Just like Google-owned YouTube, RapidShare has been sued for the actions of its users and just like the video giant, has prevailed in court.

But despite the fact that in May 2010 the District Court of California ruled that RapidShare could not be held liable for the actions of its users (after all, RapidShare isn’t uploading the content and always responds to takedown requests), in November that very same year the company had an unwelcome surprise.

In a response to a request from the Office of the US Trade Representative, the RIAA submitted their list of foreign “notorious markets”. RapidShare was included but strangely, just one year later in 2011′s submission, the file-hosting company had been removed.

So how does a site go from being reported as supposedly one of the world’s worst infringers to being given a tacit clean bill of health?

RapidShare attorney Daniel Raimer tells TorrentFreak that their twin approach was to change the negative perception of the company and show, contrary to some rightsholder claims, how the file-hoster really cares about copyright protection.

“We decided to increase our efforts to explain what RapidShare really stands for and how we are spearheading the industry’s efforts to combat copyright infringements,” says Raimer.

In December 2010 it became clear that RapidShare would be taking these efforts right to the very top when the company hired Washington-based lobbying firm Dutko. Their mission:

“Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from U.S. copyright interests.”

Time would show this was money well spent. One year later and the pressure was off.

“The fact that we were not included in the 2011 list is a result of these educational efforts,” Raimer explains.

But does the simple hiring of a lobbying firm guarantee success for a file-sharing site and enable it to avoid a Megaupload-style doomsday scenario? Well, not quite. Convincing rightsholders that protecting their interests is also part of the plan seems equally important.

So, through the prism of the Megaupload takedown and some of the accusations leveled at that site, TorrentFreak asked Daniel Raimer exactly what RapidShare has been doing to show the RIAA and MPAA it means business.

One controversial area is cyberlockers paying users on the amount of times their content gets downloaded, with a German anti-piracy group suggesting recently that good rewards only really come from uploading infringing content. Is it possible to run a “clean” rewards program?

“As you know, RapidShare does not have a rewards program, and the reason for this is pretty simple: we don’t want to be dragged into discussions about ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ rewards programs. What we want are customers, who appreciate our service and who are willing to pay for it, rather than customers who want to be paid themselves,” says Raimer.

“For more than five years, we have never had any serious outages; we try to establish industry leadership by fighting for privacy and against filtering on an international level.

“There are probably some people out there who don’t care about all that and who are just looking for a service that is paying them for uploading their files. Those people are obviously not the type of customers that we want, which is why they shouldn’t use RapidShare in the first place,” he adds.

Recently, Raimer has gone on record stating that service providers have a ‘moral’ responsibility to do more in the fight against piracy and that RapidShare is being more proactive than some of its competitors. So what exactly is the company doing to satisfy both the law and its own “moral” obligations?

Raimer told us that RapidShare has a well-staffed anti-abuse department that acts quickly on infringement notices and terminates the accounts of users who get caught violating copyrights three times. All fairly standard stuff for a company of RapidShare’s standing, but what about going beyond the call of duty?

Surprisingly, Raimer informs us that their abuse department has another job – to proactively search the Internet for potential infringements occurring on RapidShare’s service.

“We have developed a crawling technology that is constantly watching Internet forums, message boards and warez blogs for information about copyright infringement taking place on our system. The information collected by our software is then being evaluated, verified and processed by our anti-abuse department,” Raimer explains.

“Unfortunately, I cannot tell you any details about how this software works, but what I can tell you is that it is pretty sophisticated and that it is able to break most of the countermeasures that warez sites are using against automatic read-outs.”

This highly proactive anti-piracy stance is certainly intriguing, but will it lead to more friendly terms with rightsholders or will they see it as a chance to keep coming back for yet more concessions?

“I have once heard the sentence that some rightsholders try to create a perpetual motion machine, meaning that they will continue to come up with new demands regardless of what we do. This may certainly be true for some rightsholders who believe that the problem isn’t solved for as long as a single copy of their works can be found on the Internet,” says Raimer.

“Fortunately, most rightsholders turn out to be pretty realistic. Obviously, it is in their interest to protect their business and their copyrights, but they know that there are limits as to what a reputable hosting service can do without hurting its legitimate customer base,” he concludes.

For RapidShare, not hurting legitimate customers means respecting their privacy and not checking over their files. This ultimately means that although the company goes further than the law requires in some areas, RapidShare rejects proactive entertainment industry filtering requests, the Holy Grail of cyberlocker copyright enforcement.

RapidShare is certainly showing all the hallmarks of a responsible file-hosting service that meets its obligations under the law, and those it has set for itself on “moral” grounds. Only time will tell whether rightsholders view the company’s efforts as a strength, a weakness to be exploited, or a standard with which to beat other cyberlocker services about the head.

Source: RapidShare: From “Notorious Market” To Proactive Piracy Eliminator

The PROTECT IP Act gives authorities and copyright holders a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. Aside from domain seizures, they can demand that search engines remove ‘rogue sites’ from their results, order ISPs to block their domains, and cut off their payments.

But what exactly is a rogue site? Judges will often base their verdicts merely on descriptions of entertainment industry groups such as the RIAA and the MPAA. According to RapidShare, one of the oldest file-hosting services, this is a problem.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, RapidShare general counsel Daniel Raimer confirmed that this vagueness is one of the main reasons why they hired lobbying firms to represent their interests in Washington. RapidShare has been frequently labeled a piracy haven and a rogue site by the entertainment industry, but Raimer said this is not justified.

“RapidShare’s goal in Washington is the same goal it has in the marketplace: to reassure potential customers that it is doing everything in its power to eradicate abuse. The officials that RapidShare has met with appreciate the company’s openness and willingness to assert industry leadership,” Raimer told TorrentFreak.

According to RapidShare, U.S. policymakers and opinion leaders have welcomed the opportunity to learn more about the company’s side of the story.

As a company, RapidShare sees itself operating in the “cloud hosting” business, offering a service comparable to the likes of Dropbox. And since people are moving data from local drives to the cloud at an increasing rate, these companies will undoubtedly host some copyrighted material too.

The question is then, what defines whether these cloud hosting services are labeled as ‘rogue’ operations, and when does it become warranted to seize their domain names?

“It is imperative that our governments need to have serious and well-thought discussions about cloud computing services,” Raimer told TorrentFreak.

“These discussions should be about consumer interests, about privacy concerns, about the content industry’s wish for the implementation of content recognition and filter technologies and the way providers are expected to deal with illegal content.”

Over recent years, RapidShare has taken a very strict stance against copyright infringement; disconnecting repeated offenders and even going after sites that index content hosted on their servers. Despite these efforts, they are still seen as a piracy haven by many.

By sharing their concerns RapidShare is trying to convince lawmakers that the picture is not as black and white as the RIAA and MPAA often paint it. A good discussion is needed to carefully determine what the rights and obligations of cloud hosting services are.

“RapidShare would like to be a constructive participant in these discussions as a ‘best practices’ leader. We have more knowledge on how to crack down against copyright abuse than any other company in the industry,” Raimer said.

“We have a 24/7 anti-abuse department, as well as a repeat infringer policy; DMCA take-down notices are instituted within one hour during regular business hours; we do not have reward program –to identify only a few of our efforts,” RapidShare’s general counsel added.

There are of course limits to what RapidShare is willing to do to protect the interests of copyright holders. Not to hinder the entertainment industries, but to secure the privacy of its customers.

“We have always highly respected our users’ privacy. We don’t analyze and filter files. By our terms of service we are strictly forbidden to access and open our users’ files – and we strictly abide by that,” Raimer said.

RapidShare believes that their decision to directly talk to the lawmakers in Washington has been the right one. The officials they have talked to are very eager to hear the other side of the story, and RapidShare’s efforts bring some much needed balance to the table.

Whether it will pay off, and to what extent, is something we’ll have to wait and see in the coming months.

Source: RapidShare Fights for “The Cloud” in Washington

In the hope of correcting this and other misconceptions surrounding their operations, RapidShare then took the unprecedented step of hiring the lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide, who also work for Google.

