Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

HISTORY

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.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.[11] 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.

Fuller information can be found here;

RAPIDSHARE INFO

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Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

I use IDM (Internet Download Manager).... works with pretty much any host account I have .... just enter the host site/password to your account and save in the settings and good to go.


GR

Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

Thx ladybird.. I took out a 30 day account just over a week ago.. Still up and running, but hard to find people posting links to use from there. I am only a d/l guy.. So more of a leech than anything. but I still pay the site, and greatly appreciate those that do upload for all of us.. Hopefully more will upload to there. :):)

Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

Legal issues

Views on RapidShare differ to a great extent. On 19 January 2007 the German performance rights organisation 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."

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.

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

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."

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.

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".

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).

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. 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, the Düsseldorf higher regional court reached the conclusion on appeal that "most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases" and that to assume otherwise was equivalent to inviting "a general suspicion against shared hosting services and their users which is not justified".

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".

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 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).

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.


Search engines

Rapidshare does not list uploaded files. It provides the uploader of a file with a unique download URL which enables them to access the file. The uploader may or may not publish this URL on the internet. Hence, there is no central register of uploaded material and Rapidshare does not provide a search engine. As the URLs often use acronyms or random abbreviations to indicate the content of a file, conventional search engines do not turn up many results.
END

There are no reported recent prosecutions against Rapidshare.com and it seems they are back and on the rise, due to all the recent changes on other File Hosts. If any of you know of any more recent ones, please post and advise us.... with full info and coded links where you found the details. (No links to C & Ps on other sites please, just the originator's post, with legal docs/acts etc. quoted)

Thanks

Rapidshare Previous Stats;

http://readthescene.org/wp-content/u...1/08/stats.png

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Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

Re: Rapidshare Info & Prosecutions History
 

Ive tried, believe me, but unfortunately the poor uploaders dont earn anything from RShare and thats the only route they have to earn money in the many poor countries they live in. I too bought a RShare Premium account and am very pleased with them. I posted about how good they are even on Free downloads.

What I have found so far, on many that the uploaders are using, is that they are not of the same level of service as RShare, but they are safe and in secure countries, which is more important, and at least the uploaders earn a little for every 1000 downloads they get from their links. ;)

Until things "settle down" after the recent panic by File Hosts, we must take what we can get :whistle: