UPDATE: It turns out that The Pirate Bay was indeed pulling an elaborate joke about moving its hosting to North Korea yesterday. Announced on its Facebook page this morning, the file-sharing site admitted to the hoax, which used a clever IT trick to make it appear as if it were being hosted in North Korea. The site was even kind enough to post a picture of its co-founders hanging out with North Korean leaders that definitely wasn't Photoshopped.  

Allegedly, the site was never forced to leave Sweden, and was simply dealing with a temporary legal argument while major infastructure changes would solve the issue in the following week (though it is still unclear where TPB is currently being hosted until such changes allow it to return to the Swedish Pirate Party).

"We've also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can't seriously cheer the "fact" that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea," the post reads. "Always stay critical. Towards everyone!" At least the tricksters at The Pirate Bay had a point (sort of). 

ORIGINAL:

Just yesterday, former b-baller and reality TV juggernaut Dennis Rodman arrived stateside after a widely publicized hangout with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying, "I love him. The guy is awesome. He was so honest." Apparently, Kim's generosity extends to torrenting sites as well.

As of this morning, notorious file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea after being kicked out of Norway, according to the site's most recent blog post.

Having lost its hosting from the Swedish Pirate Party last week, The Pirate Bay jumped to pirate parties in Norway and Catalonia. That brief relationship ended this morning, when the Norwegian Pirate Party ousted the file sharing site as well, with party leader Geir Asalid claiming that party doesn't have the economic muscle necessary to fight for the right to torrent. 

After some very brief downtime, the site popped back up, though at the same address and with no indication of the new hosting location until a traceroute for the site was tracked back to an ISP located in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang, North Korea. Following a handful of initial reports, The Pirate Bay posted its blog post acknowledging the switchover. 

Is The Pirate Bay Messing With Us?

It's not always easy to believe what The Pirate Bay says. If this turns out to be a joke, it wouldn't be the first time The Pirate Bay has pulled such a hoax about its virtual whereabouts. In 2007, the site pulled an April Fool's Day joke revolving around this exact situation, writing at the time, "We would like to thank Kim Jong-Il for the opportunity and we would like all of our users to review their current feelings towards this great nation!"

This time around, a number of colluding circumstances make this announcement sound considerably more legitimate. Not only has The Pirate Bay switched out its homepage image (seen above), but the ISP is in fact being traced to North Korea only hours after the Norwegian Pirate Party's announcement was released. If it is a hoax, this would certainly be an elaborate one. 

Those within the torrent news network also seem to believe the situation - to a degree. "A Pirate Bay insider informs TorrentFreak that they had been working for a while to get connectivity in North Korea," reports TorrentFreak. “We’ve been in talks with them for about two weeks, since they opened access for foreigners to use 3G in the country...TPB has been invited just like Eric Schmidt and Dennis Rodman. We’ve declined up until now," the source went on to say. 

Hosting the winner of 2004's Celebrity Mole and the first ever Hulk Hogan's Championship Wrestling Tournament (aka Mr. Rodman) and wining and dining him as if he were an ambassador is one thing. But putting the actions of your country's Internet network in direct opposition to the fierce lobbying efforts of Hollywood and the United States copyright police is an entirely different kind of political taunt. It likely doesn't bode well for the increasingly precarious relationship between the U.S. and North Korea.

For those not inclined to travel to the site's blog, you can read an excerpt from The Pirate Bay below:

This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing [sic] a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.

Top image courtesy of The Pirate Bay. Second image courtesy of TorrentFreak. 

To file-sharing guru, alleged pirate and international Internet activist Kim Dotcom, his new creation, the encrypted file-sharing service Mega, is not only a company but also a "belief," not to mention "a guardian angel of your rights, freedom, and privacy."

Grandiose Declarations

This grandiose declaration came via Twitter on Tuesday, where Dotcom announced some quick figures on his new site's growth. After one month, Mega has hit 3 million users, with 125 million files uploaded. This is certainly nothing to scoff at, and more evidence that this guy is not slowing down, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Department of Justice, which has brought charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering against him.

