RapidShare is a German owned One-click hosting site that operates from Switzerland
and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users.
It operates as both a pay and free service
(with limitations), allowing any user to upload files of up to 100 MB. The
user is then supplied with a unique download URL, which locates the file and
enables anyone with whom the uploader shares it to
download the file. Non-premium users are required to wait a time period after
each download depending on the size of the last downloaded file). Their
homepage states they have 170 gigabit/s of Internet connectivity and 4 petabytes of storage for users. Registration and payment
allow benefits such as download of several files simultaneously,
queue-skipping, and the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads. No user
is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded
by following a given URL.
On October 19, 2006, RapidShare
announced that "Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de
are full right now". A new website, RapidShare.com has been made in an
attempt to transfer usage from RapidShare.de to
RapidShare.com.
Premium accounts for RapidShare.de were not lost as
a code could be used to transfer the account between servers. However, this
code was only good for as long as the account did not expire, and the
promotion did not finish. It is not possible, however, to use a
RapidShare.com account on the German site. Despite the one-way compatibility
with paid accounts, both sites claim to be entirely different organisations and entities. The new site originally did
not impose any download limits, but on October 27, the "Happy
Hours" came to an end, bringing back the download limits. The file size
limit was also reduced from 300 MB to its current 100 MB.
Issues
Due to certain ISP's usage of proxy servers
many people are unable to access files hosted on RapidShare
as they will be using one proxy server and RapidShare
limits download slots for everyone using that proxy server as if it were one
person. RapidShare's policy is to encourage those
behind proxy servers to purchase premium accounts.
Some ISPs also intentionally block sharing
sites like RapidShare to make better use of
bandwidth. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 25 GB
(25.000.000.000 bytes) within a five day period..
Non-paying users are required to wait more
than two minutes before any download becomes available. CAPTCHA validation
required. Non-paying users are also required to wait two minutes for every
megabyte of data downloaded before they can download again, up to 208 minutes
(100 MB).
Paying accounts for RapidShare.de
and RapidShare.com are separate and not interchangeable.
On January 19, news broke that German
collections agency GEMA had 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". To date RapidShare
has claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users
and of not being in a position to control the content. Through its
injunctions the District Court in Cologne had now however made it clear to
the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the
services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point
of view, lessen the operator’s liability for
copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the
spokesman added.
Both RapidShare.de
and RapidShare.com sites are currently still operating and the consequences,
if any, of the claimed injunction have yet to be seen. So far they have not
been sued.
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