In the brief history of the Internet, there have been many platforms that, taking advantage of this communication channel, have taken economic advantage by offering content protected by copyright. A clear example of this can be found in SeriesLy one of the cases that caused the most commotion in Spain and which was the forerunner of the current Intellectual Property Law. We could also find platforms like Z-Library Considered the largest library in the world where the entire catalog is available for free in exchange for donations, which were not mandatory and which are currently still operating on the Dark Web.
Another method of making a profit that also became popular in the first decade of the 2000s were cloud storage platforms, platforms that had a very different purpose than the current one, since their main activity was to store content protected by Copyright. RapidShare the first platform of this type that became polarized and was later followed by Megaupload and MediaFire among others, although the latter knew how to deal with the protected content that was stored on its servers and is still in operation today.
Birth of RapidShare
RapidShare was born in Germany in 2002 under the domain rapidshare.de it offered users the same thing that cloud storage platforms offer today: storing and sharing files over the Internet. However, in the first decade of the 2000s, the price of hosting was much more expensive than it is today and they had to somehow make their platform profitable.
The first was a plan gratuitous which offered ads and limited the download speed to a few kb, so downloading any type of content that took up several hundred MB could take more than a day in the worst case. To avoid having to leave the computer continuously on, together with this platform, applications such as Jdownloader, an open source application that allowed users of the free version to get the premium version, also became popular. continue download where he had stayed
In addition to the free version, there was also the version premium, a paid version that allowed you to download the available content at a higher speed but, in addition, also had a maximum download limit of 5 GB per day, the same limit that MEGA currently offers us in free accounts. We could remove that limit by paying additional fees that allowed unlimited access for a month up to a year.
Due to the success of this platform, in 2008, the owners of this platform, RapidShare AG, decided to redirect all traffic to the domain rapidshare.com. Along with the change of domain, they also took the opportunity to change the company’s fiscal headquarters to Switzerland, keeping their servers on German soil, a move aimed at avoiding legal problems.
That same year, the trial that pitted RapidShare against different copyright associations acquitted the company for hosting content illegally. To stop future lawsuits, the platform began to offer a channel of communication between rights owners and the company so that it will report if it knew about the case of its content illegally hosted on its servers.
closed voluntarily
While most of the platforms that shared content protected by copyright, saw how the authorities closed their doors, others choose to lower the blind directly and avoid or continue accumulating problems. rapidshare stopped working in 2015. The reason given by those responsible for this website was the growing competition from large storage platforms at much lower prices (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud among others, and incidentally, ending the continuous legal demands that They reached their offices.From its inception until its closure, none of its managers was convicted by any and likewise they were not forced to delete the content it hosted.
Alternatives to RapidShare
After the termination of RapidShare, and a few years before Megaupload, since then, there is no other platform that offers us the same service. Although it is true that anyone can use one or more accounts of the most popular storage platforms to share content, the maximum space they offer is 2 TB, a very small amount of space and it is not really profitable to offer it for free or through advertisements.
Obviously, none of these platforms is in the business of renting accommodation en masse to companies that want to promote piracy of any type of content protected by copyright. The only way to download content of this type is through torrent networks, which nobody can stop because the files are not hosted on a server, but are shared from the computers of the users who have the downloaded content.