Mega, the rebirth of file-sharing service Megaupload, which was shut down by U.S. authorities in January of 2012, has been gradually working its way into headlines since its lavish January 19 launch, where Dotcom staged a fake FBI raid to blaring techno music, among other wild antics. Notably, the service hit 1 million users in the first 24 hours, and Dotcom announced through Twitter last Saturday that Mega would be accepting bitcoins as currency.

Dotcom has also announced that mobile Mega apps are on the way, which bodes well for those looking for almost completely unrestricted on-the-go file storage options for iOS and Android. In case you were wondering, Mega's international traffic rates rank France, Spain, Brazil, Germany and the U.S. as the top five, in that order.

Mega's Perks & The Cloud Storage Battle

Dotcom is also making the news for his service's massively disruptive pricing. Mega offers 50GB of cloud storage, free. A Pro Membership package, with tier-1 offerings of 500GB of storage and 1TB bandwidth rate, costs £9.99 (or roughly $13) per month. Tier-2 quadruples the storage and bandwidth amounts of the previous tier for $26 per month, while tier-3 doubles all of tier-2's offerings for $39 per month. 

Mega's free option alone beats out the storage offerings of Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive combined. The additional perk is, of course, the privacy. Dotcom's service ensures that users' files are completely protected from peeking by way of an encrypted key. So unless you supply them with access, even Mega staff cannot access your files.

Mega: Privacy vs. Piracy?

It remains to be seen whether the service will become another source of rampant copyright infringement. Considering Dotcom's history, and the enormous amount of freedom Mega hands to users, that possibility certainly looms large. Being able to share anything and everything is great for privacy, but not so much for content owners hoping to keep file sharers from unauthorized dissemination of every new song, movie and TV episode. 

(See also Is Kim Dotcom's New Site, Mega, the Wild West of Piracy?)

In March authorities will rule on whether Dotcom will be extradited from New Zealand to the U.S. to face his numerous charges. Until then, he seems to be enjoying his new site's steady climb to the top of the file-sharing and cloud-storage leaderboard.

In an over-the-top press event at his New Zealand mansion last weekend, the notorious Kim Dotcom unveiled a new cloud storage service called Mega. From the ashes of his now-defunct Megaupload, which was shut down by U.S authorities exactly one year ago, rises a service that promises to be incredibly secure and better at handling copyright complaints.

But will users flock to it? More to the point, should you use it?

On a personal level, Mega is a big win for Kim Dotcom. With it, he shows the world that the military-style raid on his mansion one year ago (which was theatrically mimicked during the Mega launch event) did not succeed in bringing him down, even as he faces criminal charges over Megaupload's alleged involvement in copyright infringement. 

The Perks: More Storage And Better Security 

For users, the Mega message is less clear. Whether they were using Megaupload for piracy or legitimate file sharing, the site's users have had to move on to other means of transferring bits across the Internet. For some, that means services like Dropbox while others moved to Megaupload-esque solutions like Rapidshare and Mediafire, both of which have made changes to their functionality and public posture since the Megaupload raid. Where ever they went, Dotcom is hoping to lure those users back with tightened security and ample storage space. 

On the surface, Mega's offering is pretty tempting. While Dropbox and Box.net limit free users to 2GB to 5GB of storage, Mega lets you pile up 50GB worth of data before asking you to pay. The premium subscriptions start at 500GB for $10 per month and go up to 4TB for $30 a month. 

Given History, Is It Worth It?

Sure, Mega is also much more secure than its predecessor, using super-tight asymmetric encryption to keep data secure and out of view from curious governments and other third parties. But no matter how good it is, do you really want to store your valuable data on a service tied to Kim Dotcom? When you sign up for Mega, it's hard not to think about what happened to the founder's last filesharing product. You can't help but picture the armed raid and simultaneous seizure of Megaupload's servers. 

It's also hard not to think about Kyle Goodwin. He's the Ohio-based high school sports broadcaster who was using Megaupload to transfer video files between himself and the video editors he had hired to help produce his broadcasts. After one of his external hard drives was damaged, Goodwin tried logging into his Megaupload account to retrieve his old files. By then, the FBI had already seized the servers, locking Goodwin and plenty of other users out of their data. He has since been involved in a class action lawsuit demanding that authorities give non-infringing users access to their Megaupload data.  

