Earlier this week we reported about a report from the brand protection company MarkMonitor, stating that file-sharing sites attract billions of visitors yearly. The report has sparked fierce criticism among administrators of file-sharing platforms as it associates file sharing with piracy and illegal downloading activities. 

File-sharing platform RapidShare is especially outraged by the publication, as MarkMonitor called them the number one piracy website on the internet with 13 billion page visits a year.

However, in the last year RapidShare has taken all kinds of measures to ensure that they are operating legitimately. The company is actively working with copyright holders to meet their needs and has developed take down tools, comparable to YouTube’s policy. As we reported earlier, RapidShare has not been condemned for illegal activity in any of the recent lawsuits they were involved in. RapidShare considers the recent study on piracy as damaging to their improved reputation.

A key issue in this discussion is the use of pageviews as an indication of the scope of the ‘piracy’ that occurs on a site. This method seems to disqualify the possibility of consumers visiting the sites without doing anything that could be illegal. RapidShare claims that the majority of its consumers use the site for legitimate reasons, which means that many pageviews should be disregarded. In addition, RapidShare is interested to know why YouTube was left out of the study, while YouTube has millions of pageviews daily.

Indeed, it is safe to at least assume that copyrighted footage is published through YouTube without the owners’ permission.

Sources:  TorrentFreak, MarkMonitor