News - RapidShare has new plans to combat piracy

[HEXUS]

Accused = guilty, but you get 2 weeks to destroy the evidence.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

In some cases even user uploaded private files will be looked into by investigators

I hate the cloud...

[j.o.s.h.1408]

I hate the cloud...

So long is its not raining I don't mind the cloud

[OilSheikh]

Download speed has been absolutely slow on Rapidshare for the last few years for free users.
I doubt anyone even uses them.

[Saracen]

“RapidShare has been faced with a severe increase in free user traffic and unfortunately also in the amount of abuse of our service ever since, suggesting that quite a few copyright infringers have chosen RapidShare as their new hoster of choice for their illegal activities.” If you are cynical you might think that cutting speeds to free users might be a tool to get more people to sign up to the RapidShare premium services which are thrust into your face every time you go to the site. Kerching!
....

That is indeed a cynical way of looking at it, and you may well be right. But there's another way. If you have a premium account, then presumably you had to provide a way to pay for it, and that gives a much more direct link between a downloader's, and worse yet, uploader's identity than merely an IP, which may or may not link to the uploader's identity.

I've certainly had friends tell me that they download pirate stuff on occasion, but that no way would they provide credit card details to do it. It's not a lack of willingness to pay up. They didn't mind that. It's the traceability back to them. On the other hand, give them a safe, secure and guaranteed anonymous way to pay, and .....

.... Have RapidShare now done enough, or wriggled enough, to pacify Big Content providers and avoid the fate of Megaupload?

It's doubtful Big Content Providers will be unhappy unless illicit material is either totally eliminated (and I think everyone knows that's next to impossible, unless something changes in the technology), or at least, the levels of it are drastically cut.

But that's not really the relevant yardstick. The real yardstick is whether they've done enough to make it hard or impossible to convince a court that companies like Rapidshare have any legal liability for illicit material on their servers. And that is a far higher bar for Big Content to get over, because despite recent cases, like MegaUpload, the court's don't just rubber-stamp Big Content's wishes, and the MegaUpload case made it pretty clear that a major factor was the blatant nature of MegaUpload's activities. That will no doubt force the others to reign their necks in a fair bit, and at the very least, be a lot less blatant about what they offer. It'll be more of a "nudge, nudge, wink wink" deal than the in-yer-face attitude of MegaUpload.

Will that be enough, though?

Only time, and maybe a test case or two, will tell.

[aidanjt]

How many Sol-like stars are there in the universe? The only way to find out is to look at every single one of them at detail. In other words, big content has managed to back-door mass unwarranted searches of the general public's private property.

I hate this world.

[Whiternoise]

I hate the cloud...

All someone has to do is upload a password protected RAR with infringing content inside...

@Saracen - A lot of people got away with creating free accounts. Some sites give you credit for each download you get and a certain number of credits can be traded for monthly premium passes. That's how you get a premium account without needing to provide PayPal information - you're still mostly anonymous besides IP/MAC.

[Biscuit]

so they download the files from the server, google the filename an bam... they have the password. Its not that part im annoyed about anyway, what annoys me is they are like.... 'yeah we are going to look through your stuff on behalf of large corporations'
Rapidshare were the last file locker site who actually seemed to believe it was important to respect the privacy and rights of their users over the demands of large companies.