How likely is a shutdown of Mega? Thanks to the way the service was built and the lessons learned from the demise of Megaupload, probably pretty remote. But for some users, it's going to be tough to swallow the idea of trusting a service that is so intrinsically linked with the subject of a major, ongoing criminal prosecution. 

Other than the color scheme, the Mega interface isn't all that different from that of Megaupload. Even the logo's typography is the same: It looks like they just lobbed off the "upload" and changed the color. It just feels a lot like a site with which many people are familiar, but which has been replaced with an FBI anti-piracy warning message. 

Potential Security Holes

Plus, as big of an improvement as Mega may be when it comes to privacy and security, it's not perfect. In a detailed analysis of Mega's security, Ars Technica pointed out that the JavaScript-based method of randomly generating numbers for the encryption keys isn't the most rock-solid option available. 

"The end result of this is that it is easier (not easy, but easier) to reverse-engineer a Mega user's private RSA key than it should be," writes Lee Hutchinson. "That means it's easier to spoof the identity of a Mega user when sending messages or files."

The site has other limitations as well. For one, it's very insistent that people use Chrome to access Mega, due to its advanced implementation of HTML5 features. Not even the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer or Safari will suffice. Despite this strict adherence to the latest in Web standards, Mega still relies on Flash for some tasks, like downloading files. That means it won't work on iOS devices until Mega submits official apps, which Apple may or may not approve. 

What does that all add up to? For users like Kyle Goodwin, who have a day-to-day need to rely heavily on cloud-based file storage for critical data, Mega remains a bit of a gamble. But for sharing miscellaneous, backed-up files here and there, there's little reason to not give it a try.

Aaron Swartz was no ordinary man, so it is only fitting that his funeral was as extraordinary he was.

(For more, see The Persecution Of Aaron Swartz.)

Besides the press and speakers and attendees of his funeral - from Internet luminaries like Lawrence Lessig and Tim Berners-Lee and writers like Dan Sinker and Quinn Norton - the service also drew the Highland Park Police Department and some 30-odd fans and members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. The latter two groups had set up around Highland Park’s Lubavitch Chabad Central Avenue Synagogue to protect mourners from the Westboro Baptist Church, as the religious hate group had threatened to picket Swartz’s funeral. They never showed, perhaps fearing retribution from Anonymous.

Despite the chill, by 9:40am some 100 family, friends and fans - myself included - were already seated in the small synagogue. By a little after 10:00, the room was packed with roughly 350 mourners lining the walls and sitting on the floor.  

Laughter Amidst The Tears

The entire service lasted less than two hours, and while some speakers elicited rueful laughter with amusing tidbits of Swartz's life -  when Quinn Norton suggested he get LASIK eye surgery, for example, Swartz apparently quipped: “no, lasers are supposed to come out of your eyes” -  the mood hovered on the verge of tears.

Two refrains echoed throughout the service: placing the blame of Swartz’s suicide on persecution by the U.S. government, and calling for everyone in attendance continue to fight for the ideals Swartz held dear.

Taren Steinbrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz’s partner of 20 months, opened the service saying, “The night before he died, we shared a grilled cheese sandwich.” She talked about Swartz’s love of cheesy foods and his excitement over the possibility of a $1 trillion coin, before telling attendees that “we must change the world” by fighting for open access and destroying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which she said allowed prosecutors to hound Swartz to death.

Wise Beyond His Years

Tim Berners-Lee called Swartz “wise beyond his years” before describing how surprised he was to learn Swartz was only 14 when they first met. Aaron saw “coding as one way to change the world,” said Lee.  “We’ve lost an elder,” he added, before concluding with the hopeful thought that perhaps if we come together and work towards Swartz’s ideals, the world can “compensate for his loss.”

