RapidShare, named as a contributor to digital piracy by a MarkMonitor report, has threatened to sue for defamation.
In a statement from the company, RapidShare called the accusations “absurd”. MarkMonitor, for its own part, said it stood by its published research.
Best online Microsoft MCTS Training, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com
“This defamation of RapidShare as a digital piracy site is absurd and we reserve the right to take legal action against MarkMonitor,” RapidShare said in a statement. “RapidShare is a legitimate company that offers its customers fast, simple and secure storage and management of large amounts of data via our servers.”
MarkMonitor, a Web site that specializes in “enterprise brand protection,” said in a Tuesday study that the most-trafficked domains engaged in digital piracy included three sites – rapidshare.com, megavideo.com, and megaupload.com – that combined yielded 21 billion pageviews per year.
As a whole, the collection of sites which MarkMonitor classified as “digital piracy” represented 146 million page views per day, or 53 billion page views per year. Even the least-visited sites in the category drove 781 million hits per year, the firm’s study found.
“Apart from getting wrong what the company’s business model is, there are some serious questions about the study’s methodology,” RapidShare added. “For example, the authors conclude that RapidShare has to be the biggest digital piracy site from looking at the number of page visits, totally ignoring the fact that millions of customers use the service for perfectly legitimate purposes. Private customers use RapidShare to share their personal pictures, videos and documents or to make backup copies of their hard drives. Business clients rely on our services to exchange large files with colleagues at different sites, with clients or with service providers or to make available free programmes or programme updates to its customers.”
MarkMonitor said that it had noted that point.
“It’s important to point out that the report did specify that some of the sites do comply with takedown requests and that those requests need to be issued by the content owner,” a MarkMonitor spokeswoman said in an email. “We felt that was an important point to make and, in fact, I recall making it in conversation with reporters.
“We stand by the research we performed and the findings of our study,” the MarkMonitor spokeswoman said. “We believe the topic is important and deserves a healthy discussion.” RapidShare’s terms of service specifically prohibits “works the download of which violates third-party copyrights”. But the site also says that it does not open and view the files of its users, and contains no search function so that other users may look for content. Instead, each file is linked to directly by the uploader.
RapidShare acknowledged that copyrighted files do get uploaded. “However, these users are in the absolute minority compared with those who use our services to pursue perfectly legitimate interests,” the site said.
Those same arguments have been previously applied to software programs like BitTorrent and LimeWire, which shut down earlier this year, and later replaced by a spinoff technology. Claims of indexed pirated files have also been applied to Google, although in December Google launched an updated plan to combat piracy.
RapidShare said that the study had validated its intention to raise awareness of its business model, and that it had hired a Washington D.C.-based lobbyist firm a short time ago.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated at 11:24 AM PT with additional comment from MarkMonitor.