Initially, little was known about the priorities of RapidShare in Washington, but the most recent lobbying report filed by Dutko reveals that the PROTECT IP Act is high up the list. For good reason, because if the bill becomes law RapidShare could be one of the first to be put out of business, in the United States at least.

Under the PROTECT IP Act, authorities (and copyright holders) will have a broad range of tools to censor sites they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement, starting with domain seizures.

In case a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, authorities can order search engines to remove the website from their search results and order ISPs to block the website.

Although the above measures are already quite far-reaching, the bill also allows for private copyright holders to use some of the same tools as the Government. Without due process, copyright holders can obtain a court order to prevent payment providers and ad-networks from doing business with sites that allegedly facilitate copyright infringement.

One of the many problems of such a law is who gets to decide what the definition of a “rogue website” is. In common with other file-sharing platforms, RapidShare is often labeled as seriously problematic, despite the fact that they’ve been found to operate legally by a U.S. federal court. This could lead to a situation where hundreds of legitimate businesses are virtually shut down because the entertainment industry sees them as a threat.

To make lawmakers aware of these threats and to improve their image in Washington, RapidShare has already spent $260,000 in lobbying efforts during the first half of 2011.

The PROTECT IP Act, currently placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden, is crucial in this regard as the RIAA and MPAA have already labeled RapidShare as a rogue website. This means that when the bill is signed into law the file-hoster could be one of the first companies to be targeted.

Whether RapidShare’s lobbying efforts in Washington will pay off is yet to be seen. It is no secret that entertainment industry groups are lobbying extensively in favor of the PROTECT IP Act, with much bigger budgets. That said, it’s certainly better than standing idly by.

In the coming months RapidShare is expected to continue their lobbying efforts at the White House Office, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Not only against the PROTECT IP Act, but to improve the image of their company and protect their rights and those of other file-hosting services.

Source: RapidShare Lobbies Lawmakers Against PROTECT IP Act

Of course, with the spread of Internet access file-sharing is attracting attention too. Now it appears, for whatever reason, that the sharing of files is being curtailed by India’s government.

During the last 24 hours users of some of the country’s largest Internet service providers have found that they are barred from a selection of the world’s foremost file-hosting sites.

According to an initial report by a user known as Sushubh and screenshots first provided by Airtel customer Sunny Chahal, the blocks have been ordered by DOT, the Indian Government’s Department of Telecommunications. The screenshot below shows the message greeting Airtel customers.

Airtel is reported to have been the most aggressive, refusing access to a who’s-who list of cyberlockers including:

RapidShare.com
Mediafire.com
MegaUpload.com
Hotfile.com
SendSpace.com
Fileserve.com
MegaVideo.com
VideoBB.com
Novamov.com
Movshare.net
Filesonic.com
Putlocker.com
Depositfiles.com

Other ISPs have blocked some of the sites listed above, while the state-owned BSNL is reported as not yet blocking any. MTNL users report blocking, but only if they use the full web address of a site – omitting www unblocks the site in question.

This lack of consistency across ISPs has led to speculation that the problem is related to routing issues, but that would not adequately explain the presence of the blocking message which is greeting some broadband customers.

Naturally there is a belief that the action is an attempt to crack down on unlawful file-sharing but as yet there has been no official announcement from the authorities. Hayai Broadband India have announced that should they obtain a blocking order from the government, they will publish it on their website.

Inevitably the hot discussion centers around bypassing the restrictions. Some of the suggestions include using secure https:// instead of the usual http:// in a site’s URL, accessing a site by omitting www, and using various web-proxy sites.

Update: Ok, this is a very, very interesting situation. According to Indian news site Medianama, a company called Reliance Big Pictures served cease and desists letters on sites/services unlawfully offering the movie ‘Singham’ which releases in theaters officially tomorrow.

“A John Doe order is given against unidentified people, because the copyright owner doesn’t know who is going to infringe,” Big Pictures VP (Music and Anti Piracy) Sanjay Tandon told Medianama. “We anticipate that certain entities are going to infringe, and the Delhi High Court has granted us a John Doe order.”

It appears that having been served with the order, some ISPs overreacted and blocked entire sites, rather than just the Singham movie.

“Our only appeal with this order is that you cannot make the film available through your network,” added Tandon. “It’s a matter for the ISPs to look into, because it becomes their liability.”

Source: UPDATED: Indian Government Blocks Leading File-Sharing Services

While the debate over whether corporations should be allowed to lobby crime-fighting organizations such as the police and FBI will rage on, at least there is an enforced level of transparency which allows the public to see where lobbyists are spending their money.

The MPAA have just made their mandatory disclosure for the first quarter of 2011 and it makes interesting reading.

In total the member companies of the MPAA – Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Universal – spent $400,000 in the first three months of the year lobbying influential government departments. These included the office of Vice-President Joe Biden, a valuable MPAA ally in 2010 with his mantra of “Piracy Is Theft, Clean and Simple.”

In the filing, which covers the period from January 1st to March 31st, several government departments are listed repeatedly including the U.S Senate, House of Representatives, Homeland Security, Dept. of Justice, FBI, ICE, U.S. Copyright Office and U.S. Trade Representative.

On the back of moves to turn the activity into a felony, it’s no surprise that streaming illegal content featured heavily in the MPAA’s 1st quarter lobbying. Considering the huge effort already underway with domain seizures, many of them streaming-related, Operation in Our Sites remained firmly on the agenda.

Also listed is the issue of “Pay processors role in IP enforcement”, a reference to the developing strategy of strangling the revenue to sites that the MPAA believe are generating income from infringement.

In November 2010, file-hosting service RapidShare was among the first Internet services to be labelled by both the MPAA and RIAA as a so-called “Rogue Site”, a move which forced the cyberlocker service to initiate lobbying of its own.

In 2011 it is evident that Hollywood is continuing to pressure on the Swiss-based company. RapidShare is mentioned several times in the MPAA disclosure report under several headings, not least ‘Rogue Site Legislation’ and ‘Law Enforcement/Crime and Criminal Justice’.

Interestingly, ‘Graduated Response’ is also listed as a lobbying subject, although the U.S. appeared to rule out so-called “3 strikes” regimes earlier this month in response to a United Nations report.

On the educational front, the MPAA is keen to drive home the anti-P2P message to the country’s schools and universities. Equally it is pushing for anti-camcording activities in the Asia-Pacific region plus awareness of counterfeit movie usage at US military bases, a subject we’ve touched on previously.

The MPAA also discussed the anti-piracy company MiMTiD. A DMCA-related controversy connected to that company was covered by TechDirt in February.

The $400,000 spent by the MPAA in the first 3 months of 2011 represents a $30,000 uplift on the same period last year and a $60,000 increase on its spend during the final quarter of 2010.

Source: MPAA Anti-Piracy Lobbying Targets FBI, DOJ, ICE, DHS and Biden

As reported earlier this week, in traffic terms the number of one-click hosting sites that are now larger than the mighty Pirate Bay – and above them in the Internet’s top 100 sites – has grown to five.

While Hotfile, 4Shared, Mediafire are all significant players on the world stage, market leaders RapidShare and MegaUpload are the companies at the sharp end of accusatory finger-pointing by Hollywood and the music industry.

Now, following on the heels of RapidShare’s fightback, here comes MegaUpload countering what it describes as “grotesquely overblown allegations” of mass copyright infringement.

“We provide connectivity between end users and storage capacity in the cloud, but no content – just like e.g. ADSL providers and hard drive vendors,” the company said in a statement emailed to TorrentFreak. “As a matter of fact, most public Internet services, including backbone carriers, could not exist if the law did not protect them from liability for abuse committed by their users, as long as they fulfill specific requirements, such as the timely processing of abuse notices.”

MegaUpload is a “dual-use tool” comparable to an email account or a USB stick, the company says, and as such can be put to both non-infringing and infringing uses. In dealing with illicit content, MegaUpload says that violations of its terms and conditions are not tolerated and the company abides by the DMCA and quickly processes takedown requests.

Like competitor RapidShare, MegaUpload says that it too goes one step further to accommodate those seeking to remove infringing content from its servers.

“We also cooperate closely with rightsholders and their copyright enforcement agents and provide them with direct realtime takedown access, bypassing the DMCA process entirely. Because we strictly conform to all legal requirements, nobody has ever sued us over copyright infringement, and cases brought forward against our competitors have a long history of being unsuccessful,” the company notes.

