Quote:
Originally Posted by igorsk
What criminals?
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It's a reference to the fact that online file-storage systems like RapidShare, MegaUpload, FileFactory, etc. are heavily used by pirate communities of all flavours. He's exaggerating a bit, though -- RapidShare in particular actually has a fairly substantial usage by small companies (particularly in the photography and video editing fields), and an entire featureset for pay-per-megabyte bandwidth used almost entirely by legitimate businesses. I've also seen it (very rarely) used to post compiled unofficial branches from Free Software projects and scientific datasets.
That said, if you get a Rapidshare link from some place that is *not* obviously a legitimate business or public project (i.e. you weren't given a chance to actually *buy* something there and it isn't an Open Source/Free Software/Academic project), odds are quite good that there's a violation of copyright involved somewhere. If the material being downloaded is known to be for sale elsewhere (i.e. most books you would have heard of), the probability approaches 100%.