At least, this has become a reality for us...
So we've had the tubes, the torrents & P2Ps, and some file lockers like rapidshare...
It looks like there is now a growing trend in piracy which consists of mirroring full site rips on several file lockers (filesonic.com, Uploaded.to, letitbit.net, vip-file.com, fileserve.com, share-online.biz) and hide the links with redirect sites like linkcrypt.ws or linksave.in
With this it becomes more and more difficult to send DMCA notifications to the file lockers that - we shouldn't forget this - largely benefit from the illegal content that is uploaded to their servers by their users.
traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r =2y&u=share-online.biz&&u=filesonic.com&u=fileserve.com&u=link crypt.ws&u=youporn.com&
Fileserve and Filesonic have become in less than a year as popular as YouPorn ! And these guys are selling 'memberships' with our content... This is by far a bigger threat than tube sites a few years ago because
it appears that a non-negligeable amount of customers looking for specific content from a website will try first to download that content from filelockers before joining the site.
I found this thread to be interesting :
friendlyhow.com/index.php/25/should-i-ban-torrent-files-on-my-file-locker
These guys know they are in dangerous territory, but with the money they make with our content, it's probably worth it!
One of our sites was ripped early in march and 79 GBs were shared over several file lockers. We have issued tens of DMCA notifications, deleting links to more than 3500 large files (500MB-4GB on average). That's about 5 TB of content shared in one month!! Our sales for that site decreased by 20% in march (immediately, google was ranking the illegal stuff on top position, before our own site, and this in just a few days!). As soon as the files were deleted, sales were back to normal. But what would happen if it was nearly impossible to delete the links? If sales have been down 20% in just one month, what would happen after several years of file sharing with impunity?
So, file locker users are hiding their links by generating unrecognizable/anonymous URLs, almost all file lockers provide anonymity to their users... And now what? It looks like some file lockers are now trying to delay the link removal by making things a lot more complicated to us. Here's the answer we received from letitbit.net after we've sent a proper DMCA notification (we received the same letter from another FL):
Quote:
Hello,
If you are the copyright holder of any material which is posted on this site and do not wish to see this information spread by users without your consent, we can assist you by removing the appropriate links.
To do this, send us a letter (in PDF format) with the following information:
1. Documentary proof of your rights to the material that is protected by copyright:
The scanned document with the seal or
other contact information that allows us to identify you as the owner of this material.
2. Direct links to files that must be removed.
Links should be of the form ht tp:/ / ...
Within 48 hours of the receipt of this information we will remove the links of interest to you from the site.
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So what are we gonna do about it? Are we gonna let them steal our content and make money with our hard work? Alltogether, we could create a legal association to sue their asses to hell and back !