MegaUpload also provides some very impressive stats. The company says that not only does it have more than 100 million registered users and in excess of 45 million unique visitors every day, but that employees at more than 70% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies are account holders. It adds that given these numbers, it is unfortunate that the actions of a small group of “black sheep” (aka copyright infringers) can overshadow those of the millions of customers who use their site legitimately every day.

“We have become the de-facto standard for sending files that are too big to email. We are the most popular hard disk in the cloud. We host more backups than any other company. If Mega is a rogue operator as we have been unfairly labelled by the MPAA and RIAA, then what about Google? What about Yahoo? And every single ISP?”

Yesterday, after reading a report by brand protection company MarkMonitor which labelled them as a “leading digital piracy site”, RapidShare threatened to sue for defamation. Google-owned YouTube, apparently due to their takedown policies (which don’t appear to be any more comprehensive), were not included on the list. Today, MegaUpload questioned why it too should be labelled a “rogue site” when Google “probably hosts the world’s largest index of pirated content.”

MegaUpload concludes with a statement that the vast majority of its traffic is legitimate and that their company is here to stay. It also holds out an olive branch.

“If the content industry would like to take advantage of our popularity, we are happy to enter into a dialogue. We have some good ideas. Please get in touch.”

Source: MegaUpload Fights Back Against MPAA and RIAA Propaganda

In legal action the cyberlocker site has been active and successful, winning cases in both the US and Germany where courts ruled that RapidShare runs a perfectly legal business. Despite these efforts both the RIAA and MPAA have marked RapidShare as one of the largest piracy havens, and this stance was reaffirmed yesterday by a paper published by brand protection company MarkMonitor.

In this study, which was picked up by dozens of mainstream news outlets, it is concluded that the Swiss cyberlocker is the largest ‘digital piracy site’ with a massive 13 billion pageviews. Although RapidShare is indeed a big player in the cyberlocker market, being labeled as a piracy site has hugely offended the site’s owners, who might go as far as taking legal action in response to statements they view as defamatory.

“This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor. RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers,” the company announced today.

One of the main problems according to RapidShare, is the use of pageviews as an indication of the scope of the ‘piracy’ that occurs on a site. The company claims that the majority of its consumers use the site for legitimate reasons, which means that they should be discounted. Also, if pageviews were an indication then YouTube should really be branded the biggest digital piracy site on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of copyrighted videos published without the owners’ permission.

However, YouTube was intentionally left out of the study, incorrectly according to RapidShare.

“In an interview with mediapost.com MarkMonitor’s vice president of communications Te Smith said that she did not consider websites like YouTube piracy sites as they ‘have procedures in place where brandowners can take down the material.’ RapidShare offers the exact same take down features to copyright owners as YouTube does. Now, where is the difference?”

TorrentFreak asked MarkMonitor’s Te Smith to clarify why they chose to exclude YouTube but include RapidShare, despite both companies being committed to working with copyright holders. Although she could not answer our question directly, Smith did say that her company stands behind their research which is claimed to be independent.

For RapidShare the MarkMonitor report is another affirmation that they have a long way to go before they can shake off the piracy stigma, which they are committed to do. The company continues to seek dialogue with copyright holders and has most recently employed lobbyists in Washington to look after its interests.

“The study confirmed our resolution to actively raise awareness about what RapidShare is and what RapidShare does. Therefore, we have mandated a Washington-based lobbying firm some weeks ago. We are optimistic that this decision will eventually pay off,” RapidShare concludes.

Source: RapidShare Accuses ‘Piracy Report’ Publisher of Defamation, Might Sue

In the years that followed BitTorrent sites continued to dominate, but in the background cyberlockers were catching up, and catching up fast. One of the most popular sites of this nature has always been RapidShare. But although RapidShare has always been as least as popular as BitTorrent sites, there were relatively few competitors.

This situation changed in the last two years though. Where most BitTorrent sites were seeing moderate growth, several new cyberlockers saw their traffic surge. In the last year the number of cyberlocker sites that have outgrown The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic has expanded to five, and that’s just the beginning.

Megaupload, Hotfile, 4Shared, Mediafire and RapidShare are all listed in the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet before The Pirate Bay, and newcomers such as Fileserve are eager to do the same. It is worth noting and exemplary of the growing trend that half of these sites are younger than 2 years.

This dominant position of cyberlockers hasn’t gone unnoticed to the outside world. In a report (pdf) published by MarkMonitor today it is concluded that RapidShare is the leading ‘digital piracy’ site with over 13 billion yearly visitors, followed by Megaupload with close to 5 billion visits.

Although the traffic estimates are off by a few million, and while even larger cyberlockers such as Mediafire were overlooked, the report does signal that one-click hosting sites have definitely outgrown BitTorrent sites. Of course website visits say little about the data traffic these sites generate, but we assume that they are a good competitor in this area too.

The changes in file-sharing trends have not gone unnoticed to the owners of torrent sites, and several are carefully exploring their options to start their own cyberlockers or cyberlocker search engines. This is most likely where the growth lies in the coming years and thus where money can be made.

What’s worth noting, however, is that the rise of cyberlockers is not actually hurting the traffic of BitTorrent sites. Instead the rise of cyberlockers coexists next to the moderate growth of BitTorrent sites for now. It will be interesting to see how these two match up in the years to come.

Source: Cyberlockers Take Over File-Sharing Lead From BitTorrent Sites

With a view to correcting this and other misconceptions about their operations, RapidShare took the unprecedented step last year of hiring Washington-based Dutko, the same lobbying firm retained by Google. The lobbying registration form filed in November clearly set out their aims.

“Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from U.S. copyright interests,” it read.

U.S. copyright interests = MPAA and RIAA.

By ordering Dutko to counter the political efforts of these two organizations, RapidShare appears to be acknowledging that they are the biggest threat to its expansion or, more negatively, the biggest threat to its survival in the US.

But despite this rivalry, comments from spokesman Daniel Raimer suggest that the differences between his company and the content industry are not insurmountable, particularly when RapidShare is offering something they need.

“There are plenty of reasonable people in the content industry. Those people know that a file hosting company that is truly dedicated to fight online infringement may be of high value to them,” said Raimer.

“We therefore want to convince people in Washington and in the content industry that we are such a legitimate company. I would be surprised if anyone in Washington or anyone within the content industry is going to have an issue with that.”

This olive branch approach is not particularly new. Last year, leaked documents showed that RapidShare’s outgoing General Manager Bobby Chang had tried to curry favor with the entertainment industries by offering to distribute licensed content alongside the implementation of tougher measures to close the accounts of users who use RapidShare to share infringing content.

“We are more aggressively than before terminating accounts of users who have been caught uploading copyright protected content,” Chang wrote.

However, while a tougher line towards uploaders would be welcomed by the entertainment industries, the signs point to them seeking a more proactive response to the infringement problem. Last year RapidShare told TorrentFreak that copyright holders have been pushing hard for the company to install filters that will prevent users from uploading copyrighted material in the first instance, a prominent theme in the ongoing isoHunt case.

But just how keen is RapidShare to install filters?

Although in a different jurisdiction, if one looks at recent legal battles RapidShare has fought in Germany, the signs are that although it is prepared to take some anti-piracy measures, filtering is not one of them. After being previously ordered by a court to install a filter to keep certain ebooks off its servers, RapidShare was hit with a fine of 150,000 euros for failing to do so.

This week, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf ruled that RapidShare does not have to install filters to stop an Atari video game appearing on its servers and that its current measures are adequate.

“The ruling demonstrates once again that RapidShare is operating a fully legal range and has taken measures against the misuse of its service which go beyond the level that is legally required,” said Raimer about that case. “We are confident that copyright holders will gradually come to accept this conclusion.“

So while RapidShare may have announced that it’s dedicated to fighting online infringement, its recent actions indicate that it would seek to fight the introduction of filtering technology, something the entertainment industries desperately want. Indeed, the company already feels that it goes beyond the requirements of the law and the comments by Raimer seem to show that the olive branch – and the line of cooperation – will be drawn right there.

