TorrentFreak

A widely published research report from the brand protection company MarkMonitor has outraged the Swiss based cyberlocker RapidShare, who might sue for defamation. The research branded RapidShare as the leading digital piracy site with 13 billion page visits a year, while the site’s management has gone to extreme lengths to emphasize its legitimacy, both in and outside court.

In terms of visitor traffic Cyberlockers have taken over the file-sharing lead from BitTorrent sites. This trend has been developing over the last few years and has accelerated in recent months to a position where the number of one-click hosting sites that are larger than The Pirate Bay in terms of traffic has grown to five. All signs indicate that file-storage services are becoming the new sharing standard.

When it comes to commercial file-sharing sites, few are as exposed as RapidShare. Listed by the entertainment industries as being among the world’s most notorious locations for pirated media, the company is certainly feeling the heat. In an attempt to correct what it sees as misconceptions about its operations, RapidShare has hired a prominent US lobbying firm and now appears to be reaching out to the entertainment industries to see them not as a foe, but a helpful friend. But how far is RapidShare prepared to go?

Swiss based file-hosting service RapidShare has booked another clear victory against a copyright holder in a German Court. In their appeal against the computer game distributor Atari, the court ruled that RapidShare has taken sufficient measures against copyright infringement, while it dismissed Atari’s demands for a keyword filter and other stringent anti-piracy tools.

Last month RapidShare discovered that they had been reported by the MPAA and RIAA to the US Government for being one of the world’s “most notorious pirate markets”. Now, on the heels of reports that the entertainment industries spent a small fortune lobbying for domain seizures in the last quarter, RapidShare has hired a Washington based lobbying firm to represent its interests in the US and to start correcting misconceptions.

Record labels are not always acting honestly when it comes to file-sharing. In public they often condemn BitTorrent sites and file-hosting services, but behind the scenes they sometimes use the same tools to promote their artists. This has become painfully obvious in the ongoing court case between EMI and MP3tunes where evidence was provided that the record label posted tracks on the ‘piracy haven’ RapidShare.

Earlier this year, cyberlocker service RapidShare was ordered by a court to remove nearly 150 electronic books from its archives and prevent users from re-uploading them by implementing a filter. According to the publishers who brought the case, RapidShare quickly breached the injunction. Today, the Regional Court of Hamburg agreed and hit the file-hosting company with a 150,000 euro fine.