RapidShare Shut Down!

[DB11]

Information

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.

[WetFlannel]

Also saw this... worked fine for me yesterday.

BUT WHY DID THEY CLOSE DEMONOID.COM! THAT WEBSITE WAS HEAVENLY

[lavrentis]

Hope this doesn't shut down, I have invested a lot of money into it.