It will be fascinating to see how and where this particular battle plays out, both in the legal arena and, perhaps more importantly, on Capitol Hill. RapidShare almost certainly operates entirely legally under current US law, and the company – with the help of its lobbyists – will be keen that the government doesn’t implement changes to alter that position.

Source: RapidShare: We’re Dedicated To Fighting Online Infringement

In May last year a US court already ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement, and in the same month a German court ruled that company could not be held liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

Today, RapidShare booked another major win against a copyright holder. In the appeal of their case against game distributor Atari, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf acknowledged that RapidShare already takes sufficient measures against copyright infringement.

Atari had asked for additional tools to prevent their game “Alone in the Dark” from being downloaded from RapidShare. One of the suggestions they made was a filtering mechanism that would search RapidShare’s database for keywords and delete files that would match.

The Court sided with RapidShare’s stance that such a measure would be unreasonable, since it would create a risk of also deleting legal files that match the same keywords. Other measures such as manual verification of ‘suspect’ files and the removal of links on third party search engines were also deemed to be impossible, unreasonable or pointless.

RapidShare’s lawyer and spokesman Daniel Raimer is pleased with the Court’s decision and said: “The ruling demonstrates once again that RapidShare is operating a fully legal range and has taken measures against the misuse of its service which go beyond the level that is legally required. We are confident that copyright holders will gradually come to accept this conclusion.“

The successes of RapidShare in Germany and abroad set a favorable precedent for other cyberlocker sites and file-sharing platforms, including BitTorrent sites. Together with RapidShare’s lobbying efforts in Washington the verdicts add to the legitimacy of such online file-sharing services.

Source: RapidShare’s Measures Against Piracy Are Sufficient, Court Rules

In describing the file-hoster’s activities, the RIAA suggested that many of the files posted to RapidShare – whose URLs were then posted to blogs – contained pre-release content, an eye-catching offense in the US for those that posted the files and links, but not necessarily RapidShare.

In its submission to the Office of the US Trade Representative, the MPAA said that cyberlockers such as RapidShare were put forward because their main source of traffic is driven by the availability of vast amounts of infringing content on their servers.

“As you can imagine, we’re not very happy about that,” said Daniel Raimer, attorney and spokesman for RapidShare, in a just published interview.

As illustrated by the Lobbying Registration form shown below, RapidShare is now out to present their side of the story. The company has hired Washington based lobbying firm Dutko to send a clear message to the RIAA and MPAA that they aren’t the only ones who can lobby the US Government.

Drawing comparisons with Google, Daniel Raimer says the inclusion of the company on the “most notorious” list is unfair since RapidShare, like the search giant, is prepared to filter content. While some cooperation with the entertainment industries seems inevitable, it remains to be seen how interested they will be in an informal filtering agreement, especially since even enforced ones can easily go off course.

When it comes to lobbying, RapidShare will be up against formidable and well practised opponents. As revealed this month, in the last quarter alone the MPAA and RIAA spent a combined total of $1.8 million on lobbying in Washington. Public records reveal that these entertainment industry groups focused heavily on legislation and authorities involved in domain name seizures.

Of course, following the recent domain name seizures carried out by DHS and ICE, it seems that lobbying paid off nicely. RapidShare will be keen to avoid a similar devastating fate, particularly given its status on the “most notorious” list.

However, even for the mighty US Government, taking on RapidShare in a domain war would be an entirely different prospect to picking a squabble with the relative minnows targeted in November, but RapidShare has much to lose and is taking no chances.

The aim is for RapidShare to be removed from the list of “Notorious Markets” by early 2011. They’re in for one hell of a fight.

Source: RapidShare Shows MPAA/RIAA: We Can Lobby Lawmakers Too

TV-industry insiders have admitted to uploading shows to BitTorrent in advance to generate buzz, and bands do the same even though they have a hard time admitting it.

Aside from using file-sharing sites to bring attention to new material, they are also used by the music industry to make critical business decisions. As we’ve shown in the past from leaked information, record labels use ‘illicit’ download statistics to determine what singles to put out next.

Although file-sharing networks are clearly seen as a valuable marketing tool, the entertainment industry prefers not to admit this in public and especially not in courts, where they have to convince judges how evil these sites are and that piracy is in fact killing their industry. This can sometimes lead to embarrassing situations of which we have a brand new example today.

In the ongoing battle of RIAA record label EMI against music search engine MP3tunes, a recent court filing reveals that EMI was actively marketing their music on RapidShare. Interesting, yes, but also quite embarrassing since EMI was labelling RapidShare as a known ‘Piracy Haven’ in the same case.

“In defense of the Sideload.com music search engine, MP3tunes told the court that EMI promoted bands by distributing free MP3s online. EMI told the Judge our position was ‘pure fantasy’ claiming that EMI never distributes free MP3 songs online,” Michael Robertson of MP3tunes told TorrentFreak.

“Thanks to our users we quickly amassed a list of more than 1400 such fantasy EMI songs that were available online and in depositions they finally admitted they put free songs online so they would spread ‘virally’,” Robertson added.

Faced with this new evidence EMI decided to change its position and argue that MP3tunes’ website Sideload was linking to ‘suspect’ places such as RapidShare. However, this was not a particularly strong argument as the defending party had evidence that EMI was using the file-hosting service to market tracks from their own artists, including their best selling act Coldplay.

“They say we link to RapidShare which they called a known haven of piracy. However we uncovered internal emails where EMI themselves put songs on RapidShare and sent emails to others instructing them to download them from RapidShare. With EMI spreading files far and wide, their experts grudgingly admit that it’s impossible to tell which links are authorized and which are not,” Robertson said.

The text above is taken from page 9 of a recent court filing. Unfortunately all the juicy details about EMI’s use of RapidShare are “filed under seal” since the record label claims they are corporate secrets and as such can’t be made available to the public.

In the sealed document, MP3tunes’ lawyer refers to an EMI employee placing music on RapidShare and sending emails to bloggers and marketers telling them to get the song from the file-hoster, TorrentFreak was told. This is of course a painful revelation for EMI as they themselves claim that RapidShare is a piracy haven, blaming MP3tunes for linking to it.

EMI is maintaining a double standard when it comes to file-sharing sites, to say the least. It seems that they themselves can use the service to promote their artists, but as soon as others make this information accessible they try to shut them down in court – a repeat of the same file-sharing hypocrisy we’ve seen in the past.

Source: EMI Promotes Music on ‘Piracy Haven’ RapidShare

Listing 148 titles to which these publishers hold the copyrights, the lawsuit demanded that RapidShare stop making available to the public user-uploaded versions of these books via its service.

On February 10th 2010, the District Court in Hamburg issued a preliminary ruling against RapidShare. The Court ordered the file-hoster to stop making available electronic versions of the text books within 7 days by removing all current titles and monitoring user uploads to ensure no more were uploaded. Failure to do so would result in the company being subjected to a fine of up to 250,000 euros.

However, according to the publishers who conducted searches of the RapidShare archives after the injunction was issued, most of the titles in the lawsuit remained available. With evidence of the breach of the injunction in hand, they asked the Court to impose fines.

Today, the Regional Court of Hamburg upheld a fine of 150,000 euros for breaching the injunction.

The Court stated that RapidShare “…culpably failed to take reasonable examination and control measures. These measures include the utilization of a word filter, which checks the file name during the uploading of files to the servers of [Rapidshare] with regard to whether the author, the title, the ISBN number of the publisher may be contained in this name.”

RapidShare was also ordered by the Court to install a word filter for new user uploads and is also “required to search the relevant popular external link libraries for links to files with the works in dispute.”

Dr. Ursula Feindor-Schmidt, an attorney representing the publishers, said that the measures imposed by the Court provide the necessary mechanisms to prevent copyright infringement on the titles detailed in the injunction and to “prevent businesses like Rapidshare from profiting from unauthorized access to and illegal distribution of copyrighted works.”

Source: RapidShare Gets 150,000 Euro Copyright Infringement Fine

In a leaked letter to the entertainment industry, former Rapidshare CEO Bobby Chang wrote a few months back that the company would begin pursuing third party sites who use the RapidShare trademark to ‘promote’ or encourage copyright infringement.

