Rapidshare.com

Latest version of the fully automated Rapidshare Auto Downloader for free users is now available, the fresh release adds new features and fixes existing bugs.

This release features new functions to organize downloads in better manner with options to move a group of links up and down, ability to add comments (can be used to save archive password) and new system-tray icon feature.

We have shared quite a few automated Rapidshare file-downloaders on this blog and here is yet another download manager for Rapidshare free users, free utility Rapidshare Auto Downloader lets you manage and download a group of Rapidshare links one after another without user intervention.

The interface is not intuitive and can definitely be worked upon for better navigation and ease of use, if you are looking for a decent Rapidshare download manager this will get the job done.

If your institution or ISP blocks access to Rapidshare, free Firefox addon "Download Rapidshare @ Office" can be the solution you are looking for, the handy little addon changes Rapidshare links (rs*.rapidshare.com) to IP's fooling the proxy server into allowing the access, you just need to paste all your Rapidshare links into the addon toolbar and it takes care of everything else including managing the wait-times restrictions, the whole process is fully automatic and very easy, you can also use this to download multiple files as a Rapidshare free user easily.

In an on-going legal battle with GEMA, Rapidshare received an huge blow when a German court ruled that Rapidshare.Com is not doing enough to stop uploading of copyrighted content on their servers, The court said that the steps taken by Rapidshare using MD5 Hash based content filtering to block previously removed material is not enough and can easily be bypassed changing a few bytes by adding/removing/altering the file contents, the court also said that the company has to "proactively check content before publishing it", according to the court ruling Rapidshare should also log and check IP numbers of potential copyright infringers.

Without a viable business model after removing copyrighted content, Rapidshare might face shutdown as there is no Safe Harbor provision in German copyright laws similar to the DMCA, which protects them from liability as long as they remove the infringing content after being notified with a takedown notice.

Bad news for Rapidshare Premium users, the file-hoster has decided to cut back daily download quota for premium users to 4 GB daily from 10 GB earlier, which means a reduction from 50 GB per week to 28 GB per week.

In an official press-release the company announced:

Due to the significant number of new users who subscribed to Rapidshare during the last two weeks, we decided to extend our internal resources. In order to maintain the best possible performance for all Premium users, we decided to limit the download capacity to 4 GB for each user during this transitional phase. Premium users will be able to save up to 30 GB of download capacity, if the daily 4 GB volume has not been used.

The new limitation should not affect majority of the users but will certainly hurt few doing heavy downloading on daily basis. If you are not rapidshare service fan and don't like their restrictions, I would suggest giving MediaFire a try, this can truly be a Rapidshare Killer.