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Rapidshare website down!

Rapidshare website down. Today Rapidshare is down completely for the whole world. The premium Rapidshare-users are outraged over this some sudden downtime that they have been experiencing for a while now. There was no offical notice on rapidshare’s website about the downtimes.
Maybe the Rapidshare owners are saving enough many to buy the “High-End” PCs for the contest who knows unless we get an official response from Rapidshare we may never know what the real reason is behind the recent downtimes that has been happening to many people and not to the rest.

As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare's servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue: "There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)"

Added: Worked! 6 hours waiting :)

2 Comment(s):

Admin said...

2nd news [ (!) I dont know: true/false ]:
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"As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare AGa?™s servers were shutdown by anti-piracy authorities in Germany. More than hundreds of Rapidshare servers were seized from their offices in Berlin although no arrests were made. Sources said, authorities are contemplating pursuing legal action against users who distribute and download pirated copies of software and movies from these servers"

The German collecting society GEMA has obtained from the District Court in Cologne temporary injunctions against the operator of the data exchange services www.rapidshare.de and www.rapidshare.com. The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion. The services make virtual storage space available into which users can upload content that is thereby made publicly available to other users. GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer told heise online that the services should not be allowed to continue to operate in their present form. The collecting society is now demanding that the operator provide details on how many copyright protected works of GEMA members are currently stored on the said sites.

According to GEMA, the service www.rapidshare.de in particular has at times boasted of making some 15 million files available to its users. The operator had however failed to obtain from GEMA a license for making copyright protected files available, the collecting society spokesman observed. To date RapidShare had claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users and of not being in a position to control the same, the spokesman continued. Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne 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.

Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of GEMA, believes the court's decisions will have repercussions on the way "Web 2.0 services" such as YouTube and MySpace will be treated in future. What the decisions according to Mr. Heker show is that "the mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator's website(s)." (Robert W. Smith) / (anw/c't)

Admin said...

Official Rapidshare News:
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20. January 2008 - Problems accessing RapidShare

Unfortunately, starting at 5 pm CET, one of our carriers experienced a severe technical problem with their hardware, causing a loss of 50 gigabit of bandwidth. Therefore RapidShare was unavailable for several hours. We already have taken steps to avoid this particular problem in the future.