| Type | Aktiengesellschaft | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2006[1] | ||
| Headquarters | Cham, Switzerland | ||
| Key people | Christian Schmid (CEO & COO) |
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| Slogan | Easy Filehosting | ||
| Website | rapidshare.com | ||
| Alexa rank | 208 (January 2012[update])[2] | ||
| Type of site | One-click hosting | ||
| Advertising | Subscription | ||
| Registration | Optional | ||
| Available in | English German Spanish French |
||
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RapidShare is a one-click hosting service that offers both free and commercial services. Operating from Switzerland, it is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. RapidShare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites, with 10 petabytes of files on its servers, and handling up to three million users simultaneously.[3]
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RapidShare has been operating as a filehosting site since at least 2005.[4]
RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid, who also took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010.[5]
RapidShare used to operate two different websites. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland.[6] The second website, RapidShare.com, has been operated and maintained simultaneously with RapidShare.de. On March 1, 2010, RapidShare.de was permanently shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to RapidShare.com. Furthermore, files uploaded to RapidShare.de were no longer available for download.
In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites.[5]
Upon uploading, the user is supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone with whom the uploader shares the URL to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content.[3]
In April 2008, RapidShare had 5.4 petabytes of storage for users.[7] In March 2010 it stated, after a 120 Gbit/s upgrade, to have 600 Gbit/s of bandwidth.[8]
Registration and payment allow benefits such as unlimited download speed, immediate download (instead of experiencing a waiting period), download of several files simultaneously, queue skipping, the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads, uploading, downloading bigger files up to 2 GB, allowing Free Users to download their files with Premium privileges ("TrafficShare") and to store up to 50 GB of data that cannot expire.
Before 1 July 2010 there was a rewards program that allowed the user to trade "RapidPoints" for a selection of products depending on the number of points the user had collected. On June 18, 2010, RapidShare announced that it would stop this program along with RapidDonations on July 1, 2010, to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material.[9]
There are restrictions on downloads by non-account holders, for example a 167-minute waiting (increased in 2011 from 15-20 minutes) time between downloads; there is also a 5-minute (previously 1 minute) waiting period for each download once the user's waiting time between downloads has refreshed.[10]
RapidShare offers two computer programs to simplify file managing: It allows for torrents to be uploaded to their own file server and quickly be seeded.
This software allows queuing of uploads. However, it cannot resume interrupted uploads. It is available for Windows and runs without installation.[11]
This software has many more features than the Uploader, especially queuing and resuming the upload as well as the downloads (only for Premium Members—free users cannot resume). The version linked on the site works with Windows Vista and 7, Mac and Linux.[12] There is an older official client available for Windows XP, which may be obtained upon request from RapidShare or alternatively from various third-party sources.[13] RapidShare does not restrict automatic downloads to their downloader, however, they do not provide technical support to third-party downloaders as they do for RapidShare Manager.
Views on RapidShare differ to a great extent. On 19 January 2007 the German collections agency GEMA claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com. "The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion."[14][15]
RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal. By comparing the files' MD5-hash the site would now prevent illegal files from being reuploaded. While this would be sufficient under United States law, it was later established in court that under German law it is not. That decision forced RapidShare to check all the uploaded files before publishing them.[16]
In April 2009 RapidShare handed over to major record labels the personal details of uploaders who uploaded copyright-protected files.[17][18] The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band Metallica's Death Magnetic album.[19]
A month later, RapidShare stated on their website that "we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link."[20]
Six global publishers have obtained an injunction against Swiss-based RapidShare AG. Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc. The judgment handed down by a German court in Hamburg on February 10, 2010, and effective on February 17, 2010, ordered RapidShare to implement measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 copyright-protected works cited in the lawsuit, which was filed on February 4, 2010. The court ruled that RapidShare must monitor its site to ensure the copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance.
The US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus stated that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works".[21]
By contrast, the Düsseldorf higher regional court has twice overturned injunctions filed by the German film and DVD rental company, Capelight Pictures (Ref. I-20 U 166/09; I-20 U 8/10).[22][23] The court declared that the file hoster could not be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties and revoked the injunction initially upheld by the Düsseldorf district court in the main proceedings. The court also indicated that a file hoster is not obliged to use a word filter as this would also prevent legal copying for private use.
In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California, in its legal case (09-CV-2596H WMC) between the publisher of an online erotic magazine and RapidShare, rejected the filling of a temporary injunction against the file hoster.[24] The presiding judge turned down the application because the plaintiff failed to make a credible case for a direct infringement of copyright or for RapidShare having supported copyright violations.
In the 2009 - 2010 legal case Atari Europe S.A.S.U. v. Rapidshare AG in Germany,[25] the Düsseldorf higher regional court reached the conclusion on appeal that "most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases"[26] and that to assume otherwise was equivalent to inviting "a general suspicion against shared hosting services and their users which is not justified".[27]
Of note, the court also observed that the site removes copyrighted material when asked, does not provide search facilities for illegal material, noted previous cases siding with RapidShare, and after analysis concluded that the plaintiff's suggestions for preventing sharing of copyrighted material were "unreasonable or pointless".[25] It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use[26] could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which would prevent legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP analysis (as IPs are often dynamic and change).[28][29]
In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.[30]