An analysis of how Rapidshare has fallen over the years, and what the future holds for the one-click file hosting industry.
Some of you may be wondering what I mean by the “fall” of Rapidshare. Obviously the website is still up and running, and the Alexa traffic stats still show it in the top100 of all global sites (rank 100 as of the writing of this article), so how exactly has it fallen? Rapidshare’s traffic has been on a steady decline for the last two years. Daily reach stats were at 4% in 2009, now they have fallen below an anemic 1 share, and are still falling. To put it in simple terms, Rapidshare was at a global traffic rank of 17 less than 2 years ago, and has been on a steady nosedive since then. Their restructuring has not had any marked impact on their numbers, and realistically there is not much that can be done to save the ailing service.
(here’s an example of how their traffic is steadily plummeting)
Remember when Facebook was the new, big craze and Myspace got pushed out of the picture? Rapidshare is the Myspace of this new decade, its days are numbered. There are a number of factors that must be taken into account when considering the decline of Rapidshare. The one-click file hosting market has been inundated with competitors. Megaupload, Fileserve, Hotfile, Filesonic, Mediafire, and hundreds of other sites are now fighting tooth and nail in the niche that Rapidshare itself created. How long can any filehosting site stay afloat? New laws are being passed that will restrict their tenuous holds on legality, and it’s not unrealistic to think that 50% or more of these sites will not be running in the next three to five years.
Rapidshare has a history of legal troubles that have contributed, in no small way, to their current state. Legal restrictions bred new programs, policies, and standards that hindered user growth and loyalty. 2007 brought the first major legal action against Rapidshare in which GEMA (A German Collection Agency) accused Rapidshare of “using copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion.” The result of this suit was increased awareness of Rapidshare’s practices, and caused Rapidshare to implement a system in which all newly uploaded files would be checked against an MD5-hash base to determine whether the uploaded file was blacklisted (illegal or copyright).
Legal issues continued to plague Rapidshare, and in April 2009 Rapidshare handed over member information, IP addresses, and other personal and sensitive information. This information was passed to major record labels, not the government. The catalyst for this action was the early release of Metallica’s Death Magnetic album.
Rapidshare entered damage-control mode in May 2009, stating that they had no intent to spy on files that their clients (the uploaders) uploaded through their service. In the span of a month Rapidshare went from handing over information on their uploaders, to promising never to do so again.
To be fair, let’s take a look at some of Rapidshare’s legal victories. In a 2009-2010 case, ATARI USA vs. Rapidshare AG, a German High Court judge declared that there was no burden of proof to support the fact that Rapidshare is primarily intended for illegal use. This verdict was made after Rapidshare appealed the original decision, and is now binding. The judge further stated that to assume the service was intended or used only for a medium of transporting illegal content was an impossible statement to prove, and was an unfounded claim against Rapidshare, its users, and one-click file hosters as a whole.
Rapidshare also won a similar case against an undisclosed pornographic magazine. The case, which took place in the District of Columbia, was thrown out after the presiding judge determined the plaintiff could make no credible or substantiated claim of direct or continual infringement.
So how can we interpret this? Well, the numbers don’t lie. Rapidshare’s restructuring, their new Rapids system, their high profile legal troubles, the fact that they handed over user information, and so many other factors have contributed to their sharp decline. They are on shaky ground at best, and their future may very well hang in the balance of decisions they make over the next few months.
Rapidshare is at a crossroads of sorts. To continue on their current path would disallow all copyright or illegal content, and would banish the people who upload it. To embrace piracy would be to embrace further legal issues. It’s an impossible choice; to lose piracy they lose money and status, that’s undeniable. The future will only tell what direction they will take, we will just have to wait and see.