“We are extending our efforts to proceed against linking-sites, against so-called RapidShare search engines and against individuals who abuse our trademark to distribute copyright protected content,” wrote Chang.

Soon after this letter Chang left the company, but RapidShare did indeed keep its word and dozens of domain disputes were filed and won. Music-rapidshare.com, Rapidshareprime.net, Rapidshare-catalog.com, full-rapidshare.com and several more domains were transferred to RapidShare, but interestingly enough the compliant against Rapidshare.net was denied.

Rapidshare.net offered a searchable index of files that were hosted on RapidShare.com, so users could find files on the file-hosting service from one central location. RapidShare did not approve of this and filed a complaint at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The company argued in their complaint that the owners of the .net domain used it “to drive Internet traffic to its website where it advertises a search engine designed to assist web users who wish to violate third party copyrights,” and that the domain was registered in bad faith.

However, unlike the cases against the other domains, the WIPO panel denied this complaint July this year.

RapidShare, represented by the top law firm Greenberg Traurig, didn’t let the case go this easily and took the case to the National Arbitration Forum. The final decision in this case came on October 14th 2010 in favor of RapidShare, overruling WIPO’s earlier decision.

Although the owners of the .net domain had the option to appeal the decision in court, they chose not to do so.

“We had a choice, we could file in court locally and let it drag on for a few years, costing upwards of $100,000. This wasn’t an option so we had no choice but to let it go,” former Rapidshare.net owner Jesse told TorrentFreak. “We were given 10 days to respond, after 10 days on October 24th 2010, Rapidshare.net changed ownership.”

Instead of fighting the decision they bought a new domain where they continued with their RapidShare search and index service.

“We have taken the time to update some stuff and relocate the site to a new, non-infringing domain, RsFly, Jesse said, explaining that the RS has nothing to do with RapidShare and that it stands for REALLY SUPER instead.

“We changed the site around a bit and are working through the resulting bugs. The millions of users and webmasters who used Rapidshare.net’s search can now get the same thing over at RsFly.com. We will look at this unfortunate setback for what it is, a setback,” Jesse told us.

The major question most owners of the seized domains have is, why? According to the WIPO disputes, RapidShare’s actions were not only about trademark infringement issues, but also about the fact that these search engines and indexes ‘promote’ copyright infringement. Apparently RapidShare is worried that these sites negatively affect the image of the file-hosting service and that they may lead to more legal troubles.

However, RapidShare is also shooting itself in the foot, which becomes clear as one looks at the site traffic which has gone down significantly. With these disputes they have taken out even more traffic sources, and thus potential sources of revenue also.

“The domains they have seized were sending significantly large amounts of traffic to their service, which converts into paying customers, and makes RapidShare.com good money,” Jesse told TorrentFreak. “We know for a fact that a lesser-known file locker will garner about 10-15 paying customers for every 10000 that show up to their download page.”

We have no doubt that this was taken into consideration by RapidShare, but we have to assume that the company feared even worse if they didn’t go after the ‘infringing’ domains.

The result is clear though. After having led the file-hosting business for several years, Megaupload has now surpassed RapidShare as the most visited cyberlocker. Just a year ago RapidShare was among the 15 most visited domains on the Internet together with Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, but it has meanwhile dropped to 86 according to Alexa.

Competitors Megaupload, Hotfile, 4Shared and Mediafire all surpassed Rapidshare in terms of traffic this year.

Source: RapidShare.com Takes Out Rapidshare.net, But Loses Lead

In May this year, the United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement. In a hearing closer to home for the Swiss company, a German court ruled in the same month that RapidShare cannot be held not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

In a related case in Germany against the movie studio Capelight Pictures, RapidShare has booked another success after a lower court initially ruled against the file-hoster last year. RapidShare successfully appealed against a preliminary injunction granted by the Düsseldorf Regional Court, and the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has now reversed the decision.

The dispute between Capelight Pictures and the file-hoster dealt with the question of whether RapidShare had undertaken all reasonable measures to counter the illegal distribution of one of the films owned by the movie outfit in Germany. While the lower court ruled RapidShare did not, the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf overturned this decision.

“The ruling is a further step in the right direction,” sad RapidShare lawyer Daniel Raimer. “The previously common practice of copyright holders [suing] RapidShare on the off-chance there might be something to be gained from it, misunderstanding the realities it is operating within and showing contempt for its business model, will no longer bear fruit. The newest court rulings in Germany and the USA indicate this very clearly.“

Christian Schmid, founder and CEO of RapidShare, commented: “We are also pleased with the ruling because it is connected to a claim for compensation of costs. Copyright holders should therefore think very carefully in future about whether they wouldn’t prefer to save themselves some time and above all the expense of suing RapidShare for something for which the company cannot be held liable.“

Together with the positive outcomes from the other court cases this year, RapidShare has less to worry about on the legal front in the future. The verdicts are undoubtedly a major victory for RapidShare, and they will also reflect positively on other file-hosters and even torrent sites. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Court also hold for the average torrent site, as long as they stay away from other means of facilitating copyright infringement.

Source: RapidShare Scores Another Win Against Movie Studio

In addition to offering collaboration and noting that the site would increasingly terminate the accounts of persistent copyright infringers, the company noted that it would begin pursuing third party sites who use the Rapidshare trademark to ‘promote’ or encourage copyright infringement.

“We are extending our efforts to proceed against linking-sites, against so-called Rapidshare search engines and against individuals who abuse our trademark to distribute copyright protected content,” wrote Chang.

Just weeks later Rapidshare demanded that site owners should stop abusing its trademark, and went on to file several World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) disputes against others, hoping to take control of their domain names. Now it appears that those complaints have borne considerable fruit.

According to WIPO records, Rapidshare has successfully taken control of more than two dozen domains with ‘rapidshare’ somewhere in the URL including;

• music-rapidshare.com
• rapidshareprime.net
• rapidshare-catalog.com
• full-rapidshare.com
• easyrapidsharedownloads.com
• rapidsharese.com
• rapidshare-provider.com
• rapidshare-free-download.com
• rapidshare-premium.com
• whatsrapidshare.com
• rapidshare-deposit.com
• rapidshare-accounts.net
• atrapidshare.com
• rapidsharepremiumaccounts.com
• rapidsharedownload.org

The full list of transferred domains goes on for a while, and Rapidshare has already filed more than a dozen new disputes against search engines and link sites including rapidshareindex.com and rapidshare1.com.

While it is easy to see where Rapidshare’s trademark could be considered infringed by a domain which includes ‘rapidshare’ in its URL, not all domains did. A claim against another domain, rapidbay.net, was denied.

Firstly it was decided that not only is the word ‘rapid’ commonly used in the English language, but it is also in use by many businesses round the world unconnected with Rapidshare who wish to give the impression they are fast at what they do. Secondly, the word ‘bay’ was considered to be nothing like ‘share’ and therefore would not cause an Internet user to make a connection to Rapidshare.

While Rapidshare will be pleased that it has largely succeeded with these complaints, the domains it has taken control of represent just the tip of the iceberg. Time will tell if the file-hoster continues its aggressive actions against those it believes are not only abusing its company trademark, but also connecting it to copyright infringement.

Source: Rapidshare Takes Over Domain Names Of Trademark Abusers

A month later RapidShare ditched its CEO Bobby Chang on claims he was no longer the right person to successfully lead the company. And in a continued effort to avoid the pirate site stigma, RapidShare killed its reward program and went after sites that infringed their trademark to facilitate illicit downloading.

Two weeks ago premium users of the file-hosting site were informed about another upcoming change that was set to go into effect this month. RapidShare announced that it would stop the existing payment plans to introduce 5 new packages. These new packages would have daily usage limits and users would have to switch between them according to their daily download demands.

The result was that most users would be worse off than with their current plans, or would be forced to switch back and forth between the various packages on a day-to-day basis. Unsurprisingly, many premium users complained to RapidShare, urging the company to reconsider their offer.

“As a result of the recent adjustments to our product and pricing model we have received a lot of feedback from our users,” RapidShare communicated to its users yesterday. “There was also positive response but we want to be honest with you: most answers were negative.”

