‘You’re terminated,’ say Rapidshare

For many years Rapid­share was con­sid­ered to be a safe way for peo­ple to down­load copy­righted con­tent with­out hav­ing to face reper­cus­sions. I have to admit that a MASSIVE chunk of my dig­i­tal music col­lec­tion came cour­tesy of Rapid­share. 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.

Thanks to http://shoegazeralive4.blogspot.com/ for the heads up.