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RapidShare Fighting Piracy By Slowing Download Speeds
An anonymous reader writes "File hosting sites have been under increased pressure since the shutdown of Megaupload — both from law enforcement and from the sudden influx of new users. RapidShare, already dealing with a reputation as a facilitator of piracy, has now instituted a policy they hope will drive pirates away: download speed caps for its free service. According to TorrentFreak, 'RapidShare says that there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement. Those who like to pirate prefer not to pay, the company believes, not least because they want to avoid connecting their personal payment details to a copyright-infringing cyberlocker account. Now, there will be those who say that however RapidShare dress it up, the company will be aware that the restrictions will drive users to their premium services to get better speeds. But interestingly RapidShare is now offering ways for users to get faster download speeds without paying a dime — providing those uploading the original files they’re trying to access do some work.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tightrope_walking
Seems like they have experience.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I wonder then if requiring all users to pay a 10c charge would stop piracy completely for site such as this.
I'm surprised it took this long.
It would be nice if they had a "tiered" throttling system, something like:
The first 1MB to any IP address in a 1-hour period gets throttled to a medium speed, say, 100KB/sec, and the rest gets throttled more. Throttle anything over 10MB per hour to painfully slow speeds.
This way, people just grabbing one small (under 1MB) file in a 1-hour period don't suffer too much.
I do like the plan they have to avoid throttling though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
has died then has it - I thought this was where all the kids get their dodgy stuff from ?
who where what when now?
So, they're now doing what most of their competitors have been doing for years. This is certainly newsworthy.
...its slower speeds. This should in no way chase away legitimate users leaving only the pirates who dont care if their copy of photoshop takes half a day to download while they're at work.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Wow, this on top of how shitty Rapidshare already was? At this point they could only make it worse by forcing you to enter a CAPTCHA presented in the form of one of those "stare to see the letters" puzzles, shown right in the middle of goatse's anus.
Why people ever used services like Rapidshare and Megaupload, I'll never understand.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Seems like rapidshare is doing some CYA here. If you want better speeds, all you have to do is supply them with some cantact info-- fake will likely do-- and some information about the files being shared-- again fake will likely do. This way if they get raided, they can say "I didn't know that was a TV episode, they told me it was home videos".
Yes. Rapidshare is only driving away the "impatient" pirates. They are delaying the inevitable because ultimately, the works is still just as pirated regardless of how long it took to obtain.
My guess is that they are either secretly hoping to boost premium sales (they would NOT get away with throttling paying customers) or to do "something" in order to prevent Megaupload's fate from repeating with them.
"Those who like to pirate prefer not to pay, the company believes, not least because they want to avoid connecting their personal payment details to a copyright-infringing cyberlocker account.
Except for those methods of payment that don't force you to give out any personal details at all?
Ezekiel 23:20
You're caught pirating and they block your IP.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
> there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement.
There is also a direct link between internet users and copyright infringement. There is also a direct link between prople exchanging information and copyright infringement. And so on.
Copyright is for-profit censorship. As soon as you have two people exchanging information, be it on the net, by pendrives, even exchanging books, as soon as you cut out the middlemen, it will probably be some kind of infringement.
The problem with this, what they call infringement is _normal human behavior_ that shouldnt be infringement in the first place. As soon as people get together, they exchange information. Declaring parts of this information exchange somebody elses "property" and trying to censor it by basically spying on every information exchange between two people, is censorship straight from the darkest surveillance state nightmares. The worst case scanario. It is basically north korea, but not with respect to "political information" but with respect to "proprietary information". Censorship is censorship, whatever paltry excuse you can come up with for it.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever paid for a RapidShare account to use it for downloading non-pirated content?
These guys are no different than the ones who offered newsgroup access for X amount per month (and by the way, here are all these great tools for managing large binary downloads should you happen to need them).
Rapidshare's business model has always been about making the free download option as obnoxious as humanly possible. "Pay us money and you can download this random file which may or may not be copyrighted at full speed instead of playing capcha games and waiting all day for your file to download and then have it stall at 98%" This is nothing new or unexpected.
IANAL, but that seems like a refreshing admission of legal liability for being willful accessories to copyright infringement.
Sorry, no.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why does RapidShare think this will give them cover over piracy? The MAFIAA doesn't care; they're happy to burn down the Internet to protect their business.
The MAFIAA also don't really care about piracy, despite all their noise about it. Their goal is to maintain high prices and the business model that they know and control. Piracy is just a means to manipulate the publics attitude and justify the use of extreme measures by the government. Which for RapidShare means that they can't win unless they become part of the establishment ... but Hollywood needs enemies to fight more then allies to share the wealth with.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
At a guess, this is just marketing BS being used to disguise an attempt to get more paid users. Rapidshare have form in this area - they rebranded themselves the "Anti-Waiting Company" at the same time as increasing the amount of time free users have to wait for downloads and increasing their premium prices.
