Rapidshare - Piracy 2.0

Just at the time when the media industry began fighting back and
covered cyberpirates with lawsuits a new business model appeared at the stage.

Rapidshare, after a rocky start grows really rapid with sales surpassing 5 Million $ a month (own claims) the websites is one of the most popular sites on the whole net.

But where does this interest in filehosting services come from?
Why are so many people exchanging so much that the company needs 3.5 Petabyte capacity?

The answer is that the majority of rapidshares customers could be in fact cyberpirates that are changing their way to share their files.
Current lawsuits concentrate on a very specific group of softwarepirates using tools like EMule or BitTorrent.
These tools enable them to share media files on their computers with others.
In fact if one trys to download a movie of 700MB you could end up being "supplied" by 30 other users around the world.

For the user of these tools this practice grew increasingly dangerous. The music industry targeted large group of users that shared especially many files - suing them in fact not for downloading illegal material but for sharing it with others.

Although the sucess of such measures remains to be at least marginal considering the still massive international traffic it seems that the shock and awe policy has created a opportunity for Rapidshare.

For the pirates it is almost safe to download from Rapidshare since the effort to nail somebody down would be immense. Additionally it is very convenient since the download speed exceeds everything ever seen so far.

Acknowleding this new instrument the media industry is shifting their efforts towards attacking the content providers, the "release groups".
If these efforts bear any fruits seems to be doubtful.

In contrast, the trend that started in about 1999 and is continouing to this day is that media content transforms into a common good.

Conclusions:

- Likelihood of success of the media industry in fighting global piracy: 0-5%