Starts from $10.with a rapidshare account you can download any thing you want including, all sort of games(psp, ps2, etc.), movies, applications, (vista, office, etc.) anything on ur mind mounit Subscribe Unsubscribe 1.
Type of business | Aktiengesellschaft |
---|---|
Online backup service | |
Available in | English, French, German and Spanish |
Founded | 27 May 2002; 17 years ago |
Dissolved | 31 March 2015; 5 years ago |
Headquarters | Schochenmühlestrasse 6, 6340 Baar, Switzerland |
Advertising | Subscription |
Registration | Optional |
Current status | Offline |
RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously.[1] Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct.
RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid in Mulheim, Germany, initially as ezShare later Rapid Share, a file hosting service for his RapidForum web forum hosting services.[2] In 2004, he started the company RapidShare AG, which went online in August 2004[3] then moved its premises to Baar, Switzerland in 2006.[4] Schmid avoids the public eye, but took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010.[5]
RapidShare's original site was RapidShare.de.[6] Later a second site, RapidShare.com, was started. It operated in parallel with RapidShare.de for several years. On 1 March 2010, RapidShare.de was shut down, and users visiting the site were forwarded to RapidShare.com. Files hosted on RapidShare.de were no longer available for download.
In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites.[5]
Lawsuits by the owners of copyrighted content shared via RapidShare, and the takedown of file hoster Megaupload, caused RapidShare to revise its business model.[7] The company changed its focus to B2B cloud storage services, but a drop in revenue led to a reduction in staffing by three quarters in May 2013.[8] By 2014 its Alexa ranking had sunk below 1,400.
In late February 2014, the website PCTipp.ch, based on reports from a former RapidShare employee 'MarkusP,' stated that RapidShare had presented a 'quit or be fired' ultimatum to 23 of its 24 employees (already down from 60 employees just two years before) and that most had resigned. The rest, save one, had their contracts terminated. As of mid-March, RapidShare was reported as operating with only one employee, a support person who answered the telephone and managed customers and accounts. The product development team was no more. On 13 March 2014, RapidShare announced price increases for its paid services of about 150%. Free users would continue to be able to use RapidShare, but their download speeds and capacity were sharply curtailed.
On 10 February 2015, RapidShare announced on its home page that it would shut down its services permanently on 31 March 2015. After that date none of the data it hosted would be available, even to the customers who uploaded it.[9][10] On 31 March 2015, the site home page displayed a notice about the service's closing.
Upon uploading, the user was supplied with a unique downloadURL which enabled anyone with whom the uploader shared the URL to download the file. Circle surround ii download. No user was allowed to search RapidShare's servers for content.[1]
In April 2008, RapidShare had 5.4 petabytes of storage for users.[11] In March 2010, it stated, after a 120 Gbit/s upgrade, to have 600 Gbit/s of bandwidth.[12]
Registration and payment allowed benefits such as unlimited download speed, immediate download (instead of experiencing a waiting period), download of several files simultaneously, queue skipping, the facility to interrupt and restart downloads, uploading, downloading bigger files up to 2 GB and to store up to 50 GB of data for an unlimited period.
Until 1 July 2010, RapidShare operated an incentive program that rewarded uploaders with 'RapidPoints' according to the number of times those files were downloaded by others; the points were redeemable for premium RapidShare subscriptions. RapidShare discontinued the program to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material.[13]
Downloads by people without a current premium account subscription were subject to restrictions such as an enforced wait of several minutes between downloads. The length of the wait varied over the years, from 15 minutes to over 2.5 hours.[14]
RapidShare offered two computer programs to simplify file managing:
This software allowed queuing of uploads. However, it could not resume interrupted uploads. It was available for Windows and ran without installation.[15]
This software had many more features than the Uploader, especially queuing and resuming the upload as well as the downloads. The version linked on the site worked with Windows Vista and 7, Mac, and Linux.[16] An older official client was also available for Windows XP.[17]
RapidShare did not restrict automatic downloads to their downloader, however, they did not provide technical support to third-party downloaders as they did for RapidShare Manager.[citation needed]
On 19 January 2007, the German performance rights organisationGEMA 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.'[18][19]
RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal. By comparing the files' MD5-hash the site would now prevent illegal files from being reuploaded. While this would be sufficient under United States law, it was later established in court that under German law it is not. That decision forced RapidShare to check all the uploaded files before publishing them.[20]
In April 2009, RapidShare handed over to major record labels the personal details of uploaders who uploaded copyright-protected files.[21][22] The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band Metallica's Death Magnetic album.[19]
A month later, RapidShare stated on their website: 'we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link.'[23]
Six global publishers obtained an injunction against Swiss-based RapidShare AG. Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc. The judgment handed down by a German court in Hamburg on 10 February 2010, and effective on 17 February 2010, ordered RapidShare to implement measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 copyright-protected works cited in the lawsuit, which was filed on 4 February 2010. The court ruled that RapidShare must monitor its site to ensure the copyrighted material is not being uploaded and prevent unauthorized access to the material by its users. The company will be subject to substantial fines for non-compliance.[citation needed]
The US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus stated that the site was 'overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works'.[24]
The Düsseldorf higher regional court twice overturned injunctions filed against RapidShare by Capelight Pictures, a German film and DVD rental company.[25][26] The court declared that the file hoster could not be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties and revoked the injunction initially upheld by the Düsseldorf district court in the main proceedings. The court also indicated that a file hoster is not obliged to use a word filter as this would also prevent legal copying for private use.
