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How RapidShare Plans To Avoid MegaUpload's Fate
concealment writes "On November 27, RapidShare will start putting a tight cap on outbound downloads for its free users. Paid members will still have 30 gigabytes in outbound downloads per day, but everybody else will be capped at one gigabyte. The change is expected to further deter pirates from using RapidShare to distribute copyright material on a large scale."
Why would this reduce piracy more than it would reduce legitimate uses?
Or does this seem like a way to punish free users and play a victim card at the same time.
"It's not us doing it to try and force people into paid plans. It's... um... pirates?"
look, if I could go with limited caps( AND CENSORING) why the fuck would I be putting it on rapidshare in the first place ?
sounds to me that even dropbox has the drop-kick on rapidshare now(I always thought that rapidshares waiting system for free downloads looked and felt like shit too - by the way if you've already removed the fucking file don't fucking show those wait dialogs to users, it just pisses them off).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
30GB/day is really ridiculous for a paid service, unless there's some other larger plan. I mean, legal downloads ...
Just imagine a 100 MB application/movie being downloaded 300 times a day ... it's either a toy or something it won't interest anyone.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Please wait 1 minute to read this comment.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
So their site WON''T be useful for those extreme large patch and legit f2p game install downloads anymore.
Got it. Ignore rapidshare.
Plus if i see an ad for them ever i'll just hosts file block their entire site. And nothing of value will be lost.
kimdotcom might be a scumbag criminal... but he's about the only one on the side of the internet.
Everyone else will cut and run.
It sounds to me like this is designed to prevent people from downloading HD-quality movies. In the old days, you could click, wait your sixty seconds and then start the download, and a half-hour later have your movie.
I guess their policy of policing music blogs is assumed to take care of the music piracy.
Either way, as the article pointed out, these changes are to keep the regulators happy, more than they are designed to actually curb piracy.
For example, a blogspot music blog that uses a URL redirector should be OK from these new restrictions.
I have never, ever met someone who uses Rapidshare extensively for piracy who wasn't a paying customer. It's mostly useless if you don't pay.
I admit, I don't understand this at all.
"The change is expected to further deter non-paying pirates from using RapidShare to distribute copyright material on a large scale."
FTFY.
If you are the author of a 100 MB application or a 100 MB movie, why are you using RapidShare in the first place? You could just get a domain and get some $7/mo hosting plan that claims "Unlimited Bandwidth!!!111" like Go Daddy's.
FTFY.
Does this stand for "follow the [expletive] yen"? The idea is that payment requires handing over personally identifying information that could incriminate a habitual infringer.
If I come across content that is served by Rapidshare, I don't bother getting it because its usually not worth the effort to try and get something off that POS service.
Seriously, BitTorrent is more then adequate to share both legit and illegal content without BS pay walls and content throttling. Why anybody uses RapidShare or MegaUpload to share content in this day and age speaks to a group of ex-geeks that were relevant back in the early 90's but haven't learned or done anything new since then. its like people that share files using RAR to break them into a thousand pieces because of old Usenet group limitations, absolutely no point to do that in this day an age of broadband and torrent services.
RapidShare and other file download services are like AOL where the last few remnants of old-school geeks and vapid Luddites still believe they need some kind of portal to access web content at a time when torrent and cloud services has become the most prevalent way to share any content.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There are legit uses for the download sites. I pay and keep a membership with one because it offers links which are one-click downloads for the receivers. This I use for an acting troupe I'm in to store documents, as well as MP3 files of presentations. Yes, I could use YouTube, but for something which is intended only for a private group, I much rather have it in a place where I control, so I can respect the wishes of the presenters. With the downloads only coming from one authorized site that I have access to, I can pretty much guarentee that their stuff only stays within the group, and nowhere else, barring someone else divulging links.
Yes, I could host them from my domain's web page, but that means I would have to get off my duff, actually spin up a Web server, point DNS at it, and create a Web presence, as opposed to just using the domain for E-mail as I do now.
...since charges of piracy are so ridiculously inflated. If you download the discography of your favorite musician, that's usually under 1GB and can contain hundreds of songs. Each one of those violations could come down on RapidShare's head. So just one user using one day's worth of bandwidth is enough "piracy" to end RapidShare.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
I'll assume that by "ROMs", you mean community-made Android system images like CyanogenMod, not infringing copies of classic video games. But why are they hosted on RapidShare as opposed to hosting them on a site dedicated to Android system images?
Last time I used Rapidshare as a free user the download was throttled to some absurdly slow rate (5-10kbps IIRC). Also, you were limited to 1 download at a time and there was a 30 minute window between downloads. Downloading a gigabyte in a day over that kind of connection should be rewarded, not punished. Someone had to work really hard to get those bits.
I read the internet for the articles.
The change is expected to further deter everyone from using RapidShare.
Another question is how far their revenue will drop from now on. Sure, the chance of being sued is likely to be reduced, but so is the probability of their actual user base shrinking - including paying customers.
Looking the other way on what was rather commonly known as a piracy haven might have been a great deal more profitable than the company realizes (or, perhaps, simply more than they fear). Once the content's no longer there neither will users.
Since they can probably:
1. Locate the retail card reseller from the account number
2. Cross-reference security video with receipt time stamp
3. Look up your license plate number or enhance your face
So make sure you walk or ride your bike, and maybe wear a fake mustache. In the future, all mustachioed cyclists will be suspected of piracy.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The example of Megaupload showed that you don't actually have to be convicted. An accusation is enough to ruin a business.
What I want to see is a site similar to Rapidshare or Megaupload or MediaFire that uses client-side encryption (even the actual name of the file would be part of the opaque blob). Heck, build a system (presumably using a cypher that is designed to be good with random seeking in the file if such a cypher exists) that can play videos in the client (where the video player would take the key as input and decrypt on the fly). So like YouTube except that the hosting provider never sees the content and is unable to pre-screen it.
So without the key all you get is some kind of ID for the file (just start at 0 or 1 and keep going up) and an opaque AES encrypted blob.
Harder for the media companies to send take-down notices (as they would be unable to use their regular automated system and would have to have a human manually find the decryption key for the content in whichever blog post, forum post or other location the link itself was found in.
I am rather opposed to the idea that there even is such a thing as "intellectual property", with one exception: commercial and competitive use without payment: that seems unwise for all of us in the long run (I HATE fairness it's a devil theory, but. Not being reciprocal in important i.e. Survival or business related matters-that violates whatever - common sense, the Golden Rule, the Commandment, The US Constitution, and/or whatever few actually legitimate statutes as may exist).
2 GB/day might be better; maybe sometimes we have a fat iso or two videos to share under our personal interpretation of fair use. After all, what we want to do is what we do do; what we do do is what we think is right; what we think is right is what we ought to do; – all we really might get better at it starting with the right step, what we think is rightso my interpretation of any law IS the law as far as I care. Because if I do it, it’s clear just from that that though I have preferences as to the consequences, the consequences cannot change my preferences as to what I will do next. End of rant.
If one is a paid user, there is no mandatory wait for people to download uploaded items. However, if one had a free user account, there is one.
For what they provide, the subscription fee is worth it, since there are no ads for downloaders.
Yes, it is a no brainer to spin up an Apache server, but for the same functionality, I can have the files hosted on a faster pipe for far less money and time.