Filesharing company RapidShare has announced that it will change its business model. The company is trying to fight piracy as it's afraid that it will be shutdown by the authorities like MegaUpload. This file sharing website owned by famous internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom provided a similar service, was shutdown and Dotcom's house was raided. To avoid massive copyright infringement on their website, RapidShare has added some new restrictions to the service. Previously it limited the download rate to 30 Kb/s but this was lifted recently.
The new restrictions are mainly affecting users that are not paying for the service. Paying users of RapidShare will get unlimited traffic for their own files and can also get unlimited downloads of files from their contacts on the service. They also get 30 GB a day for downloads of other RapidShare members.
Files that are uploaded by free RapidShare accounts will be limited to 1 GB of data traffic a day, where traffic by the user itself or its contacts are not included. All downloads are unrestricted which means they will be served at full speed. The new system will come in effect the 27th of November 2012. On that day also a new service called RapidDrive and a new website design should be revealed.
