RapidShare Urges US To Punish Linking Sites and Not File-Sharing Sites
hypnosec writes "RapidShare has said that the U.S. government should crack down on linking sites rather than punishing file-sharing sites and strangling innovation. The file-sharing site is understandably a little worried about the recent crackdowns on sites involved in or found to be promoting piracy. Daniel Raimer, RapidShare's Chief Legal Officer, is to meet with technology leaders and law enforcement at the Technology Policy Institute forum. Responding to a public consultation on the future of U.S. IP enforcement, the company emphasized that linking sites are the real problem. It wrote, 'Rather than enacting legislation that could stifle innovation in the cloud, the U.S. government should crack down on this critical part of the online piracy network.'"
Everybody is making jokes when the simple fact is just like the VCR there are plenty of non copyright uses for these sites. lets take myself for example, i have used sites like Rapidshare to send some of my own musical works to someone halfway across the planet so they could load it up and add their own tracks, I've used them to send .reg files for basic fixes like the PITA "Windows no sound device even though the drive is installed" bug, used them to store zip files of family photos so I can send them across the country to distant relatives, plenty of things other than the latest Titney Spears you can use these sites for.
In the end it shouldn't be their job to have to constantly go through everyone's stuff to make the *.A.A happy, we've already seen that doesn't work as you can simply change the name of the files and you are back to square one. No they should be treated no different than Google who takes things down when they get a request. Problem is the *.A.As are lazy bastards and want to pass all the expense to everyone else and they have no problem with bribing officials to write the laws to let them pass on the expense.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.