TorrentFreak : A Higher Regional Court in Germany has ruled that file-hosting service RapidShare must proactively filter thousands of files uploaded by its users. The Court confirmed three separate verdicts by a lower court, in cases that were started by book publishers and a music rights group. RapidShare has yet to decide whether it will appeal the verdicts, and informs TorrentFreak that there’s also positive news to report.
TorrentFreak- Just eight months after its launch Kim Dotcom’s Mega has established itself as one of the dominant players in the secure file-storage business. The site has now earned a spot among the top 1,000 most-visited websites on the Internet, overtaking its direct competitor RapidShare. Kim Dotcom says that Mega is already 50% of Megaupload in terms of the number of files stored, and that’s just the beginning.
TorrentFreak: A Higher Regional Court in Germany has ruled that file-hosting service RapidShare operates legally in Germany. The verdict is the result of a long-standing legal battle between the Swiss-based file-hosting service and music rights group GEMA. It’s not all good for RapidShare though, as the company now has to monitor external websites for incoming links to infringing files.
What's Hawt: Rapidshare has disabled resumable downloads and has set a speed cap for its free users.
They have such an odd way of throttling as well. Just last night I thought a download from RS had stopped, and I immediately jumped to another site. Lost client.
That's what competition does. The cut throat competition in the market force them to take such action.
Rapidshare was the one service that I believe actually benefitted from all the millions of crappy file hosts. Now that most of the competition is calling it quits, its gonna go back to being crap like it was before.
Right now, a lot of file sharing services are laying low and no one can blame them. New services are trying to start up but either no one has heard of them or they suck real bad. Also, I'm sure many dedicated uploaders are also waiting for the storm to blow over before picking a service. Why waste all that time to upload when the service could fold any day?
There are actually still quite a lot of services out there such as:
Mediafire
Fileswap
Filesend
Filevelocity
I'm kinda of surprised by most uploaders aren't taking advantage of platforms such as Box.net and Dropbox.
Freedom is an illusion. There is no freedom. The laws of the land will always be there to control the consumer and to profit through corporations. Its always about the money.
Wish there was a country I could move to that really was free.
At least for now were not at chinas level. Were just pretty close with all the propoganda that we listen to here in the US. The corruption is still here in the US just like Chinas corruption.
Would it be possible for the company to filter all the content , my opinion is: its a tough ask .
Rapidshare is a failed service. Now that they have these crazy throttles, I've already switched to alternative lockers. Adding filtering on top of that isn't going to do them any good.