In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California rejected an injunction against RapidShare filed by the publisher of online erotic magazine Perfect 10.[27] The presiding judge declared that the plaintiff had failed to make a credible case that RapidShare had directly infringed copyright or supported copyright violation.
In a 2009-2010 case brought against RapidShare by Atari Europe,[28] the Düsseldorf higher regional court concluded on appeal that illegal use of RapidShare was by a small minority of its users[29] and that to assume otherwise amounted to 'a general suspicion of shared hosting services and their users that cannot be justified'.[30] The court also observed that the site removed copyrighted material upon request and did not provide search facilities for illegal material. It concluded that the plaintiff's suggestions for preventing sharing of copyrighted material were 'unreasonable or pointless'.[28] It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use[29] could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which could impair legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP address analysis (as IP addresses can change frequently).[31][32]
In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.[33]
In March 2012, the Hamburg higher regional court upheld three earlier decisions that the file hoster could be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties.[34]
In September 2018, a criminal trial of three Rapidshare managers for commercial assistance to copyright violation is to take place in Zug, Switzerland, where Rapidshare remains incorporated.[35][needs update] House plan drawing house plan drawings house.
Kabluey | |
---|---|
Directed by | Scott Prendergast |
Produced by | Jeff Balis Rhoades Rader Sarah Feinberg |
Written by | Scott Prendergast |
Starring |
|
Music by | Roddy Bottum |
Cinematography | Michael Lehrmann |
Edited by | Lawrence A. Maddox |
Distributed by | Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group |
| |
86 minutes | |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $1,383,398 (USA) |
Kabluey is a 2007 comedy film written and directed by Scott Prendergast.[1]
It stars Prendergast, as well as Lisa Kudrow, Teri Garr (in her final film role prior to retirement), Christine Taylor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Angela Sarafyan. Chris Parnell also appears in the film as a grocery store manager.
Leslie, whose husband is in Iraq, is in danger of losing her benefits if she does not return to work.
Salman, her brother-in-law, arrives in her town to help watch over Leslie's two kids. In part this is due to Salman's having no other place to go. He seems a bit spacey and was fired from his last job at a copy shop because he enjoyed laminating so much that he laminated everything in the store that was laminatable (including the money in the till).
Leslie's eldest son, Cameron, takes an instant dislike to Salman and threatens to kill him. Her other son Lincoln follows his lead. Salman's difficulty in handling the two hyperactive children does not impress Leslie, so she asks him to leave. Unfortunately that's not an option as Salman has no money and nowhere to go.
So, struggling for answers and a way to keep things from falling apart, Leslie finds Salman a job at her company. They will trade off working and watching after the kids. Leslie does not realize that the job Salman gets is as a blue-costumed corporate mascot called 'Kabluey'. Salman's job as Kabluey is to hand out flyers (advertising office space) on the side of the road for her company, a faltering dot-com called BluNexion. The costume has its unique challenges, being extremely hot inside and having no fingers on the hands, forcing him to grip the flyers under his arms. Standing on the side of the road also seems completely pointless - as the only people who drive by are farmers who don't need office space. Kabluey (the mascot) also interacts with passing road workers, and an insane woman (who lost all of her money investing in BluNexion in an ENRON type scandal) who constantly drives by and even tries to kill Kabluey with her car. Despite all this, Salman finds strange confidence through his suit and alter ego - and his life begins to change.
Salman is asked to entertain at a birthday party in the suit. He manages to gain the respect of Cameron and Lincoln in the process. He later discovers Leslie is having an affair with her boss Brad but is afraid to confront the issue. When he later discovers that Brad is sleeping with another woman, he attacks Brad (wearing the costume) while Brad is in a motel room with the other woman, but not before calling Leslie to the scene.
Confronted with the reality of the situation, Leslie slaps Salman and walks away, but later breaks down in Salman's arms. She tells him that she never loved Brad and never planned on leaving her husband, that the situation had simply developed due to stress and as a way to keep money coming in. Leslie's husband returns home to a family happy to see him, and Salman disappears.
Kabluey was well received by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it has an 84% rating based on 37 reviews, with an average score of 6.9/10 and a consensus that reads: 'An effecting treatise on modern alienation, Scott Prendergast's story of a hapless loser who finds recognition by donning a featureless suit is full of whimsy and sorrow.'[2] On Metacritic the film has a score of 62% based on reviews from 11 critics, indicating 'generally favorable reviews'.[3]
Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club gave the film a positive review and wrote: 'While the film's social-satire elements are flat and overly familiar, its dry absurdity is unmistakably Lynchian.'[4]Dennis Harvey of Variety magazine gave it a mixed review, saying: 'Kabluey is short on the cutes and ca-ca jokes. But it's also short on substance, despite a watchable supporting cast and an amiable overall tenor.'[5]