RapidShare, Kickass out of the picture, crack-down on file sharing intensifies

The crack-down on file sharing seems to be intensifying, as both Kickass and RapidShare seem to have given up on their causes. Kickass.so has been down since yesterday and rumor has it that the website was seized by government agencies. RapidShare has been spiraling downwards for quite some time now, becoming from one of the most popular free file sharing services to a bankrupt company that will no longer exist starting April 1st.

Companies are pressuring governments into regulating copyrighted material on the internet better than before, which lead to the take-down of many torrent hosting and file sharing sites in the past year. Kickass and RapidShare are the latest victims of this effort to clean the internet, so to speak. Kickass is back on its original domain, at Kickass.to, but their previous domain seems to have been seized judging by the WHOIS of the website. We are curious to see how long other torrent sites like Kickass and Torrentz will hold up.

 

RapidShare has announced that users of the service should secure the data they have on the platform because March 31st will be the last day their data will exist on servers. RapidShare is shutting down and will be deleting accounts and data. The service has been on a downward spiral, turning into a paid service, which effectively killed the whole appeal of RapidShare. After that, users just tried gravitating to other file-sharing platforms like Ge.tt, which are still free. Even though RapidShare tried to advertise itself as a cloud storage platform, we all know it used to be just a way easier alternative to Pirate Bay, Kickass, and torrents in general, because you got direct downloads instead of torrent files.

It’s a shame that file sharing services, as well as torrent sites used to share various things (not necessarily copyrighted material), are going down, but we have to prepare for the inevitable. No more torrents and no more piracy on the internet, soon! We don’t think doomsday is near, as Pirate Bay proved that with their recent comeback, but it seems like an inevitable development of the current stigma companies have for these kinds of services.