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RapidShare was an online
file hosting service A file-hosting service, cloud-storage service, online file-storage provider, or cyberlocker is an internet hosting service specifically designed to host user files. It allows users to upload files that could be accessed over the internet afte ...
that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10
petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service
Megaupload Megaupload Ltd was a Hong Kong-based online company established in 2005 that operated from 2005 to 2012 providing online services related to file storage and viewing. On 19 January 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized the d ...
in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global.


History

RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid in Mulheim, Germany, initially as ''ezShare'' later ''Rapid Share'', a file hosting service for his RapidForum web forum hosting services. In 2004, he started the company RapidShare AG, which went online in August 2004 then moved its premises to
Baar, Switzerland Baar () is a municipality in the canton of Zug in Switzerland. History Baar is first mentioned in 1045 as ''Barra''. Geography Baar has an area, , of . Of this area, 51% is used for agricultural purposes, while 25% is forested. Of the rest ...
in 2006. Schmid avoids the public eye, but took over management of the company after longtime
CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especiall ...
and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010. RapidShare's original site was RapidShare.de. Later a second site, RapidShare.com, was started. It operated in parallel with RapidShare.de for several years. On 1 March 2010, RapidShare.de was shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to RapidShare.com. Files hosted on RapidShare.de were no longer available for download. In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites. Lawsuits by the owners of copyrighted content shared via RapidShare, and the takedown of file hoster
Megaupload Megaupload Ltd was a Hong Kong-based online company established in 2005 that operated from 2005 to 2012 providing online services related to file storage and viewing. On 19 January 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized the d ...
, caused RapidShare to revise its business model. The company changed its focus to B2B cloud storage services, but a drop in revenue led to a reduction in staffing by three quarters in May 2013. By 2014 its Alexa ranking had sunk below 1,400. In late February 2014, the website PCTipp.ch, based on reports from a former RapidShare employee "MarkusP," stated that RapidShare had presented a "quit or be fired" ultimatum to 23 of its 24 employees (already down from 60 employees just two years before) and that most had resigned. The rest, save one, had their contracts terminated. As of mid-March, RapidShare was reported as operating with only one employee, a support person who answered the telephone and managed customers and accounts. The product development team was no more. On 13 March 2014, RapidShare announced price increases for its paid services of about 150%. Free users would continue to be able to use RapidShare, but their download speeds and capacity were sharply curtailed. On 10 February 2015, RapidShare announced on its home page that it would shut down its services permanently on 31 March 2015. After that date none of the data it hosted would be available, even to the customers who uploaded it. On 31 March 2015, the site home page displayed a notice about the service's closing.


Operation and services

Upon uploading, the user was supplied with a unique
download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote s ...
URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifi ...
which enabled anyone with whom the uploader shared the URL to download the file. No user was allowed to search RapidShare's servers for content. In April 2008, RapidShare had 5.4
petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s of storage for users. In March 2010, it stated, after a 120 Gbit/s upgrade, to have 600 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Registration and payment allowed benefits such as unlimited download speed, immediate download (instead of experiencing a waiting period), download of several files simultaneously, queue skipping, the facility to interrupt and restart downloads, uploading, downloading bigger files up to 2 GB and to store up to 50 GB of data for an unlimited period. Until 1 July 2010, RapidShare operated an incentive program that rewarded uploaders with "RapidPoints" according to the number of times those files were downloaded by others; the points were redeemable for premium RapidShare subscriptions. RapidShare discontinued the program to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material. Downloads by people without a current premium account subscription were subject to restrictions such as an enforced wait of several minutes between downloads. The length of the wait varied over the years, from 15 minutes to over 2.5 hours.


Software

RapidShare offered two computer programs to simplify file managing:


RapidShare Uploader

This software allowed queuing of uploads. However, it could not resume interrupted uploads. It was available for
Windows Windows is a group of several Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, W ...
and ran without installation.


