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RapidShare Threatens Suit Over Piracy Allegations
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that RapidShare, named as a contributor to digital piracy by a MarkMonitor report, has threatened to sue for defamation. 'This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor,' says RapidShare in a statement. 'RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers.' MarkMonitor, a Web site that specializes in 'enterprise brand protection,' says in their study that the most-trafficked domains engaged in digital piracy included three sites — rapidshare.com, megavideo.com, and megaupload.com — that combined yielded 21 billion pageviews per year. RapidShare acknowledged that copyrighted files do get uploaded to its site, however 'these users are in the absolute minority compared with those who use our services to pursue perfectly legitimate interests.' RapidShare says that it does not open and view the files of its users, and contains no search function so that other users may look for content."
Just in my own personal experience, I've never seen Rapidshare used for legal means. I've never heard of anyone using it for legal means. I'm not saying that it can't happen or doesn't happen, but I really do wonder how much of their business is business done without breaking copyright laws. Furthermore, if they never open up the files put on their servers, how the hell would they know whether there's copyright infringement going on in the first place? You can't claim for absolute certainty that your core business doesn't rely on law breakers when you don't monitor what your customers are doing. You have to view data somewhere at some point to have a reasonable conclusion.
While I support the original intent of both copyright and patent laws, I also think both have exceeded their bounds, and need reform.
The original intent was to BOTH foster creativity and innovation while protecting both, it has currently devolved into protecting/fostering those with the most money.
Major reform is needed.
One thing I learned from my GrandDad[among many, numerous things], was that only stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Think about the concept seriously for a moment, it is enlightening.
Maybe it seems new to you all, but it's a culmination of 100 year old insight and wisdom to me.
Sonny Bono/Disney should have been stopped in retrospect, but that's how hindsight seems to work!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I've pondered on this since the first story broke, but can a company be liable for hosting partial files? A lot of the links i see for rapidshare are partial archives. By themselves they do no harm
Everything can be used for "Piracy".
Before we had tapes, then Floppies, then CDs, then P2P and websites...
I can send illegal files by email, by handing them over on a thumb drive...
Its easier if we just add "Everything" to the list of Piracy and let it be done.
RapidShare has saved my bacon more than once when my radio station server was borked and I couldn't ftp to it, so I uploaded my news stories to RapidShare and the news director could get my stories before the deadline for final editing (and I got to be the tech hero).
I've also used it for sharing my personal files, photos, video, etc. with friends all over the world.
RapidShare is a great service for legitimate uses.
Plus it wouldn't work. Soon it'd be full of encrypted RARs of filenames like aiegflaeaergfaer.rar, or possibly sales_reports.rar... no way anyone could tell what they are unless they are a member of the private forum where the link and decryption password are posted.
FTP down, nonexistent or blocked in a client's building. You need to transfer a few hundred megs of data. Rapidshare to the rescue.
Sure, RapidShare is used a lot for copyrighted material, but it's not as if it's their doing. On the contrary, they seem to make a lot of effort to remove copyrighted material - at least a lot of the links I see are deleted. Whether or not this is them specifically searching for it, or it being reported, I have no idea.
What next? FTP is used for uploading copyrighted material too. What an evil protocol.
Slashdot loves car analogies right? Clearly cars that can drive over the speed limit are also to blame for speeding.
Didn't even know they had any piracy on there. Maybe the porn is meant to distract people from noticing?
Uh, that's like saying because of some new initiative police employ failed because it only drove murder down 80% and not 100% in that you're setting the bar for success way too high.
If something you describe came to pass, the RIAA/MPAA/others would have won because it would reduce sharing dramatically by restricting it to a select few rather than the world at large. I've encountered several password protected downloads before, and I gave up rather than waste the time hunting down the password or anything else. And such a shift towards encryption/password_protected sharing would make the copyright associations happy that, in the general public's perception, that it's far more convenient and easier to buy the damn thing.
I wouldn't want to be on such a internet, personally.
And so you redirect all your traffic through a URL shorterner that changes the referer, or don't offer links, require that users copy paste them, and you make lots of new accounts. Trivial to work around.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I guess their data is just out of date.
Maybe a year ago you could have seen a lot of traffic on Rapidshare, but slow speeds, low filesize limits and long wait times have made Rapidshare go the way of MySpace.
Now you have a completely different set of players, there's Hotfile, Fileserve, Netload, Filesonic, Depositfiles, and a whole bunch of others.
If you go to a site that posts such links you'd be hard pressed to find one Rapidshare link in fifty.
And I bet the **AAs are just about getting ready to do something about Rapidshare.
Your explanation fails the idiot test. As icebraining said - firstly Youtube have full access to the unencrypted data, it's relatively trivial to run some algorithm to compare it to a stored video/audio stream and you know what format the file is in to begin with. Rapidshare not only have the issue that users could just encrypt their files, but even unencrypted they'd need a reliable method to compare vastly more types of files. That's both technically complicated and incredibly costly. The alternative is that the people with a vested interest in preventing the sharing of illegal materials (the rights holders) do the police work and RS remove it when asked and... oh, wouldn't you know, that's what they already do. It's a much better situation, RIAA admittedly have to invest a little in chasing the content down, but compared to the millions they tell us in court this is costing them, it's a drop in the ocean to have some student checking download sites, meanwhile the rest of us get to use hosting sites for legitimate purposes without them being crushed by an unfair financial burden.
Rapidshare does remove content that has been flagged as illegal. How does it find out? It gets reported, or the copyright holder files a complaint with them (with the offending links in question, obviously). They have never condoned piracy, and always take it seriously. Is it convenient to upload files? Sure, I'll give you that. Is it harder to upload illegal files than legal ones? Unlikely. They can't comb through all their uploaded files manually; that's just silly. Filenames would be useless too. Even if someone named their file 'adobe_photoshop.rar', that isn't grounds for removal. As long as they don't promote piracy, it's simply unjust to accuse them of such, regardless of how many people do break the law with it. Many, many things can be used to break the law. That doesn't mean we can go after everything.
It's true that RapidShare is used for piracy but the same applies to other similar sites too.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with defamation. The simple fact is, they absolutely know they are a piracy hot spot. They'd be absolute idiots if they sue. Suing means their own data becomes open to subpoena. Which means they are primed to be royally fucked.
The only way they can prove they have suffered from defamation is to actually look at their own content. Once they look at their own content, by law, they will be forced to disable tons and tons (vast majority of their) content and accounts else they are now liable for distribution of copyrighted content. Basically they'd force themselves to do exactly what they claim they don't do so as to avoid legal prosecution. The only way they can hope to be justified is if they look at their data and find almost no one uses their service for copyrighted content. And frankly, I don't find that likely in the least.
I don't know about you, but roughly 98% of all content I've seen on their site has been obvious copyrighted material. I honestly can't see how the studies are even close to being wrong. And them stirring the pot is likely to completely backfire.
My money is on them making noise and then going away - otherwise I'll be extremely surprised if it doesn't completely blow up in their face.
You would tag the files as suspicious. Give it a "suspicious-rating" that is higher if the file is password-protected, multi-file rar-archive, downloaded from known warez-domains, mostly downloaded by visitors who downloads known warez files. Then you hire 10 Indians for $5/hour who go through the most suspicious and most downloaded files and check them for obvious copyright infringements. Or they could just check the 100 most downloaded rapidshare files. Likely, all of which are warez or movies.
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