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RapidShare
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
RapidShare is a German One-click hosting site that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. It claims to be the world's largest in its field.
It operates as a pay service, allowing any member to upload files of up to 100MBs. 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. Free downloaders are throttled and forced to wait 20 seconds and about 10 seconds more for each 10 MB (however, with files under 500 KB there is no waiting). As of September 17 2006 , non-premium members are required to wait a total of 170 seconds for the largest files, and are forced to wait roughly two hours after each download, although it must be noted people with a dynamic IP can skip this wait by simply disconnecting and then reconnecting.
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"[citation needed]. 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 300MB to its current 100MB.
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In June 2006, RapidShare started giving away free Premium accounts valid for two days every so often. Free account users are then offered the chance of extending their accounts to 1 month if they gain 10,000 "Premium points", where one point is awarded per download if the downloader is a free-user and your file is bigger than 1 MB and the downloader has generated less than 5 points in the last hour. Those increased measures were introduced to protect Rapidshare from abuse.
Interest in these free accounts is very widespread, and often thousands are registered within several minutes. There even are a few specifically-developed programs that periodically poll the RapidShare site to check if new free Premium accounts are being offered.
Non-Premium account downloads usually do not work on conventional download managers. However, a number of free programs allowing leeching of hosted files are released and updated every few weeks or so, resulting in RapidShare regularly revamping its protection schemes.
Due to their ISPs' use of proxy servers, people using NTL or BT internet services in the UK are occasionally unable to utilize Rapidshare.de/.com without using a premium account. Some ISPs also intentionally block sharing sites like Rapidshare to make better use of the bandwidth. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 25GB within a five day period [1].
On January 19th news broke that German collections agency GEMA has 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,".[2] 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. However, rapidshare.de stopped accepting uploads for a period, although nothing indicates this was related to legal problems. Indeed the site specified that uploading was no longer possible because all the drives were full. Uploading is now possible again. So far, they have not been sued.
- ^ "Rapidshare.com Website News Section, 9 February 2007".
- ^ "Heise Online". Retrieved on 2007-01-31.