RapidShare Manager

This software had many more features than the Uploader, especially queuing and resuming the upload as well as the downloads. The version linked on the site worked with
Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
and 7,
Mac Mac or MAC most commonly refers to: * Mac (computer), a family of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * A variant of the word macaroni, mostly used in the name of the dish mac and cheese * Mac, ...
, and
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which in ...
. An older official client was also available for
Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
. RapidShare did not restrict automatic downloads to their downloader, however, they did not provide technical support to third-party downloaders as they did for RapidShare Manager.


Legal issues

On 19 January 2007, the German
performance rights organisation A performance rights organisation (PRO), also known as a performing rights society, provides intermediary functions, particularly collection of royalties, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works ''publicly'' in loca ...
GEMA 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." RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal. By comparing the files' MD5-hash the site would now prevent illegal files from being reuploaded. While this would be sufficient under United States law, it was later established in court that under German law it is not. That decision forced RapidShare to check all the uploaded files before publishing them. In April 2009, RapidShare handed over to major record labels the personal details of uploaders who uploaded copyright-protected files. The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band
Metallica Metallica is an American heavy metal band. The band was formed in 1981 in Los Angeles by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and has been based in San Francisco for most of its career. The band's fast tempos, instrume ...
's ''
Death Magnetic ''Death Magnetic'' is the ninth studio album by American heavy metal music, heavy metal band Metallica, released on September 12, 2008, through Warner Bros. Records. The album was produced by Rick Rubin, marking the band's first album since ''...A ...
'' album. A month later, RapidShare stated on their website: "we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link." Six global publishers obtained an injunction against Swiss-based RapidShare AG. Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc. The judgment handed down by a German court in Hamburg on 10 February 2010, and effective on 17 February 2010, ordered RapidShare to implement measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 copyright-protected works cited in the lawsuit, which was filed on 4 February 2010. The court ruled that RapidShare must monitor its site to ensure the copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance. The US government's congressional international anti-piracy
caucus A caucus is a meeting of supporters or members of a specific political party or movement. The exact definition varies between different countries and political cultures. The term originated in the United States, where it can refer to a meeting ...
stated that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works". The Düsseldorf higher regional court twice overturned injunctions filed against RapidShare by Capelight Pictures, a German film and DVD rental company. The court declared that the file host could not be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties and revoked the injunction initially upheld by the Düsseldorf district court in the main proceedings. The court also indicated that a file host is not obliged to use a word filter as this would also prevent legal copying for private use. In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California rejected an injunction against RapidShare filed by the publisher of online erotic magazine Perfect 10. The presiding judge declared that the plaintiff had failed to make a credible case that RapidShare had directly infringed copyright or supported copyright violation. In a 2009–2010 case brought against RapidShare by Atari Europe,Legal case: OLG Dusseldorf, Judgement of 22 March 2010, Az I-20 U 166/09 dated 22 March 2010. the
Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...
higher regional court concluded on appeal that illegal use of RapidShare was by a small minority of its users - cite from ruling: "Es ist davon auszugehen, dass die weit überwiegende Zahl von Nutzern die Speicherdienste zu legalen Zwecken einsetzen und die Zahl der missbräuchlichen Nutzer in der absoluten Minderheit ist." (''One can assume that the vast majority of users use the storage services for lawful purposes and the number of people using them improperly is an absolute minority.'') and that to assume otherwise amounted to "a general suspicion of shared hosting services and their users that cannot be justified". The court also observed that the site removed copyrighted material upon request and did not provide search facilities for illegal material. It concluded that the plaintiff's suggestions for preventing sharing of copyrighted material were "unreasonable or pointless". It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which could impair legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP address analysis (as IP addresses can change frequently). In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the
United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washin ...
. In March 2012, the Hamburg higher regional court upheld three earlier decisions that the file hoster could be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties. In September 2018, over 3 years after its demise, Schmid, his wife, Alexandra, and one of their former lawyers were tried by the public prosecutor in Zug, Switzerland, where Rapidshare remained incorporated, on behalf of several copyright holders seeking financial restitution for commercial assistance to copyright violation. The trio were found not guilty in January 2021.


See also

* FilesTube


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rapidshare 2002 establishments in Germany 2015 disestablishments in Switzerland Internet properties established in 2002 Internet properties disestablished in 2015 Notorious markets One-click hosting Defunct websites