File sharing site Rapidshare shut down by anti-piracy officials
Another blow to file sharing was made public on January 19th, 2008. As user’s cries and pleas rang out through forums and blogs on the Internet, news continues to leak about the shutdown of Rapidshare.com. Currently as this is released Radidshare.de is still functional, however, all Rapidshare Premium account holders have stated they cannot download.
Wikipedia has had over 20 different versions of the account with some of the first statements from RapidShare themselves. At first it was announced that over 360 Rapidshare servers collapsed due to overload and that the servers would be up within hours. As the clock ticked by users have become more irate and confused. There is now information hitting the press wire that German anti-piracy officials are involved.
An organization called, GEMA, which is a society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights has obtained from the District Court in Cologne temporary injunctions against the operator of the data exchange services www.rapidshare.de and www.rapidshare.com. The dot com version of Rapidshare was specifically targeted as GEMA members claimed their copyright protected works had been used in an unlawful way.
RapidShare services are well known throughout the Internet for file sharing. In fact, according to Alexa traffic metric’s service Rapidshare.com is ranked as the #11 website in the world. According to another competing and generally more reliable traffic analytics service, Compete.com, Rapidshare.com holds a ranking worldwide of 879. You can see screenshots from these ranking services below:
The RapidShare service allows users, both free and premium, to upload files onto their servers making the files publicly available and searchable through different search engines. A detailed press report from Heise Online states that the GEMA spokesman Hans-Gerwig Geyer believes that both Rapidshare sites should be taken down and not allowed to operate in their present way.
Very broad statements have been made by Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of of GEMA saying that this injunction and process could have sweeping effects for other sites like YouTube and MySpace. Mr. Heker sums it all up by saying, “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).”
With statements being made about the Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and MySpace user’s have also been brought into question. It has also been stated by sources that GEMA officials and other related anti-piracy officials are looking into pursuing legal action against users who distribute and download pirated copies of software and movies from these servers.
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WRONG!
it works fine again
The GEMA is wasting their artist’s money on lawsuits for a lost case.
This RapidShare company is probably the biggest of its kind but not the only one on the globe.
Besides that nothing can stop them from backing up servers somewhere else in the world where it can be done legally.
GEMA is also risking themselves with lawsuits by shutting down RapidShare servers in such a brutal method (if that story has some truth in it) cause much of the content there is private and made for private use. It has if Gmail would be shut down with no previous notice and people will loose their private materials only because some people are using Gmail to send “piracy” material.
[...] rumors circulating on the web indicate that Rapidshare was shut down, a situation which does not appear to be [...]
[...] as this is released Radidshare.de is still functional, however, all Rapidshare Premium … credit : [...]
[...] bookmarks tagged site #1 File sharing site Rapidshare shut down by offic… saved by 1 others ronnie130 bookmarked on 01/20/08 | [...]
“The RapidShare service allows users, both free and premium, to upload files onto their servers making the files publicly available and searchable through different search engines.”
INCORRECT – The uploaded files are 100% NOT searchable. The only way people can search for them is by joining a forum board and posting the link to their upload.
If they’re going to try and shut down anyone, it should logically be the forums that publish the links to piracy material.
wow…
[...] 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 [...]
Well they cant shut the forums down either, because they do not host any material related to piracy on their site, and of course the servers are out of the USA, in countries that do not explicitly ban the linking to pirated material
the rapidshare.de work fine until now. not so bad.
[...] 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 [...]
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