Rapidshare copyright woes made it loose traffic to competing file locker services like Hotfile.com as evident from the Alexa traffic chart shown below, the heat is now shifted to Hotfile as MPAA has now sued them citing copyright infringements. The MPAA lawsuit against Hotfile on behalf of 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and Warner Bros. accuses Hotfile of not only "facilitating copyright infringement" but committing "direct infringement" by awarding users cash incentive for doing it and making money from the illegal activity.

Rapidshare Vs Hotfile Traffic Comparison

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.

In an on-going legal battle with GEMA, Rapidshare received an huge blow when a German court ruled that