In an interesting move which could severely hurt Rapidshare and benefit rival services like Hotfile and Megaupload the leading file-hoster is now pro-actively terminating accounts of illegal downloaders and uploaders engaging in copyright infringement activity. It is no secret that the only reason for Rapidshare's success is the vast amount of illegally distributed copyrighted software's, music and movies hosted on their servers and this move is definitely going to have it's consequences.

This extreme step could be due to two reasons first being the legal problems faced by the company and second that they are soon going to have their own legal movie sharing service - Rapid Movies, whatever the reason maybe this is surely going to have an major impact on website's user-base.

In an somewhat unexpected news top file-hoster Rapidshare has entered into an partnership with Warner Bros. and is planning to launch a legal paid movie download website, in preparation of the upcoming paid downloading service the company has already started providing legal trailer downloads of movies to its premium subscribers.

Ironically, Rapidshare is still undergoing a strict copyright infringement battle in German courts which lead to speculations of service being taken down but got settled on terms of pro-active monitoring and control of illegal file uploads to their servers for the time-being.

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

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: