Rapidshare.com

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.