Lawrence Lessig called Swartz “a mentor to elders” and a “wise soul” always asking the question, “How do I make the world a better place?” He joked that the parenthood potion for creating a beautiful and brilliant boy like Swartz was “probably patented,” before breaking down and taking a dig at the Massachusetts prosecutors that he felt drove Swartz to suicide. “Aaron was depressed because God was depressed” said Lessig, who closed his speech with, “All is not okay, but we will make it better” in his name, a reference to an email exchange the two shared years ago.

No Ordinary Waif

Swartz’s defense attorney Elliot Peters, upon meeting his client, was struck by how “small, vulnerable, and waifish” Swartz was, before quickly realizing “this is no ordinary waif.” Peters knew right away Swartz was “something very valuable to protect,” an individual who needed “protection from the government, from stony-faced bureaucrats.” Speaking to Aaron Swartz as if he were alive and in the room, Peters admitted he was disappointed not just in himself  - “my job was to protect you” - but also “disappointed in you because you didn’t give our routine a chance. Protect you we would have.”

He had planned to evoke “the Boston Harbor” and early American revolutionaries in his closing statement at Swartz’s trial, and was confident the verdict would be favorable. “I am disappointed I won’t feel your arms around my neck” in celebratory thanks “when they read 13 not guilty verdicts,” said Peters.

A Father's Love

Perhaps even more moving than Peters' statements were those from his father Robert Swartz, who wavered when he first stepped in front of the crowd, saying, “I don’t know if I can do this.” Through Robert Swartz, we learned Aaron taught himself to read while other children were in nursery school, a feat which “embarrassed” him at the time, and that Aaron dropped out of both high school and Stanford University in his first years to pursue other agenda, like building Reddit.   

“How is it that Aaron did something that wasn’t illegal and was destroyed for it,” yet Zuckerberg is “idolized” and “Wall Street bankers” who ruined our economy “dine at the White House,” wondered Robert Swartz, who went on to describe Aaron Swartz’s characterization as a “malicious hacker” by the U.S. government as “false.”  

“Why are you destroying my son,” he asked through tears, adding his son “was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all its basic principles... He could have done so much more and now he is dead.” He closed by saying, “We must never stop” trying to make the world a better place.

The Best Way To Honor Aaron Swartz's Memory

Aaron Swartz may have already done that, and not just by others taking up his cause of open access and an uncensored Internet. Just a few days before his suicide, JSTOR opened its electronic doors to offer free but limited access to its database of academic articles, most likely in part because of Swartz's act of protest in 2011.    

Upon leaving the service, I ran into an Occupy Wall Street organizer and admirer of Aaron Swartz: the 50-year-old IT consultant Padraig O’Hara. "I believe the State murdered Aaron Swartz," said O'Hara, who went on to add the "last democratic thing we have is a free, open Internet," which is why he has made it his mission to follow Swartz's footsteps and "help social transformation" through Internet activism. 

A worthy goal for anyone who wants to honor Aaron Swartz's memory.

Image by Fruzsina Eördögh.

On Monday, the U.S. government dropped its charges against Aaron Swartz following his suicide. Swartz was charged in 2011 with illegally downloading 4.8 million academic papers from the digital database JSTOR over MIT's network using fake credentials.

For that, Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

Since he died before the case went to trial, the feds dismissed the case according to standard procedure.

Swartz has been fondly remembered as a brilliant programmer, activist, leader and folk hero, not to mention a beloved human being. But in considering the crimes with which he was charged, try to leave aside the many things that made Swartz exceptional. He was simply a citizen of a country proud of its freedom of information.

If Swartz did what he was accused of doing, he committed a crime. But that crime was essentially victimless. No profits or royalties or other material value is destroyed by the theft of academic articles. Yes, it would be against the law of the land. But what is the appropriate punishment for this crime?

A Victimless Crime

As Lawrence Lessig points out, JSTOR itself decided it was appropriate not to pursue any charges. It asked the feds to drop the case. Then it gradually opened its stance on freedom of information, opening its public-domain articles to anyone. It also created a test program giving access to 4.5 million articles — a trove nearly as large as the one Swartz was charged with stealing — available to anyone who signs up for a free account.

