RapidShare [wikipedia.org] was a German/Swiss company which pioneered the online file-hosting service model. During its lifetime, the company's reputation spanned fame and infamy in equal measure; many internet activities and communities today -legal and illegal- were influenced by RapidShare's methods.
words from torrentfreak.com (10 Feb 2015):
RapidShare, once the most popular file-hosting service in the Internet, has announced that it will shut down next month. The company doesn’t cite a reason for the surprising shutdown, but losing the majority of its users in recent years after the implementation of tough anti-piracy measures is likely to be connected.
Founded in 2002, Swiss-based RapidShare was one of the first and most popular one-click file-hosting services on the Internet. Like most sites of this nature, RapidShare was frequently used by people to share copyright-infringing material. It was a relationship that got the company into trouble on various occasions.
RapidShare fought many legal battles with entertainment companies seeking to hold the company liable for the actions of its users, and to top it off the site was called out by the U.S. Government as a "notorious market". Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things, the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while (re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage service.
More down the page:
Continuing from torrentfreak.com (10 Feb 2015):
The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs. Today marks the beginning of the final chapter in RapidShare’s controversial history. The company just announced that it will shut down at the end of March and is recommending that users store their files elsewhere.
RapidShare writes on its homepage: "Kindly note that RapidShare will stop the active service on March 31st, 2015. Extensions of STANDARD PLUS and PREMIUM will be possible until February 28th, 2015. [...] We strongly recommend all customers to secure their data. After March 31st, 2015 all accounts will no longer be accessible and will be deleted automatically".
TorrentFreak asked the company for further details on the planned shutdown but we have yet to hear back. The most likely explanation is that RapidShare can’t sustain its business with the smaller number of users it has today.
The demise of RapidShare marks the end of an era. Half a decade ago RapidShare was listed among the 50 most-visited sites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of page-views per month, but in a just a few weeks it will be gone.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @01:33PM
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GOOD RIDDANCE.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ryuugami on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:33PM
See, that's why you don't download manually, you use download managers like JDownloader (if it still works, haven't used it in a while). Automate all that crap.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:00PM
The thing that pissed me off about rapidshare is that it was a data silo. Now that it's gone, everything in the silo is gone too.
At least usenet is still around, going back 2000+ days and available from multiple sources so no single point of failure.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @02:04PM
There were always better hosts then you anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:35PM
What Big Brother is doing here is divide and conquer. Killing one data repository at a time, so that only a few remain, so they can keep an eye on everyone, and give users a false sense of choice.
Its not totally about piracy. Its also about control, and giving a loud message to any new comers as to what will happen to them if they do not share all user details with them thugs, and allow them simple and easy access to each account.
What is needed is open standards and no single point of failure. So Big Brother cannot control information, that it so dearly wants and needs to, to stay in absolute control.
As to RapidShare, they had issues with ads and too many of them, but they ought to have remained solvent. It gives users one more option.
(Score: 3, Informative) by CRCulver on Sunday March 29 2015, @08:16PM
Do you actually participate in communities for trading pirated books, films, and music? Far from the options, dwindling, there are more and more file hosts out there. When Rapidshare became unfriendly to filesharers, suddenly a bunch more popped up. When MegaUpload died, another umpteen appeared. Now, when someone posts a new book/film/album to the forum, he's able to mirror his upload among five different services. It's easy to understand why: these sort of hosts are an easy business to set up, and the profits are large, even if one day in the future you'll have to scale back on your activities when the MPAA etc. catch on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:42PM
AvaxHome (it still exists) was a community file-sharing blog which, in their glory days, had a superlative range of content for download with a userbase second to none; the list of registered users was a 'whos who' of the internet underground. RapidShare was the preferred file-host in those days, and it is not unreasonable to say that this blog was a seminal reason for RapidShare's rise to global popularity.
Personally, my main interest in Avax was the MUSIC downloads category, specifically the LOSSLESS AUDIOPHILE VINYL RIPS sub-category.
Until a few years ago, this was THE place to be if you were anybody in the vinyl ripping file-sharing scene (apart from DEMONOID, which was a torrents scene and had a few individual vinyl ripping maverick legends posting there).
Nothing lasts for ever I guess...
at AvaxHome, the harmonious relationship between some famous vinyl rippers and some blog moderators became acrimonious. Not long after that, private invite-only vinyl rips blogs started appearing - owned by former Avax ripping legends - eventually the vinyl rips section at Avax became a ghost-town and shell of its former self.
I am a member of those private blogs, but I still continue to pop in and check out vinyl rips posted publically at Avax because some of the rippers who continue posting there and myself have a particular philosophy towards public file-sharing versus private file-sharing. We never forget our roots I guess you could say; It's like the chicken and the egg story; if it wasn't for PUBLIC file-sharing accessible to all users then I would never have discovered this hobby to start with. Some of the vinyl rippers at Avax feel the same way about it.
This deep-seated urge to share the content publically for free and without a business angle is a philosophical and humanist stance. I just can't see some cultures ever being allowed to form and exist with an internet locked down and controlled by groups like governments, corporate interests or elitist individuals. Furthermore, I see these groups as destructive to culture in the long run.
Thanks for reading.
RIP RapidShare.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Sunday March 29 2015, @03:42PM
I remember reading that on many a forum and for good reason...Rapidshit was a perfect example of why a good 99% of free to play games will die, in that their business model was based on bugging the living piss out of and antagonizing their users until they gave them money. The insanely small download limits, irritatingly long wait times between downloads, if there was a way to cockblock the users Rapidshit did it.
To me the only bad thing about the death of something like Rapidshit or Megasuckload is how many older forum posts will now be fucked because of it, just the other day I went looking for a fix for a BIOS problem in an older laptop and it turned out there was an easy fix...uploaded to megasuckload. Looked all over the web, every. single. link? Went back to megasuckload. I ended up stripping the laptop and chunking it. That is the downside to all these hosting sites, plenty of sub 10mb tools and fixes hosted to these sites that are never re-upoloaded and once they are gone they are gone. Maybe we need a Wayback machine for the small non infringing tools and patches and fixes?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Sunday March 29 2015, @07:42PM
I think it's funny how the immediate end of file sharing is about to happen in the next year, and has been since the days of Napster. When Napster shut down, WinMX and others sprang up. They were inefficient and were replaced by torrents. And file lockers. But file lockers have always been garbage. Something else is probably going to come along. What happens is the copyright industry announces the final crackdown program that will end file sharing. People see this and want to get all the files they can as quickly as they can, and there's a Cambrian explosion of new file sharing. This has happened every few years since Napster shut down. New mechanisms of file sharing and new hosts spring up to meet the demand, eliminating the single point of failure. File sharing thrives.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)