Instead of selling four copies of a Walt Disney Pictures film at $5 each to capture the long tail, Buena Vista would rather sell one copy at $20 and keep the film unavailable for years at a time to prop up demand.
Say I'm working on a computer program and I want to send copies to my beta testers. I'd upload a copy to mediafire and give only my beta testers the URL. Or say I shot a video and I want to share it with family members, but I don't want to post it publicly on YouTube because the video might contain some copyrighted music that happened to be playing where I shot it.
Which is why ISPs in a growing number of countries are required by law to log the last few weeks of their PPPoE or DHCP leases.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever paid for a RapidShare account to use it for downloading non-pirated content?
Has anyone in the history of Dropbox, one of RapidShare's competitors, ever paid for a Dropbox account?
With MegaUpload out of the way, they're just trying to pickup more paying customers.
...you'll find a whole bunch of stuff well under $20. Two of the most popular releases from 2010 - The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Two-Disc Special Edition) is $7.78 for the two-disc set and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is $4.99. (In fact, it was that price even before December - I bought it as a Christmas present.) New releases are going to be more expensive - you can't blame a for-profit industry from trying to make a bit more money from those people who've gotta have stuff now and are willing to pay a premium instead of waiting six months, can you?
I know people love to whine about how over-priced movies are, and how that justifies your piracy, but seriously, these are two block busters from 2010 for the price of a McDonald's meal. What's it going to take to stop you pirating this stuff?
As I commented in a previous story, people are bringing this on themselves, and also ruining the internet for the innocent bystanders like me.
Back in the late 90s, I knew people who would leave their modems connected overnight on a dedicated line, with a download manager running, just to be sure they got the latest copy of whatever it was they were after.
Slowing up your downloads is just going to make people take longer to grab something, or they'll busily try to find a way to circumvent your "protection." Or, they'll move on to some other service or method, partially collapsing your business model.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
www.grandleech.com
All these companies will fall one after another and the only people in the game will the arrogant Google assholes with their privacy invading Google Drive product.
They can put whatever positive, law-cooperating spin on it that they want, but the real reason is simply that Rapidshare no longer has any competition to drive up their free download speeds.
Their single largest competitor (Megaupload) just dropped off the map and all their other competitors have either blocked the US or dropped any free support whatsoever.
Remind me to send Hollywood a thank-you note for herding internet users over to the encrypted areas of the internet in droves. Because of them, encrypted networks will mainstream and thrive - and develop new services - rather than die from neglect.
In that sense at least, perhaps corporate America is right. Greed is good!
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Dropbox has good clients for multiple systems, is simple to set up and use, requires basically no administration. It wins out over some of its competitors (SugarSync, I'm talking about you) because it actually has a solid Linux client along with the Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone/iPad and Blackberry (and browser-based access). I think their pricing for the individual accounts is high (or at least I think they'd do well with a $5/20GB plan rather than the current low-end of $10/50), but I can understand their current setting. The Dropbox for Teams page you link to has a 1TB 5-user account for $800/year ($160/user or under $15/user/month for 200GB per user), with all the tools available for a regular Dropbox account. That's not bad at all.
Sure, *I* and likely most readers here could set up remote access to storage if we wanted to, but is it worth it? I have a buddy who seems to have an allergy to paying for things when he can do them cheaper, but I feel that "you can do it yourself free!" falls apart because A) "free" is only free if my time has no value, in which case there are probably other things I'd rather be doing with my "free" time and/or B) I'm going to enjoy going through the setup and inevitable tweaking over time. I'm not rolling in dough, but I'm willing to pay people to do things that I could choose to do myself just as my customers are willing to pay me to do things that they could learn to do themselves (or hire an in-house IT person for).
I've built software in the past that had a price tag over $50k when installed and configured by field people, and I questioned it at first because I looked at what our software did and thought "our customers have IT departments and could build this for less than we're charging." That may be true, but they *weren't* doing it, and what we were doing had an ROI that generally was in single-digit MONTHS even with our price point. Paying for services is a lot like that - what do you need to invest to do it yourself, how much will it cost to buy it, what's the ROI, is it worth it.
fencepost
just a little off
And in other news, the MPAA is fighting piracy by releasing movies that aren't worth copying, thus destroying piracy at the source.
I am John Hurt.
Somehow this article suggests that there are legitimate uses for services like rapidshare. What legally owned digital files would anyone want to share on the internet where the best service to use is rapidshare? Help me out here.
Wait, what? No, just no. up.to, netload, depositfiles, bayfiles, bitshare, turbobit, shareflare, fileserve (yes, really, there's still plenty of fileserve/wupload links for stuff like tv shows if you know where to look), filefactory, etc.
