Vows aggressive account termination of accused illegal uploaders as well as a proposal to redirect visitors to pages formerly hosting copyrighted material to online destinations where it can be purchased legally.
Swiss-based file-hosting service Rapidshare is making waves these days with the leak of conversations between its General Manager Bobby Chang and unidentified representatives of the entertainment industry.
In it Chang talks about the company’s plans to expand and “officially distribute licensed content,” vowing not to take the side of “criminals” (copyright infringing customers) and “terminating accounts of users who have been caught uploading copyright protected content.”
Another proposal put forth by Chang is that instead of removing those pages were copyrighted material was once available the company would redirect visitors to legal online destinations. He says its part of an effort to “frustrate” visitors into making a purchase.
“If a user finds out that several attempts to download an illegal copy of a DVD are in vain, and if his several attempts to ’steal’ this DVD have just brought him to an online-store, he may finally be frustrated and willing to purchase a licensed version of this movie,” he writes.
As for Rapidshare’s response to all of this, it does confirm that it plans to partner with the entertainemnt industry in order to develop “new models that make piracy obsolete.”
“We believe that if users can instantly find what they are looking for at a fair price, piracy will become a problem of the past,” it adds.
Too bad Chang doesn’t work for the entertainment industry.
Rapidshare is also reiterating in a post that users must comply with the site’s terms and conditions, and that it will terminate accounts of those that don’t.
“If content owners bring to our attention that some of our customers have obviously distributed pirated copies of their content repeatedly or at a large scale, we reserve the right to close these accounts without previous notice,” it reminds users.
Stay tuned.
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rapidshare is dead RIP RS almost funny to think that they thought this would work, you can feel the exodus on the internet from RS to mega and hotfile
@mountain rage-
intelligence has nothing to do with it, it’s the fact that rapidshare premium costs money and already had an established network of users with mass files that people wanted access to. if you upload, you can get access for free, if you don’t you need to pay, and in countries, like the united states, where copyright holder power is far excessive, it’s much safer and smarter to use rapidshare than to go on a public network such as torrent or any standard p2p, such as gnutella.
considering the multitude of files that are available on rapidshare, I would say that you’d have to be a serious cheap-ass to think it wouldn’t be worth it, but if you can contribute back to the rapidshare community while simultaneously getting free access, why wouldn’t you?
but this article is not that shocking, rapidshare has been screwing themselves and losing marketshare in the file-hosting world for the last 2 years.. while other services, such as megaupload, are evolving, rapidshare is devolving and it’s ambitions to become “legal” are plain to see.
personally, I wish to see rapidshare fall completely, and I hope this does happen soon.
Peolple should pay for software and video and all the stuff. But I do think that a dvd cost a lot of money and software like windows 7 is to much expensive.
When I found out that Rapidshare would be obliged to hand over personal information to authorities, that made me decide to use an alternative service (Megaupload) to distribute my music. While I’ve used Rapidshare, I purposefully choose not to let other users be subjected to possible privacy breaches.
Naturally, if you know of a better free one-click hosting service, I’m all ears, but for now, it appears that MegaUpload is a decent alternative for now.
Rapidshare blows. I don’t know why it ever became popular in the first place. There a ton of better alternatives that don’t torture you with cues, limits and constant upgrade $ ads. Good riddance.
The system is only popular because some less than intelligent individuals upload content to gain free access to the database, as they are credited for the traffic generated. Meanwhile they could use the better systems that don’t suck, have access to those systems anyway, and not piss off a bunch of people.
Anyway, I’m very happy about this motivation they have, if we are lucky it will drive people away to the better systems.
the reason rapidshare became popular is because all those ‘alternatives’ you speak of didn’t exist at the time rapidshare.de (the original domain) existed. most of the services you are talking about copied rapidshare’s idea, although I’m sure there was a couple that were out before rapidshare.de that just never got popular for one reason or another.
Rapidshare will make you pay twice: Once to buy the copy and once again (premium account) to download it if it is over 200 MB.
there is a problem.
you pay for a download then you post the download link to a p2p service or even better post the downloaded file to the p2p.
entertainment industry shot them self in the heart
So what? Rapidshare gone? There will be 1000000 more out there