“With our adjustments we have alienated many users. As a matter of course, that was not our intention. Instead, it is our goal to introduce a system that gives our users more flexibility. However, we are happy about every single user response that we have received as this is the only way we can learn what our users really want,” the company added.

To accommodate the complaints of the revolting users, RapidShare changed its payment scheme to a simpler and much cheaper offer. For less than 5 euros users can now buy 4 months of premium access with 10 GB storage and a 30 GB monthly data limit. Heavy users can buy additional traffic and storage space if required.

The main benefit of the revised scheme, besides the fact that nearly every user will be better off, is the change from a daily limit to a monthly one. Under the old scheme, users with the cheapest account had a 1 GB download limit that they would have to upgrade even though they might never go over the 30 GB a month.

With these changes RapidShare thinks that there wont be any future revolts from users over the new pricing scheme. “We are convinced that we will meet our users’ needs with the new and simple model,” the company said.

Source: RapidShare Cheapens Pricing Scheme After User Revolt

Unlike most torrent sites, RapidShare has done well in court. Last month a United States District Court of California ruled that RapidShare is not guilty of copyright infringement. A few weeks earlier a German court ruled that the file-hoster is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

Outside of court RapidShare has sought contact with several major players in the entertainment industries, hoping to start a collaboration by converting copyright infringers into paying consumers. In addition, the company has taken several steps to ensure that they cannot be seen as piracy facilitators.

RapidShare has gone after sites that abuse their trademark to promote piracy, and they have now discontinued the rewards program for its users for the same reason.

“This decision by the company is a reaction to claims that the reward programme rewards the uploading of contents that are protected by copyright. We feel it is necessary to undertake this step as we do not wish RapidShare’s users to be exposed to such an unjustified general suspicion,” RapidShare explained.

The reward programs of RapidShare and other file-hosting services allowed users to earn cash or other gifts if they uploaded popular content. The entertainment industry sees these programs as incentives to upload copyrighted music and movies and possibly urged RapidShare to shut it down.

Previously, a leaked email from former RapidShare boss Bobby Chang to several entertainment industry representatives already revealed that RapidShare was not planning to compete with file-hosting services that were trying to gain the favor of ‘criminals’ (copyright infringers).

“RapidShare has decided not to participate in this battle and not to fight for the favor of criminals. Instead we would rather like to agitate against these activities and – if possible – to institute proceedings against those competitors of ours, who are intentionally supporting criminal activities,” Chang wrote in an email a few months ago.

Whether RapidShare’s most recent move to shut down the reward program will cause it to lose users is yet to be seen. If anything, it may have avoided yet another expensive legal battle while ensuring the site can continue to operate its business.

Source: RapidShare Kills Reward Program Over Piracy Concerns

The California-based company called for a jury trial in the United States to settle the issue. RapidShare responded by requesting that the case be postponed and transferred to Europe and heard under German law. This request was denied last month and the case went ahead in the United States.

This week the District Court of California rejected Perfect 10′s request for a temporary injunction. The Court stated in its ruling that as a file-hosting company, RapidShare cannot be accused of any copyright infringements. The ruling is a significant victory for RapidShare and the case sets an important precedent in the United States.

“The view that RapidShare does not promote any infringements of copyright, unlike other file-hosts, appears to be gradually catching on,” Christian Schmid, founder of RapidShare said.

“It is a milestone for us that this is also happening in the US. We are happy that the court in California has not bought into the odd line of argument put forward by Perfect 10 and we look forward to increasingly emphasize the major difference between RapidShare and illegal share-hosts,” Schmid added.

For Rapidshare this is the second high profile legal victory this month. Earlier, a German Court of Appeal overturned an earlier verdict in the case against the movie rental company Capelight Pictures. In the verdict it stated that RapidShare is not liable for acts of copyright infringement committed by its users.

It is not entirely clear what Schmid means by “illegal share-hosts” in his comment, but we assume that he refers to sites that encourage copyright infringement. The company previously said it would distance itself from other file-hosters that try to win the favor of those users that upload and distribute copyrighted content.

RapidShare itself does all it can to avoid such claims and is hoping to convert pirates into paying customers. Instead of simply removing pages where copyrighted material can be downloaded, RapidShare would like to redirect users to an online store where the same content can be bought legally.

Source: US Court: RapidShare Not Guilty of Copyright Infringement

One of the cases in which RapidShare lost was that against the movie rental company Capelight Pictures. This case was appealed by RapidShare and the Dusseldorf Court of Appeals overturned the earlier verdict yesterday, stating that the file-hoster is not responsible for any copyright infringements committed by its users.

“We are very happy about the judgment. The court has confirmed that RapidShare is not responsible for the contents of files uploaded by its users,” Rapidshare founder Christian Schmid said commenting to the outcome of the appeal.

“The judgment shows that attempts to denounce our business model as illegal will not be successful in the long run. With its 1-click-filehosting model, RapidShare responds to legitimate interests of its users and will continue to do so in the future,” Schmid added.

The arguments by the Court of Appeals go directly against earlier decisions in Germany where RapidShare was ordered to filter content proactively. The Court argued that RapidShare’s business is acting within the law and discounted the preventive measures that were suggested by the copyright holder.

Filtering based on keywords is not effective since that would result in many false positives, the Court noted. Likewise, manually reviewing uploaded content is not deemed feasible because RapidShare does not have the manpower to do this.

Another suggestion, banning file formats such as RARs, was also tossed out since this file type says little about whether a file is copyrighted or not. RAR is simply a format used to compress data, regardless of the copyrighted status of the files, the court explained.

The verdict is undoubtedly a major victory for RapidShare, and it will also reflect positively on other file-hosters and even torrent sites. In fact, many of the arguments used by the Court hold also for the average torrent site, as long as they stay away from other means of facilitating copyright infringement.

Source: RapidShare Not Liable For Pirating Users, Court Rules

This move is part of a new strategy for the file-hoster, which will also see it go after third party sites who use the RapidShare trademark to ‘promote’ or encourage copyright infringement.

“We are extending our efforts to proceed against linking-sites, against so called RapidShare search engines and against individuals who abuse our trademark to distribute copyright protected content,” RapidShare’s departing CEO Bobby Chang wrote to the entertainment industry.

Several weeks later it seems that RapidShare is indeed keeping its word. The company has recently sent out requests to a slew of site owners demanding that they stop abusing the RapidShare trademark for nefarious purposes. In addition, RapidShare has filed several domain disputes against similar sites, hoping to scoop their domains.

Among the targets are Rapidshare.net, Rapid.org (formerly Rapidfind) and Rapidshare4movies.com, all sites that allow users to find content available on RapidShare.

In the letters sent by RapidShare’s lawyers, site owners are asked to stop encouraging people to use RapidShare for copyright infringement (i.e. close their sites) and transfer the domain to RapidShare within two weeks. Among other things, the lawyers cite trademark abuse and unfair competition as the reasons why RapidShare is taking these actions.

Whether this strategy is in the best interests of its users has to be doubted. TorrentFreak spoke to several site owners who were targeted by RapidShare and none of them are planning to capitulate.

“We find it amazing, considering the amount of traffic and inevitably premium memberships we drive towards Rapidshare, that they target us in such an aggressive manner and turn on their own customers,” the founder of Rapid.org told TorrentFreak.

“We will not comply with ludicrous threats, such as to hand over the domain, and we will continue building our already large community. If at any point it becomes necessary for us to support alternative filehosts and/or create our own, we are capable and willing to do just that,” he added.

Aside from legal pressure, the file-hoster has also filed several WIPO domain disputes in the last week against sites that use the word ‘RapidShare’ in their domain names. If successful, these disputes could shutter many popular sites that were built on the RapidShare brand.

In the legal paperwork RapidShare clearly states that it does not want its site to be used for copyright infringement. By closing the linking sites and search engines they most likely hope to improve their relationship with the entertainment industry and avoid being shut down themselves.

Source: RapidShare Targets Sites Over Trademark Abuse

For years the company behind the popular file-hoster has been led by CEO/COO Bobby Chang, who worked in the telecommunication business before joining RapidShare. In his work Chang had the difficult task of pleasing the site’s users as well as copyright holders, who were increasingly threatening the company with legal action.

