Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Illegal Downloaders

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Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Illegal Downloaders
March 23, 2010

" For many years Rapidshare was considered to be a safe way for people to download copyrighted content without having to face repercussions. Recently, however, the company has been actively going after users that upload or download copyrighted files through the service by terminating accounts and logging IP-addresses for legal purposes.

In common with BitTorrent and other file-sharing services, Rapidshare has steadily increased its user base in recent years. The site has hundreds of millions of visitors each month and is listed among the 50 most-used sites on the Internet.

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 downloading or uploading copyrighted files. From the emails being sent out, it is clear that Rapidshare is taking a more aggressive stance towards ‘infringing’ users.

“It came to our attention that illegal uploads which have violated third-party copyrights that can result in lawsuits are being hosted on our servers, thus voiding the Terms of Service. We have detected and removed these files from our servers, as requested by the legitimate owners, and are now in the process of terminating accounts that have downloaded or stored those copyrighted materials in order to prevent them from circulating and breaching copyrights again,” the email from Rapidshare reads.

Terminating accounts is not the end of it though, as Rapidshare informs the users in question that their personal details will be kept for legal purposes. “A log file of all your login IP addresses and uploaded/downloaded file details will be kept for legal purposes,” they write. Rapidshare advises users who want to appeal the decision to hire a lawyer.

The email doesn’t elaborate on what they mean by “legal purposes” but we assume that the company is going to use it as leverage, and that logs might eventually end up in the hands of copyright holders. If anything, the email from Rapidshare makes it clear that the company places the interests of copyright holders above the privacy of its users.

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. "

:source: Source: Rapidshare Terminates Accounts of Illegal Downloaders:view: Homepage: TorrentFreak

The recycle bins on sharing forums are going to be overflowing, LoL. Personally, I'll be glad when RapidCrap bites the dust...

this will not happen.
RS is not fool.
if they do that they will die!!

Hmmm ... I was just about to get a year-subscription to RS.

Guess I'll wait for that just a little more. It's rather sad cause with tools like JDownloader and a premium-account and access to many boards like warez-BB, etc ... RS has huge potential and is really easy to use for your 'needs'.

If this is true, it's game over for rapidshare.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cabalo

If this is true, it's game over for rapidshare.

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That's for sure! This days, the people download only "pirate" things ahha :whistling

Without piracy, i don't see how a service like RapidShare could survive.

How much "legitimate" traffic could they have?

another reason to use jdownloader :)

guys this are phish mails!
if it was official an announcement will be in the news in RS

atrwz. I'm not sure how it would be a "phish mails"

I don't notice them asking for any login details anywhere...

they sending this mails to accounts that already been hacked ;)

most likely RS is coming down harder on uploaders due to the book publisher court ruling last month. mediafire is the new king

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cabalo

If this is true, it's game over for rapidshare.

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Yea it wont last long if theyre gonna close accounts of those who downloads content of it. must be like 99% copyrighted content hosted on it :lol:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by atrwz

guys this are phish mails!
if it was official an announcement will be in the news in RS

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Yea thats one of the mails people have gotten when they have been phished :yup:

I can confirm this as utter bullshit.Just checked my email.None from rapidshare regarding any of this.Probably the work of kiddie porn distributors.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sez

I can confirm this as utter bullshit.Just checked my email.None from rapidshare regarding any of this.Probably the work of kiddie porn distributors.

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Well obviously it hasn't affected everyone, otherwise the outcry would've been far greater and we most certainly would've felt it over at the filesharing forum.

Most likely RS attempting to appease copyright nazis agencies by "catching" a few downloaders every now and then.

Hopefully though RS will lenient and only pretend to "catch" a few people every month and disable them while still mainly allowing such activities to occur, otherwise practically 99% of their traffic is gone. We'll have to see.

thank you rapidshare.. :censored: :mad3: :mad3:

Thank god for megaupload. I don't even bother buying rapidshare anymore, when megaupload is catching up to them more and more everyday. It's true it would literally takes years to pull even with rapidshare, since they still have a big edge. Once they started being nazis starting with deleting massive amounts of files that hadn't been downloaded in a long time, pissing off a lot of uploaders and convincing some filesharing forums to explore other filehosting providers, they started a long downward spiral.

Nowadays, if there is something i need I check megaupload for it before i check rapidshit. Since i usually only download movies and tv shows anyways, and between my 0day trackers and tvtorrents.ro I have access to all the tv shows i could ever want, it's only for the really hard to find movies that rapidshare is still useful. Still if I can't find a movie on KG or PTP, and i usually can, I'll use jdowloader rather than feed rapidshare's pockets. I used to be the biggest most hardcore rapidshare addict before I decided to take a moral stand against them.

I buy new games anyways, as for older older games, i still download, also download discontinue or games that recently stop selling at gamestop or ebgames.
I never download movies, nor do i download music for burning purposes.
So i am good.
As for rapidshare , well if the site disappeared, i wouldn't care.

Rapidshare is gettig bigger and bigger, you can't stop them

Just used today , a link from Forum W . Works fine for me .

so RapidShare is going down?

There are far to many sites like Rapidshare, for this to have any real effect.
Anyways I've seen more sites use Hotfile of resent, tho I've never understood why.
If you don't have an account and you download a big file their, the last wait time I had was like an hour.

That was excpected to happen someday. but as said there are many replacements to the legendry RS these days ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LubTheStaringCat

Anyways I've seen more sites use Hotfile of resent, tho I've never understood why.
If you don't have an account and you download a big file their, the last wait time I had was like an hour.

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Doesn't Hotfile pay you after a certain number of people download your files?

banning downloaders doesn't make sense.... uploaders maybe.

thanks my account is safe till now !