21]

By contrast, the Düsseldorf higher regional court has twice overturned injunctions filed by the German film and DVD rental company, Capelight Pictures (Ref. I-20 U 166/09; I-20 U 8/10).[22][23] The court declared that the file hoster could not be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties and revoked the injunction initially upheld by the Düsseldorf district court in the main proceedings. The court also indicated that a file hoster is not obliged to use a word filter as this would also prevent legal copying for private use.

In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California, in its legal case (09-CV-2596H WMC) between the publisher of an online erotic magazine and RapidShare, rejected the filling of a temporary injunction against the file hoster.[24] The presiding judge turned down the application because the plaintiff failed to make a credible case for a direct infringement of copyright or for RapidShare having supported copyright violations.

In the 2009 - 2010 legal case Atari Europe S.A.S.U. v. Rapidshare AG in Germany,[25] the Düsseldorf higher regional court reached the conclusion on appeal that "most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases"[26] and that to assume otherwise was equivalent to inviting "a general suspicion against shared hosting services and their users which is not justified".[27]

Of note, the court also observed that the site removes copyrighted material when asked, does not provide search facilities for illegal material, noted previous cases siding with RapidShare, and after analysis concluded that the plaintiff's suggestions for preventing sharing of copyrighted material were "unreasonable or pointless".[25] It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use[26] could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which would prevent legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP analysis (as IPs are often dynamic and change).[28][29]

In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.[30]

Competitors

References

  1. ^ "About us". RapidShare.
  2. ^ "Rapidshare.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2011-11-02.
  3. ^ a b Stroll, Randall (2009-10-03). "Will Books Be Napsterized?". New York Times. Retrieved 2009-10-03. {{cite news}}: More than one of |work= and |newspaper= specified (help)
  4. ^ Wolk, Douglas (5 July 2005). "Never Ending Math Equation". The Village Voice.
  5. ^ a b "RapidShare Ditches CEO Bobby Chang". TorrentFreak. 21 April 2010.
  6. ^ "RapidShare is Appealing" (Press release). RapidShare. Retrieved 13 April 2008.
  7. ^ "RapidShare". Retrieved 13 April 2008.
  8. ^ "RapidShare News". Retrieved 2 March 2010. [dead link]
  9. ^ "RapidShare News". Retrieved 28 June 2010. [dead link]
  10. ^ "RapidShare Download FAQ". Retrieved 11 June 2011. {{cite web}}: Text "Download" ignored (help)
  11. ^ "RapidTools: RapidShare Uploader". RapidShare.
  12. ^ "RapidTools: RapidShare Manager 2". RapidShare.
  13. ^ "RapidTools: RapidShare Manager". RapidShare.
  14. ^ Smith, Robert W. (19 January 2007). "GEMA obtains injunctions against data exchange services". Heise Online. Archived from the original on 3 January 2008. Retrieved 31 January 2007.
  15. ^ "The Rise and Fall of Rapidshare".
  16. ^ "Haftung von RapidShare IV Oberlandesgericht Hamburg Urteil v. 02.07.2008 - Az.: 5 U 73/07". Webhosting & Recht (in German).
  17. ^ Wilson, Drew (7 May 2009). "German Lawyer Speaks About Risks of Using One-Click File Hosters". Zeropaid.com.
  18. ^ "RapidShare: Cease&Desist-Letter for Uploader through civil law based information claim". gulli.com. 30 April 2009.
  19. ^ "The Rise and Fall of Rapidshare".
  20. ^ "News". RapidShare.
  21. ^ "RIAA joins congressional caucus in unveiling first-ever list of notorious illegal sites". RIAA. 2010-05-19. Retrieved 2011-01-16.
  22. ^ "RapidShare Wins in Court". gigaom.com. 3 May 2010.
  23. ^ "German court overturns injunction against RapidShare". arstechnica.com. 22 July 2010.
  24. ^ "Rapidshare Beats Perfect 10, for Now, in US Court". zeropaid.com. 20 May 2010.
  25. ^ a b Legal case: OLG Dusseldorf, Judgement of 22.03.2010, Az I-20 U 166/09 dated 22 March 2010.
  26. ^ a b Roettgers, Janko (2010-05-03). "RapidShare Wins in Court". Gigaom.com. Retrieved 2011-01-16. - cite from ruling: "Es ist davon auszugehen, dass die weit überwiegende Zahl von Nutzern die Speicherdienste zu legalen Zwecken einsetzen und die Zahl der missbräuchlichen Nutzer in der absoluten Minderheit ist." (It is to be expected that the vast majority of users use the storage services for lawful purposes and the number of abusive users are in the absolute minority.)
  27. ^ From the Atari v. RapidShare ruling: "entspricht einem Generalverdacht gegen Sharehoster-Dienste und ihre Nutzer, der so nicht zu rechtfertigen ist" (corresponds to a general suspicion against shared hosting services and their users, which is not to justify such).
  28. ^ "RapidShare Not Liable For Pirating Users, Court Rules". TorrentFreak. 4 May 2010.
  29. ^ "OLG Düsseldorf: Keine Haftung von Rapidshare für Urheberrechtsverletzungen Dritter". Telemedicus (in German).
  30. ^ "Watch out Big Content—RapidShare has hired a lobbying firm". Ars Technica. 27 December 2010. 
    Rapidshare went offline Dec 19, 2011, with no fanfare or explanation.  As of noon EST, 12-20-2011, it is still

non-existent.



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