What is Rapidshare?

RapidShare is a German owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. According to Alexa, Rapidshare.com is currently the 12th most visited website in the world.

RapidShare has two different websites, but both sites claim to be entirely different organizations and entities. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain ".de", and the organization has its central office in Cham, Switzerland

On October 20, 2006, RapidShare announced that "Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de are full right now". A new website, RapidShare.com was set up in an attempt to transfer usage from RapidShare.de to RapidShare.com. When the new Rapidshare.com was launched, holders of "Premium" accounts at the time on RapidShare.de were able to use both the RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, until their account expired. It is not possible, however, to use a RapidShare.com account on the German site.

The site allows any user to upload files of up to 100 MB (at rapidshare.com) and up to 300 MB (at rapidshare.de).The user is then supplied with a unique download URL which enables anyone, with whom the uploader shares it, to download the file. No user is allowed to search the server for content; all files have to be downloaded by following a given URL.

RapidShare states that they have 230 gigabit/s of Internet connectivity and 4.5 petabytes of storage for users.

Non-paying users are required to wait, usually two to three minutes, before any download becomes available and CAPTCHA validation is required. Non-paying users are also required to wait two minutes for every megabyte of data downloaded before they can download again, up to 200 minutes (100 MB).

Registration and payment allow benefits such as download of several files simultaneously, queue-skipping, and the facility to interrupt and re-start downloads. Every premium account is limited to a maximum of 25000 MB within a five day period, as a way to prevent account sharing especially using Rapidleech sites.

Some ISPs intentionally block sharing sites like RapidShare so as to avoid legal issues due to the propagation of pirated copyrighted material.

On 19 January 2007, news broke that German collections agency GEMA had claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com. "The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion." To date RapidShare has claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users and of not being in a position to control the content. Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne GEMA had now however made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator’s liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.