While it's not fair to speculate about Swartz's motivations to commit the alleged crime, he was certainly known as a champion of free and open access to information of this sort. While JSTOR is a closed database, a privilege of the academy, it has come around to some of these ideas in recent years.

And yet MIT, the institution through which the files were downloaded, took a harder line against it, and U.S. attorney Carmen M. Ortiz continued her prosecution of Swartz, aiming to lock him away for most of his life and ruin him financially. For someone devoted to rearranging the world and its social order through the sharing of information, this dogged persecution must have been impossible to understand.

Overreaching Prosecution

Alex Stamos, CTO of Artemis Internet and an expert witness for the defense in United States v. Aaron Swartz wrote just after Swartz's death that "I know a criminal hack when I see it, and Aaron’s downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail."

Swartz's family and partner wrote a statement after his suicide that shows the impact the vicious prosecution had on him and those around him:

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

In the wake of the tragedy, thousands of Americans have signed a petition calling for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz to be removed from office.

On Sunday, MIT announced it would launch an internal investigation into the matter. And on Monday, in one emotionless sentence, Ortiz "respectfully submitted" her dismissal of the case. With the painful example of Aaron Swartz in mind, one hopes our society will learn more respect for the difference between a crime of information theft and a crime with victims.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the articles allegedly downloaded by Swartz ended up on The Pirate Bay file-sharing site. The JSTOR articles posted on The Pirate Bay were shared in protest of the charges against Swartz, but they were not from the same collection.

At Le Web in Paris Tuesday, Evernote CEO announced the launch of Evernote Business, and it has a few extra features since its preview at the Evernote Trunk conference this summer. Evernote has found success as a personal life-organizer and workspace, but the new Business features make team management and collaboration possible, too.

Great Features For Business Users

The major feature is the Business Library, which is a standalone destination for notebooks throughout the company. Evernote CEO Phil Libin likes to liken Evernote to an external brain or memory, and the Business Library is like a company's institutional memory. As a company does more and more work in Evernote, the Business Library should improve as a resource for new and existing employees alike.

Individual employees also get Business Notebooks, which are like regular Evernote notebooks for documents, projects, and so forth, but they're easier to share within the organization. They're also visually distinct from individual Evernote notebooks, so there shouldn't be any accidental sharing or confusion.

Business Notes stay within the organization, even when an employee leaves. Personal (regular) Evernote notes go with employees who leave once their Evernote account is removed from the organization.

Sharing for Business users has easy permissions. In addition to sharing with individuals, which is possible using regular Evernote sharing, you can share within a team, a department, the entire company, or with people outside the company.

Evernote is pretty good at figuring out which notes in your account are related to the one you're viewing, and Evernote Business expands that functionality across the whole company while still searching your own notes as well.

Evernote Business costs $10 per user per month, and it leverages the existing, free Evernote desktop applications for Mac, iOS, Android, and Windows (desktop only). For the money, you get a 2GB monthly upload allowance, which is twice what individual premium users get, and the company as a whole gets a separate 2GB bucket for shared notebooks.

It's easy to deploy and manage, too, since there's a centralized console for IT people to add and remove employees and manage permissions.

But just because it's easy to manage the big picture doesn't mean it'll be easy to manage the details. I have some doubts about the viability of Evernote Business.

The Dangers Of Evernote Business

Let's be clear about this, I am betting on Evernote with my digital life. But as a heavy Evernote user, I know one thing for sure: It takes a lot of fiddling to make the service work for you. I'm subtly adjusting my tags and notebooks all the time as I figure out new ways I need to organize all this stuff. I'm not sure that kind of micromanagement is going to scale well.

For companies that can keep things simple, Evernote Business will work. If you make sure that the company has clear and rigid rules about formatting and tagging, and you fix it whenever someone doesn't follow them, it'll be fine. But how realistic does that sound? Think about company email and all the annoying protocol mistakes that crop up there. Now imagine those kinds of communication breakdowns in an application that's for writing, editing, collaborating and organizing, not just for sending messages.

That sounds like it could get pretty hairy. On small teams of technologically savvy people with very clear objectives, Evernote Business could be an awesome way to work together. But in your typical company, it's likely to be a logistical nightmare.

