Quote:
Originally Posted by Format C:
How do you know it?
Have you seen them all?
Have you openend all the files, or know somebody who did?
Exactly how many files have benn posted there, and how many of them are not IP of the poster?
And, most of all, can you explain why "don't care" equals "to promote"?
In my limited understanding of English, to promote implies some action. Have you got an example of a promotional action performed by Rapidshare toward piracy?
Thank you for your answers.
 |
Gee. Lotsa questions listed in order to sow doubt. Shame you use it in a fairly unambiguous context.. It's way harder to argue that torrent sites "make available" than RS.
How many files have been posted: Hundreds of thousands to millions; there are lots of forums these days where (especially music and video) are being shared via RS. Most of these forums require one to register before being able to see the forum contents. It became more popular when demonoid and other large websites were having trouble, and have become more popular because seeding is highly dependent on upload speeds.
Have I seen them all?
Huh? We're talking about statistical significance here, not about whether they offer
only IP not owned by poster. (and/or downloader, depending on your location)
And a second indication as to how many files they offer would be the fact that the service has been adding servers at an astounding rate. This happens through demand, not because RS particularly cares about redundancy. The files that cause increase bandwidth to be necessary are big files rather than small ones; i.e., music/video content. I'm guessing books are still a rather minor part in all this, but they have higher RRPs per megabyte. (which is a poor indication of worth, but still.) Public domain videos of course do exist, but they're generally already hosted on sites like archive.org, or youtube, and do not need to be mirrored 200x on RS.
Have you opened all the files?
My, how you must annoy your friends with your rigorousness.
And, most of all, can you explain why "don't care" equals "to promote"?
They don't need to promote; mouth-to-mouth advertising works very well for them. So no, they don't actively 'promote' themselves. That said, why is this proof of anything?
If they were to 'promote' it, it would be ever so much easier for a IP owner to complain to a judge to have them shut down; this way they can play the
plausible deniability card. So no, they won't blatantly advertise the fact that you can put anything on there, especially IP content; but that's like saying the Mafia doesn't admit to being a criminal organization, and then using that as proof.
Anyway, the most criminal thing I would want to accuse RS of is trying to bully everyone into buying a subscription. Especially the captcha stuff was just nasty last year, though they've cut down on that now.
The biggest difference between torrent sites and RS is that torrent sites run on donations, RS actively makes people pay for faster service, knowing they're hosting what they're hosting, and trusting that the take-down rate will be low enough for them to be able to turn a profit.