RapidShare is Shutting down

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net.<p>I&#x27;m talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The &#x27;big&#x27; ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel&#x2F;ROM for your G1&#x2F;ADP1 you are mostly out of luck.<p>It&#x27;s sad that there&#x27;s basically no way for an organisation like archive.org to archive things from sharehosters given the unclear (or quite clearly black&#x2F;gray) law situation and also the missing cooperation with the sharehosters themselves.

Even as an indie software developer, this makes me sad.<p>Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them off whenever I wanted. I&#x27;d rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I could see how popular &#x2F; unpopular a link was &amp; had control over when to remove it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to remove links.<p>I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don&#x27;t come from the company that makes the software).

Torrentfreak has some good editorializing and context around this shutdown:<p><a href="https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-150210/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;torrentfreak.com&#x2F;file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-...</a><p>&quot;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.<p>&quot;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.&quot;

Rapidshare died because the market moved on. &quot;File hosting services&quot; like rapidshare have been replaced by cutthroat &quot;cyberlockers&quot; like Keep2share and rapidgator.<p>The most successful cyberlockers do what Rapidshare decided not to: pay uploaders, even those who share illegally. And also pay linking sites through referral schemes far more resilient legally. They aren&#x27;t trying to appease anyone not either a customer or a very active uploader. Working with copyright owners beyond base legal requirements (DMCA et al) isn&#x27;t the business plan anymore. Getting into bed with copyright owners was megaupload&#x27;s and rapidshare&#x27;s first mistake. The new plan is to make as much money is possible then abandon the ship the moment the MPAA looks their way.<p>Filesharers are ok with this. They purchase monthly subscriptions in full knowledge that the service might disappear any day. They aren&#x27;t looking for a long term relationship anymore. The blind panic resulting from the megaupload raid ended that expectation.

So, that&#x27;s a business that shuts down gracefully. They clearly identify their last date, and, continue to serve a useful function (for their customers, at least) right up until that date. They even continue to take new customer business right up to 30 days prior to their last day of business.<p>&quot;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.&quot;

I&#x27;ve interviewed an ex rapidshare employee some time ago. Might have been just one disgruntled ex employee, but they told me the CEO wouldn&#x27;t hand out access to the servers to anyone and insisted on keep doing that himself and other stuff.<p>They weren&#x27;t competent though, so maybe he just didn&#x27;t want to give that employee access. I asked them what they did at Rapidshare and the only answer I got was &quot;multicore stuff&quot; (sic).<p>However it seemed inviteable, Rapidshare tried to rebrand to a personal cloud storage provider without providing the features needed to be one while still cracking down on piracy. Maybe they should have pulled a dotcom, shut rapidshare down and announce rapid. And then stick to the old business model.

Rapidshare shafted their paid users long ago (announcing the deletion of files on short notice) then they came back with a business model that was not exactly well thought-out.

I was doing research on anti-piracy, torrent kills all the file sharing portal more than government. File share portals comes directly under law of punishment for hosting and sharing infringed content. Torrent is a general public, mass, there could be many ways to protect innocence against strict law. Hoping that rapidshare made enough money, may try to leave the shit off and spend their time on vocation.<p>These all hall of fame, rise and fall of empire, giving way innovations and technologies.

Rapidshare links have continuously died whether they were legit or not for a long while. Sure, a lot of it was illegitimate, but people simply moved on.

I like the &quot;187,864 users trusted rapidshare in the last hour&quot; in the bottom left corner of the announcement...nice touch lol

Anyone remember those hard to figure out capchas Rapidshare had? specially the cats.

Hi,<p>I came across this thread whilst searching for info on File Hosting and there&#x27;s certainly a lot of good information here.<p>I&#x27;m writing an app that uploads small documents to public file hosting sites (e.g. via REST-HTTP Post) so that others can download them again, preferably via simple HTTP GET.<p>Rather than coding to a particular API for each and every Hosting site, are there any public code libraries (preferably C++ or C#) that do this already presenting a common API across a number of different supported hosting sites?<p>Ideally I&#x27;d be looking for an Apache&#x2F;MIT license code rather than GNU.

Is anyone else here surprised that Rapidshare is still even a thing and lasted this long in the face of Mediashare, Megaupload, Zippyshare and all those other sites? I haven&#x27;t seen a Rapidshare link shared in a very long time.<p>I remember once upon a time if you downloaded leaked music or even software, then Rapidshare was the go to site for that kind of thing. Funny how things change.

Reminds me of Xoom [1]. It&#x27;s very hard to pivot a legit business when you&#x27;re basically know as the best place to download pirated software&#x2F;music&#x2F;games.<p>[1] -<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/home" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19990515000000*&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xoom.com&#x2F;h...</a>

I completely forgot about RapidShare till I saw this, I&#x27;m probably not the only one...

imo they failed to adopt to the Cloud Model . one interesting company which I think pivoted form being a similar site to cloud&#x2F;backup space is Mediafire<p><a href="http://www.mediafire.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mediafire.com&#x2F;</a>

It actually happened later than I would have thought. Rapidshare built their entire brand around warez uploading and piracy, so when they changed their concept to please anti-pirate organizations, it was just a matter of time.

I&#x27;m surprised they never adopted to the cloud model of their competitors such as Dropbox, surely they would of had the resources (at least the hardware) to compete. Such a shame.

RapidShare was my childhood hero!<p>I think appearance of google drive&#x2F;dropbox is the main reason of this. People easily share data with them.

I remember it being the pirate king in the old days. Won&#x27;t miss it much now.

Good, their new premium features shut out large treasures of content on the web.

goodnight sweet prince&#x2F;and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Back to BBSs?

man I had the most amazing time with Rapidshare during the 2007~2009 era. I remember being in an all you can eat candy store. Same with megaupload. Stuff you couldn&#x27;t find anywhere were popping up, old vintage rare tv shows, games, magazines. The monetary incentive provided an explosion of content you couldn&#x27;t get elsewhere.<p>I will really miss the golden era of filehosting services.

We could assume that Rapidshare got shut down because of evil copyright blah blah...<p>Or maybe they just couldn&#x27;t compete with Dropbox et al.

To me Rapidshare was a very shady place to be full of warez, never visited, never cared. good riddance

It&#x27;s not that hard to create a Tor hidden service, locally or on a VPS or hosted server. And using OnionShare &lt;<a href="https://onionshare.org/&gt;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onionshare.org&#x2F;&gt;</a> it&#x27;s trivial.