Rapidshare.com has very high traffic ranks in several countries (e.g. Egypt 45, Saudi Arabia 75, Morocco 88, Iran 89, Turkey 90) and is number 214 in the global Alexa ranking. This could make them a possible target in peoples mind for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Why Rapidshare.com probably shouldn't in fact be a target:

Rapidshare has a business model which only has following few similarities to Megauploads:

- Rapidshare is structured to discourage the vast majority of its users from using Rapidshare for long-term or personal storage by automatically deleting content which is not regularly downloaded (if they don't pay a fee).

- Rapidshare does not need to publicize infringing content on their site as users do this on third party sites (i.e. linking sites).

- Rapidshare manipulates the perception of content available on their servers by not providing a public search function on the Rapidshare site and by not including popular infringing content on the publicly available lists of top content downloaded by its users.


The above according to the logic of the DOJ and FBI ! (not ours)


What could save Rapidshare from being the next vicitim of the DOJ / FBI?

- Rapidshare does not offer a rewards program that provides users with financial incentives to upload popular content and drive web traffic to the site.

- Rapidshare complies (according to a statement from their CEO) with their obligations to remove copyrighted material from their servers within short delays.

- Rapidshare takes down not only one link to infringing materials but deletes all identically named files on their servers.

- Rapidshare is not using a business model expressly designed to promote uploading of the most popular copyrighted works for many millions of users to download.

Your take?

This article was written as Rapidshare is a Swiss company with global reach and the business model may call for listing on a stock exchange in future, should heavy policing and subsequent costs associated with it be incurred.