To be fair, enterprise IT is always a logistical nightmare. It's not like Google Docs would be any better for organizing. But the advantage of Evernote is that it's stored locally on your device, no matter what kind of device you use. That makes it a little more rugged and ready-for-anything as a working environment.

Here's how I'd advise someone deciding whether to deploy Evernote Business: If you don't know Evernote, try the free version and see if its basic structure makes sense for your work. Once you're comfortable with the way Evernote works, imagine your whole team sharing that tool and the synced workspace to which it connects. If that sounds awesome, go for it. Evernote is solid, and it's in it for the long haul. If the process seems too complex to manage, though, listen to that instinct.

It's not everyday an Internet company watches its traffic numbers plummet - and rejoices. But that is precisely the scenario that cloud storage service RapidShare finds itself in as it seeks to draw a clear distinction between its business model and that of the now-defunct Megaupload. 

Since the raid that saw Megaupload shut down and its founder arrested last last year, RadidShare and similar services have been taking measures to reduce piracy on their networks, in many cases limiting their functionality and potentially sacrificing the overall user experience. If it means avoiding the fate of Megaupload, even drastic changes are worth it to these companies.

On November 27, RapidShare will start putting a tight cap on outbound downloads for its free users. Paid members will still have 30 gigabytes in outbound downloads per day, but everybody else will be capped at one gigabyte. This will apply to public downloads, whereas direct Dropbox-style sharing between users won't be affected. The change is expected to further deter pirates from using RapidShare to distribute copyright material on a large scale.

An Ongoing, Newly Urgent Battle

The download caps are just the latest in a list of anti-piracy moves the company has made, as Chief Legal Officer Daniel Raimer outlined in a presentation at the Future of Music Summit in Washington, D.C. earlier this week. Those earlier efforts include a three-strike policy for repeat infringers and Web-crawling technology that helps RapidShare find links to illegal content so it can take corrective measures with those accounts. 

"That's really helpful to delete a lot of accounts in a short amount of time and to get rid of a lot of piracy that happens on a large scale," Raimer told ReadWrite in an interview after his talk. "It's kind of hard to identify guys who do piracy on a very low level, like some Norwegian kid who has a music blog with very low traffic. Sooner or later that guy is going to be detected."

Earlier this year, RapidShare published a document titled "Responsible Practices For Cloud Storage Services" (see below), which outlines an anti-piracy framework for cyberlockers like to use in dealing with DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests to remove allegedly pirated content and policing activity on their services.

RapidShare Handicaps Itself To Save Its Own Life

In the case of RapidShare, the association with piracy is difficult to shake. For years, links to RapidShare pages containing movies and albums have littered the Web. According to Google Trends, the second most closely related search term to "RapidShare" is "Megaupload." Included on the list of top-ten related search terms are "rapidshare movies" and "rapidshare crack." It's this close association with piracy that RapidShare is hoping to change with its download caps, three-strike policy and Web-crawling technology. 

The company has already seen a substantial drop-off in traffic as a result of the company's existing anti-piracy measures, Raimer said. Their goal is to make using RapidShare as unpalatable as possible for copyright infringers, and the initial response to its anti-infringement measures suggest that the strategy is working. The pirates are not happy. 

RapidShare isn't the only company taking these kinds of precautions. In the aftermath of the Megaupload shutdown, FileSonic and FileServe stopped allowing users to download files uploaded by other users, and MediaFire went on a PR offensive in an attempt to draw a line between itself and Megaupload. 

This is an odd and risky position for a business to be in, deliberately handicapping its own product in a bid to shoo away some users while hoping to cling to enough members to avoid a detrimental drop in revenue.  

RapidShare is trying to strike a very delicate balance. How effectively it's able to do that depends, in part, on how much of the content on RapidShare infringes on copyrights, and how much does not. That's a difficult thing to measure, but no doubt the company's crawlers and other anti-piracy technology is starting to illuminate. Come November 27, the picture will start to get even clearer. 

SF #5383794 v2 Responsible Practices