So now that the gloom and doom is over with, let me give a bit of credit to Rapidshare. The entire concept of One-Click hosting was pioneered by Rapidshare. Under the guise of Ezshare, the founder of Rapidshare, Christian Schmid, discovered an untapped niche with unlimited potential. Christian found a marketplace ripe for exposure and growth, and created a service that is used by millions which has spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of copycat sites. The idea was innocent enough at the time; give users a way to send files that were too large to email to people who had the direct link to the file. In October of 2006 the first filehosting site was born, and the Internet hasn’t looked back. Services such as Usenet, Shareaza, and of course Torrent sites, were around before Rapidshare, but the one-click concept was indeed pioneered by Rapidshare, and revolutionized the Warez world.
Note- Megaupload was established in 2005, but there is no significant information that they had any substantial operation before Rapidshare. It is also interesting to note that the robots.txt file in use by Megaupload.com has one, specific, block…archive.org – interesting.
The fall of Rapidshare is important to the Warez community and filesharing sites, as a whole. How long can these operations stand up against mounting legal pressure? What measures can they take to remain legal while not peeking at every file we upload? How safe is your information with these services? Every site has a Terms of Service agreement that states they will comply with the laws of the land and will respond to any appearance of infringement, but how far will they take those actions?
Think about this- if Rapidshare could give away user information to major record labels once, what would stop them or any file host, from doing this again? At the end of the day you are nothing but a line in a ledger, or a dollar in the pocket, of these companies, end of story.
So, let’s think of some ways to keep you safe if it’s your desire to stay on this precarious path.
VPN services are a great way to stay safe, protect your physical location, and allow you to maintain a modicum of security while browsing the internet or even uploading. VPNs are not foolproof, but they are a great first step. Essentially a VPN is a secure method of connecting to a Private Virtual Network at a remote location. The end location is encrypted so your insecure packets would pass through their level of encryption, which disallows users without access to read the private packets of information. VPNs are typically used by companies with workers in remote locations to transmit private data in a secure fashion. VPNs use a method of transferring data using secure cryptographic methods between at least two networked devices which are NOT on the same private network. This method keeps the data completely private as it passes through the various nodes of your local and wide networks.
The second method would be to simply not upload or download. Obviously this is not ideal to some people, so you can choose to continue down your current path and hope to blend in with the mass of others doing the same thing. Typically downloading is less risky than uploading, but there is always a risk. One of the biggest mistakes a wannabe downloader can make is to use a public torrent site such as The Pirate Bay, ISOhunt, Fenopy, and others. So called “private” torrent sites are said to be more secure, but this is not always the case. Demonoid is a “private” torrent site, but has such a large userbase that the fact they are “private” is moot. Furthermore, Demonoid is now in the process of migrating all information to a .me domain, as a result of COICA (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act) which could, in essence, allow the United States government to take control of the .com, .org, and, .net TLD (top-level domain) names.
Torrent sites are under attack on quite a few fronts. Let’s look at some recent closures and seizures:
On 1/13/2011 Empornium and PureTNA went permanently offline. TorrentFreak broke the story and confirmed with both site owners that they would not be coming back online. The owners refused to comment about the specifics but one, by the name of Breeze, stated that such is torrent life.
On 4/28/2011 in Russia the torrent site Pornolab.net, which (after the takedown of the two larger porn trackers) was arguably the largest porn tracker in the world, had their servers seized by police. It’s important to note that while the site was Russian, the servers were located in the Ukraine.
There are many Non-Adult trackers that have been shut down as well; however, the Adult trackers listed above are most recent.
So, where do we go from here? That’s for you to decide. You can either stick with the status quo or wait for your turn to come, you can join a pirate party in the hopes of changing your local laws regarding new technology and the legality of certain downloads, or you can back away from downloading and uploading; what other choice do we have?
I’ll leave you with a quote by Anne Baxter – “It’s best to have failure early in life. It wakes up the phoenix bird in you so you can rise from the ashes.” The World Wide Web is in its infancy; we have yet to see its full potential. Even if our current systems fail, we can rise from the ashes and promote change for the future.
