I for one, love rapidshare.

Yes! I could use bit-torrent, its free .. and unfortunately fucking slow too.

I pay the $10 a month for the speeds, not the access. (~18mb/s)

We talk to the creators and do business with them. Rapidshare does not.

P2P has its strengths, but file-lockers also have strengths, just different ones. Sure, the future’s in decentralised networks, but lockers will remain useful in the near-future.

Here’s hoping this case gets thrown out quickly… or that RS don’t even turn up to the hearing.

A content filter will do very little to stop people from sharing data using cyberlockers. It may however force users to become even craftier and harder to stop in the long run. I think rapidshare realizes what a futile effort it would be even if they were forced by law to do it. Just a lot of busy work for no return. By being the oldest and most well known of the cyberlockers, they are already being abandoned by most file sharers for newer sites who may not necessarily be in the MAFIAA’s crosshairs yet. The best thing rapidshare could do is close up shop and start anew every year or so under a different corporation and domain name. Being the “biggest and most popular” is actually a detriment to any cyberlocker or file hosting company so long as the industry is still funding their “war on content”.

Naming conventions on rapidshisse are already trending towards nonsense and gibberish for file names because uploaders are weary of sites such as rapidlibrary.com which are making the content industries’ job of finding the content to order takedowns a little too easy for most of rapidshare’s premium user’s liking.

X-M3n 0r161n5: W01v3rin3.avi
Tr0p1c Thund3r.avi
Th3 L053rs-C4M.xV1d.rar
K1ck-A55.avi

These and many other similar naming conventions completely bypass the currently available rapidshare search engines when looking for those movie titles, however that doesn’t mean the content isn’t still there just because a search turns up few or no results when inputting a movie title. And what is a content filter but a search engine with the power to automatically remove content using the flagged strings? Even if they use hash checks to identify a targeted release, all it takes is for someone who downloaded the original release to repack it. The resulting archive will have a different hash than the original release that was being filtered. File size checks can easily be defeated by placing a 1KB .txt file in the archive or using a different level of compression than the original release did.

I don’t think it will be long before cyberlocker users universally name uploads a random string of characters and password protect the archives with a random string password while giving the upload and erroneous or no title. Then if a takedown is noted on one of their releases, it will become apparent that there is a shill amongst the users of the forum or newsgroup where the links/passwords for the archives are being exchanged and action can be taken to eliminate the “leak”.

Anti-Piracy is merely paving the road to the creation of the darknets of internet legend, and in the meantime, creating a need for privatized communities from which users can share data of any kind with impunity and anonymity, regardless of whether the data is copyrighted, illegal/contraband or public domain.

You say “But then they wouldn’t be able to earn millions off of other people’s work.” in regards to rapidshare, but the irony is that this is exactly what the content industries paying your salary are trying to protect their own right to do.