I always found rapidshare way to slow to be usable and that's on the very rare occasion I got it to work. They never seemed able to recognise my ISP's transparent proxys that everyone was forced through so where basicly treating the entire ISP as one computer and limiting downloads on that basis.
Really, the 'direct public download' bushiness model is dying. They are far too open for attack by the latest anti-whatever craze.
The future is distributed storage with encrypted storage and transfers. Not sure how companies like mega and rapid will make a buck off it without opening themselves back up to the same risks, but that is the direction we are heading.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Rapid share is just reverting to the way they were before megaupload. They used to be similarly terrible all though not quite as slow. Every increase in usability they have ever had has been done to keep up with Megaupload. Now that they are out of the way and they regained their spot as the most legitimate download service they couldn't handle the traffic. Simple as that, they don't need to try anymore.
It depends on how much the pirates intend to download. If you're just downloading one item then one half day to download it doesn't make much difference. But if you wanted to pirate Windows 7 Ultimate, Photoshop, and gigabytes of high definition movies then having to wait days to satisfy your need isn't going to cut it. Only casual pirates would tolerate slow download speeds when much faster alternatives exist to get the content. Throttling decreases the amount pirated per unit time.
Well they are correct about the "not paying" part, but they already had crippled download speeds before, so this isn't going to change anything in the long run. All it does is provide an alternative for the pirates to grab an unbroken copy to re-seed on a torrent site.
I don't how many times I've tried to download something from a torrent site, only to find out there's no seeds. So turn around and grab the file off rapidshare, etc. But I prefer the speed of the torrent (which if it's something stupid-popular with 10,000 users, downloads in several seconds, but sometimes you end up with torrents with just one seed and 50 people with the same 5% of the file.)
Hint, if you torrent, set the upload speed high enough not to cripple your internet connection. If you have 3Mbit upload, set it at 2Mbit. The faster you can upload, the faster you can download when there's less seeds because your connection will swap parts with other users. If there's hundreds of seeds, don't worry about it.
As for piracy vs legitimate downloads. I've never downloaded anything that I could legally buy(due to incompetence of the rights owner) off a torrent or rapidshare, either it was foreign, foreign fan-translated. I've downloaded free software like FreeBSD and Linux ISO's, I've downloaded the videos from the Blender projects, I've downloaded comics, music, videos and cartoons from Japan, Germany, Thailand, Russia, and probably other countries. Sometimes the songs are on iTunes, just not US iTunes. Most video stuff is available online nowadays from the broadcaster's site, just not live.
As for direct download as a business model. It's a stupid business model that can only be funded with ads. Yes there is stuff you can share, but if it's under 10MB you can email it, if it's bigger you share it on skype or MSN chat, and if it's stupidly big, you create a torrent for it and email the torrent/magnet file to your friend instead. If you make commercial use of file sharing, you're not going to pay rapidshare for it. No, you're going to pay the much cheaper 2 cents per GB to dump the file somewhere and point a content delivery network at it.
Unfotunately I've found that up.to netload, turbobit, and several others also have the same speed issues as RapidShare.
Shame, because those are all legal for me to use in my country, whereas torrents are a bit more of a grey area (downloading copyrighted material is 100% legal in my country, uploading is not) meaning that the slower speeds actually pushes people like me from the legal practice of downloading, back to a grey area of torrenting.
ing seem to be posting right now.
This move by rapidshare absolutely HAS hurt file-sharing. Specifically, a number of sites have developed scripts that allow you play movies from file sharing sites through streaming rather than downloading. Mega-Upload was an absolutely huge sorce for this. Now, several of the major players in the illegal streaming market have moved over to rapid share, and rapid share immediately instituted the maximum-download speed for free users which kills the streaming. Sites likes [redacted]films.info are already looking into moving to other hosts because their user base has made it clearly known that Rapidshare has made their form of piracy unusable.
I wonder how many legitimate file sharing customers of Megaupload (like indie rock bands and open source software projects) started moving their files over the Rapidshare, only to get screwed AGAIN by these download transfer caps?
I wonder which free storage service is going to be next to cave to legal threats from the **AA's. Dropbox? MediaFire? SkyDrive?
Spending the time to set up a private FTP server of your own for private file transfers suddenly doesn't sound like a bad idea anymore...
This is old news, It's been this way for the last 2 weeks. And yes I am a pirate, But I don't give a ****. I have a premium account anyway.
Dropbox?
What makes Dropbox any different from RS/MU/MF in this respect?
It's not really a problem for incidental music if you're non-monetizing your videos. Youtube will just put links to the music on your video page.
Except in some countries where viewers will get "This video is not available in your country" (paraphrased) because a particular country's state-sponsored monopoly collecting society wants more money for each view than advertisers are willing to pay. And I thought a user in the YouTube Partner Program had to clear the rights to all the videos on his channel before monetizing even one.