12 Facts About RapidShare

RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002.

RapidShare was founded by Christian Schmid in Mulheim, Germany, initially as ezShare later Rapid Share, a file hosting service for his RapidForum web forum hosting services.

In 2010, RapidShare was said to have hundreds of millions of visitors per month and to be among the 50 most popular Internet sites.

RapidShare changed its focus to B2B cloud storage services, but a drop in revenue led to a reduction in staffing by three quarters in May 2013.

On 10 February 2015, RapidShare announced on its home page that it would shut down its services permanently on 31 March 2015.

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Until 1 July 2010, RapidShare operated an incentive program that rewarded uploaders with "RapidPoints" according to the number of times those files were downloaded by others; the points were redeemable for premium RapidShare subscriptions.

RapidShare discontinued the program to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material.

RapidShare did not restrict automatic downloads to their downloader they did not provide technical support to third-party downloaders as they did for RapidShare Manager.

RapidShare started to check newly uploaded files against a database of files already reported as illegal.

In May 2010, the District Court Southern District of California rejected an injunction against RapidShare filed by the publisher of online erotic magazine Perfect 10.

The presiding judge declared that the plaintiff had failed to make a credible case that RapidShare had directly infringed copyright or supported copyright violation.

In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.