Today, RapidShare has announced that Chang will leave the company with immediate effect, but in mutual agreement. The reason cited is that Chang would no longer be the right person to successfully lead the company.

“We will continue RapidShare’s success story, faster and more consistently. We believe we can better achieve this goal with different leadership – for the benefit of our customers, partners and users,” Christian Schmid, RapidShare’s inventor and founder said in a comment.

RapidShare does not give any details on what the future course of the company will be, but the sudden breakup seems to indicate that there have been significant differences in opinion between Chang and other people on the company’s board.

Recently we revealed that Chang had sent out a letter to entertainment industry representatives, looking for partnerships and licensing deals. In this letter he labeled some of RapidShare’s users as ‘criminals’ who would see their accounts terminated more rapidly.

According to Chang, RapidShare would be working on a changed course where they would focus increasingly at converting illegal downloaders into paid customers. Whether or not the plans described in this letter have anything to do with Chang’s sudden departure is open for speculation.

RapidShare’s founder Christian Schmid will take over business management for the time being. He is expected to announce several changes for the benefit of users in the coming weeks.

Source: RapidShare Ditches CEO Bobby Chang

“The success of Perfect 10′s business is almost entirely dependent on its intellectual property rights. Therefore, the ongoing and massive infringements of Perfect 10′s rights [by Rapidshare], is devastating to, and threatens the existence of, Perfect 10′s business,” states the lawsuit.

It goes on to claim that RapidShare stores hundreds of thousands of unauthorized copyright images and billions of dollars worth of songs and movies on its servers, and enables “users from around the world to purchase virtually every pirated image, song and movie for $10 a month.”

“RapidShare also offers, without authorization, Perfect 10 DVDs and videos, including Perfect 10 Model Of The Year Video, which cost approximately $1,000,000 to produce,” notes the lawsuit, further adding that RapidShare infringes Perfect 10′s copyrights on 26,000 images and videos.

According to Perfect 10, they informed RapidShare on 29 May 2009 that it was hosting and “offering for sale” 800 specifically identified Perfect 10 images. They claim the file-hoster failed to respond to, or act on, that notification.

The California-based company called for a jury trial in the United States to settle the issue. RapidShare responded by requesting that the case be postponed and transferred to Europe and heard under German law. According to XBiz, that request has now been denied.

Last week a court confirmed that the hearing will take place in San Diego’s U.S. District Court next month, a case Perfect 10 owner Norm Zada feels he can win.

RapidShare claims that Perfect 10 has failed to inform them of the location of the infringing material on their servers. If it knew where the material was, the file-hoster said it would willingly remove it. Zada shrugs off responsibility for that work.

“It’s not my obligation or up to me to spend time finding those links. That’s not my problem. They need to stop selling what they don’t own,” he explains.

RapidShare denies that it sells Perfect 10 material and insists it functions purely as a storage site. Zada vehemently denies those claims.

“They’re not a storage locker. RapidShare is the greatest infringing paysite of all time,” he told XBiz. “They’re making $80 million a year that belongs to American studios and producers.”

TorrentFreak contacted RapidShare for their reaction to these accusations but they refused to comment.

Source: Perfect 10 v RapidShare Goes Ahead Next Month in U.S Court

To ease the minds of some major executives in the entertainment industry, Rapidshare’s General Manager Bobby Chang has revealed an ambitious plan through which copyright holder could benefit from the file-hosting service. At the same time, Chang says that his company will target uploaders of copyrighted material – who he refers to as criminals – more aggressively.

Earlier this week we already hinted at Rapidshare’s intention to terminate accounts of copyright infringers. In that article we made the mistake of quoting a fake email that has been circulating for a while, which suggested that Rapidshare had been logging IP-addresses for legal purposes. In reality, the company has only been terminating the accounts of infringing uploaders.

The true reason for us posting the earlier article was founded on information we obtained completely separately and was totally unrelated to the misquoted email.

TorrentFreak recently received documentation showing communication between Rapidshare’s General Manager Bobby Chang and representatives of the entertainment industry which is 100% genuine. In the documentation we have Chang reveals some of Rapidshare’s future plans.

“I would like to use this mail to inform you about some changes of our company’s business strategy. RapidShare’s supervisory board has decided to not just rely on the filehosting business but to extend our company’s efforts to officially distribute licensed content,” begins Chang in his writing to the media executives. Rapidshare’s manager then goes on to explain how the filehosting business is currently undergoing some major changes.

“For quite a few weeks and months we have seen changes in the filehosting business. Several new players are trying heavily and with shady or unfair business practices to get into the market. I am convinced that most of those new players are trying really hard to gain the favor of those users, who rely on cyberlockers to spread and distribute copyright protected content,” he writes, adding that other well-established cyberlockers are trying to compete with the aggressive marketing efforts of these new players.

According to Chang, Rapidshare is determined to take another route. Instead of gaining the favor of copyright infringers (or ‘criminals’ as Rapidshare’s manager calls them), they are going to take a stand against these competitors. In addition, they will step up efforts to go after users that upload copyrighted material.

“RapidShare has decided not to participate in this battle and not to fight for the favor of criminals. Instead we would rather like to agitate against these activities and – if possible – to institute proceedings against those competitors of ours, who are intentionally supporting criminal activities,” Chang writes.

“We are more aggressively than before terminating accounts of users who have been caught uploading copyright protected content,” he explains, while adding that they have also stopped the payout option that was part of the “rewards program.”

This last paragraph is what led us to post the earlier article about account terminations. In follow up conversations over email and on the phone, Rapidshare remained vague about what this would actually entail. We were told that Rapidshare doesn’t have any logs of the files people download, but that uploaders can indeed have their accounts terminated if they are caught.

Referring to infringing users as “criminals” does also explain Bobby Changs statement to the entertainment industry that “Our cooperation with the German-based organization GVU is running for several years.” GVU is the German anti-piracy outfit that includes members such as the MPA and other local content owners. Bobby Chang does not go into detail in explaining how this cooperation has effected
RapidShares relationship to content owners in the past.

Perhaps even more interesting is Rapidshare’s commitment to “institute proceedings” against competitors “who are intentionally supporting criminal activities.” By “criminal activities” Rapidshare means uploading copyrighted material, the same activity that helped their business to flourish. What the basis of these proceedings will be is not clear from Chang’s writing.

In the second part of his letter Chang goes on to plug an interesting business proposal to the media executives. Instead of simply removing pages where copyrighted material can be downloaded, Rapidshare would like to redirect users to an online store where the same content can be bought legally.

“If a user finds out that several attempts to download an illegal copy of a DVD are in vain, and if his several attempts to ‘steal’ this DVD have just brought him to an online-store, he may finally be frustrated and willing to purchase a licensed version of this movie,” writes Chang, while noting that this also works for music, games and other media.

Rapidshare already has a licensing deal for promotional content with Warner Bros. and they would like to extend this to full titles of various studios. “Currently, we are redirecting users to a website [link] on which they can view promotional content only. Even though this website does only offer promotional content, it does already have 250,000 users per day,” Chang writes.

“We are willing to invest substantially into this online store and I would be glad to not just talk about RapidShare as a threat for the entertainment industry, but also about RapidShare as an interesting option to sell your products. My company does have several million users per day. I am sure, that quite a significant proportion of these users may be willing to buy your companies’ movies,” he concludes.

Rapidshare’s plans will probably be received critically by many users, but they might be essential for the site’s survival. A Rapidshare spokesperson told TorrentFreak that copyright holders have been pushing hard for proactive filters that will prevent users from uploading copyrighted material. The shop proposal on the other hand gives the copyright holders an option to convert downloaders into customers, and this might benefit all parties in the long run.

Rapidshare was sent a draft of this article and didn’t question the authenticity of the information we posted. They got back to us with the following comment:

“RapidShare is seeking the partnership of the content industry to generate new models that make piracy obsolete. One of these models is to redirect users to legal content on our own website, which is provided by content owners. This redirect has been in place since beginning of 2010 and well perceived by users so far. We experience that many users seek the content in the first place and are very often not aware – and cannot find out – if any content is pirated or not. That is why they prefer to consume it from a reliable and safe source, instead of risking to be involved in piracy. RapidShare has initiated a dialogue between the content industry and the internet industry to go forward and create new models of cooperation that eliminate the need for piracy, thus the need for pursuing users and thus protect data privacy on the internet. We believe that if users can instantly find what they are looking for at a fair price, piracy will become a problem of the past.”

