But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the URL and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.
“As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material,” McCoyd said. “Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it.”
When I asked Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, if the company had a general sense of what kinds of material were most often placed on its servers — music? videos? other kinds of content? — she said she could not say because “for us, everything is just a file, no matter what.”
At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, California, that offers publishers anti-piracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of The Lost Symbol were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.
Scheid said her company complied with publishers’ take-down requests. But the request must refer to a particular file and use the specific URL; it’s left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers.
I can report that RapidShare acted promptly last month when my publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked it to remove an audiobook version of one of my own books and provided the URL for the file.
Scheid said the company gets requests to remove about 1 percent to 2 percent of the files that are uploaded daily.
To protect users’ privacy, however, she said RapidShare does not attempt to block the uploading of infringing material in the first place.
“We don’t do content filtering; we don’t look into uploaded files,” she said.
Once a file is removed, the company tries to keep perfectly identical files from being uploaded again, but she listed various ways that determined users can alter the files just enough to effectively circumvent these measures.
My book reappeared on RapidShare a few days after it was taken down.
Hotfile and Megaupload did not respond to requests for comment.
RapidShare and fellow online storage services say that their services help users share large files easily or store personal data without having to carry around a memory stick. On the FAQs page of its Web site, Megaupload depicts its customers as the most ordinary of citizens: “Students, professional business people, moms, dads, doctors, plumbers, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, you name it.”
Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned.
Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”
I will forward the suggestion along — as soon as authors can pack arenas full of fans and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.
Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University.
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