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Old 12-07-2010, 06:49 AM   #14
Krystian Galaj
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Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.Krystian Galaj can tame squirrels without the assistance of a chair or a whip.
 
Posts: 820
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Warsaw, Poland
Device: Bookeen Cybook
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
Perhaps publishers feel that they aren't doing enough to crack down on illegal uses of the service?
They aren't doing enough, that's for sure.

Youtube has a very successful automated system for checking if parts of the videos uploaded aren't under copyright, and removing them withing minutes. It's very well described here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...-fair-use.html

People are already using Vimeo instead.

Rapidshare could put together a big database of prohibited files, based on files' content's hashes, shared with the rest of hundred big sharing sites, and work on extending it, making sure that once a file is recognized as illegal, it's removed from all those sites, and never allowed to be published there again.

There are problems with this approach.

The users are required to agree to site's terms that the material they're uploading isn't illegal. If rapidshare started to screen it independently, it would mean agreeing that they should care about it, that they're no longer only providing a service, that they feel somehow responsible for the breaking of the law. It's as if Mobileread started big scale automated checks on the books it stores, instead of believing the uploaders they made sure those are legal materials.

Also, unlike on Youbtube of Mobileread, files uploaded to Rapidshare are just data streams. They don't have to be in any usable form. They can be (and usually are) encrypted with long passwords, which it's unfeasible to try to break, and the files names are carefully chosen to have nothing to do with the content (many pirated movies are named 'MyPhotos', for example). The surest way of finding such illegal links is to search Google and filesharing sites they way users do to find the content, then using the passwords found to decrypt the file and confirm this is illegal. Currently rapidhsare refuses to do this for all files, and with good reason - the number of files is gigantic, they wouldn't be able to keep afloat if they had to do it.

So let's assume the big database is extended with files reported by copyright owners as breaking the copyright. As long as this process is not made efficient, and files can stay on RS for months before being removed as illegal, nothing will change. If copyright owners somehow made this process efficient, and files would be removed within hours of their upload, people would stop using rapidshare, and wither switch to other filesharing sites, or go back to using P2P networks, now much more secure than just a few years ago. Rapidshare would go out of business.

I believe they will be paying fines until those fines are bigger than their income - then they will go out of business, rather than doing anything to prevent illegal file sharing. I don't see any other choice for them.
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