We also have a German translation of this article.

Source: Rapidshare Aims To Convert Pirates Into Customers

Like most file-hosting services, Rapidshare is hosting a wide range of music, movies and music files that are distributed without the consent of the rightsholders. This has dragged the company’s bosses into several lawsuits with copyright holders already, most recently they were ordered to proactively filter 148 book titles to avoid jail time and huge fines.

Although it is no secret that many people use Rapidshare to distribute copyrighted content, the site’s users have remained largely untouched until recently. Over the last few weeks, however, reports are coming in from users who’ve had their accounts terminated for uploading copyrighted files.

From the emails being sent out, it is clear that Rapidshare is taking a more aggressive stance towards ‘infringing’ users. Additional information from inside Rapidshare confirms that distributers of copyrighted material are indeed targeted more that before.

There is little doubt that this active termination policy is the result of ever-increasing pressure from copyright holders. At the same time, these actions might very well be the end of Rapidshare’s limitless expansion, as users will quickly move over to competing file-hosting services upon hearing this news.

Update: In addition to real terminations there have been reports of scam emails. However, we have additional information which proves without a doubt that Rapidhare is indeed targeting distributors of copyrighted material more aggressively by terminating their accounts. We will publish this in the coming days. We removed the quotes from the email we posted here earlier to avoid confusion.

Update: A Rapidshare spokesperson just confirmed that they are indeed terminating accounts of copyright infringers. “I can confirm that we reserve the right to terminate the accounts of users that do not act according to our terms and conditions,” we were told.

Update: To clarify what happened. Last week we received confidential information that Rapidshare will take on a new direction (this info comes from Rapidshare). Among other things, it included information that Rapidshare was going to target infringers more aggressively. Then, yesterday we were sent a termination email by a reader.

We assumed that this was connected to the information we received earlier and posted this article. As it turns out, we cannot verify if this email is the scam one or the legit one, but Rapidshare says that the email we posted here earlier was fake.

The email has been removed by us because it looked similar to the fake emails. But, there is no doubt that Rapidshare is taking a more aggressive approach towards copyright infringers. More on this later.

Update: There is no doubt that the email we posted here earlier was fake. The bit about Rapidshare storing privacy sensitive information in its users for “legal reasons” is not true. We apologize to Rapidshare for posting this (we should have been more careful), but stand behind the part that Rapidshare is targeting copyright infringers more aggressively.

Update: New info at Rapidshare Aims To Convert Pirates Into Customers.

Source: Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Copyright Infringers

The lawsuit cited 148 titles to which the publishers own the copyright, and demanded that RapidShare stop user-uploaded electronic versions of the same being made available to the public via their file-hosting service.

On February 10th 2010, the District Court in Hamburg handed down a preliminary ruling against RapidShare which ordered that by February 17th the company must stop the book titles named in the lawsuit being made available on their website.

The Court ruled that RapidShare must monitor user uploads to ensure that none of the book titles are put onto their servers and go on to ensure that the public never gains access to copies that somehow slip through this filtering.

According to Inside Higher Ed, every time a prohibited book named in the injunction is made available on RapidShare it could cost the company up to 250,000 euros ($339,000) or even earn company bosses 2 years in jail.

“This ruling is an important step forward. Not only does it affirm that file-sharing copyrighted content without permission is against the law, but it attaches a hefty financial punishment to the host, in this case Rapidshare, for noncompliance,” said Tom Allen, CEO of the Association of American Publishers. “Consider this a shot across the bow for others who attempt to profit from the theft of copyrighted works online,” he added.

While there is little doubt that copyright material is indeed available via RapidShare, a press release by the book publishers oversteps the mark a little by stating that the company “encourages the unauthorized uploading of content with a variety of reward programs.” While RapidShare could be accused of many things, openly encouraging its customers to upload pirate material is not one of them.

This is not the first time that RapidShare has been ordered to filter content. In 2009, the Regional Court in Hamburg ruled that the company must pro-actively filter around 5,000 music tracks from music industry group GEMA’s catalog to prevent them being made available to the public.

Source: RapidShare Ordered To Proactively Filter Book Titles

Rapidshare was also ordered to delete any and all of those same tracks from its servers and ensure that they are not uploaded again by users. Previously Rapidshare had been using file hashes to recognize tracks that were already removed after requests from GEMA, to ensure that they weren’t uploaded again. The court decided that the technique used was ineffective.

The court found Rapidshare guilty of breaches of copyright law and estimated the value of the tracks at €24 million ($34 million).

“The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA’s fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet,” said Dr. Harald Heker, Chief Executive Officer of GEMA. “We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level,” he added.

Understandably, Rapidshare sought to downplay the ruling. Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare, Switzerland, said: “We do not consider the court’s decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases.”

Noting that the courts of appeal “tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts,” Chang said it would make more sense to offer music fans the right products and services at the right price to “open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet.”

Update: We initially reported that Rapidshare was fined $34 million on the back of this report. This information is wrong, the court only stated that the value of the tracks was estimated at $34 million. The article is updated accordingly and we’re sorry for the confusion.

Source: Court Orders Rapidshare To Proactively Filter Content

At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law. It turns out that several record labels are using this to take legal action against those who share music on Rapidshare.

Previously the paragraph was only used by rights holders to get the personal details of those who share copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. It basically enables the copyright holders to get “permission” from a civil judge to ask ISPs to disclose the personal details of a user behind a certain IP. Now, however, this also seems to be the case for file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, which is based in Germany.

This of course opens up the possibility for rights holders to go after a wide range of file-hosting services and potentially even BitTorrent sites. Indeed, everyone who now uploads a torrent file to a site hosted in Germany is at risk of having his personal details revealed. Although it will be impossible to prove that the uploader actually seeded the file it might be seen as assisting in copyright infringement.

Pretty much all torrent sites keep track of the IP-addresses of their (.torrent) uploaders, and if the rights holders can get the IP-address of people who upload to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, they can easily extend this to BitTorrent sites hosted in Germany. A dream come true for copyright holders, but a nightmare for the privacy of Internet users.

Too bad for Metallica’s Lars Ulrich who only just started sharing files himself.

Source: Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders

Almost exactly 1 year ago, P2PBlog reported that the German rights organization GEMA had gained a preliminary injunction against Rapidshare which ordered the company to stop hosting and distributing titles which GEMA represent.

Rapidshare made an appeal – but lost. The court decided that Rapidshare should be forced to monitor all uploads which infringed on GEMA’s copyright – a feat which the company said was impossible.

At the time, GEMA boss Dr. Harald Heker said that the Court’s decision shows that it’s not down to the rights holders to police commercial outfits such as Rapidshare for their copyright works. He went on to say that he felt that the decision would send a major signal to all file-hosting sites where copyright works are used to generate revenue for themselves.

Then in April 2007 it was reported that Rapidshare was fighting back, suing GEMA in response – with the aim of clarifying the legal position for file-hosting sites.

Now, rumors circulating on the web indicate that Rapidshare was shut down. Quite a few sites reported the news but this situation does not appear to be true. Rapidshare’s Wiki page is now closed due to vandalism which is believed to have carried erroneous information which contributed to the confusion.

According to a report, a Rapidshare technician said: “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”

There is no doubt that Rapidshare stores millions of files – including lots of music. The operators of Rapidshare claim they have no idea what material they store on their servers and are in no postion (much like a regular ISP) to monitor or police the content. The users upload the content, they say, and as such, it’s out of their control.

However, the injunctions issued by the District Court in Cologne indicate that Rapidshare’s liability for such infringements still exist as they were carried out during the course of Rapidshare’s business. GEMA head, Harald Heker said at the time: “The mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator’s website(s).”

In the meantime, Rapidshare.com and Rapidshare.de continue to operate.

This article has been updated

Source: Music Industry Got An Injunction Against Rapidshare in 2007, Site Not Shut Down