Sunday, 17 January 2010
Piracy via paid file-hosting services
According to global website-tracking service Alexa, there are five file-hosting sites within its top 100 website list as of yesterday. The two most popular with downloaders here, Megaupload and RapidShare, are Singapore’s 33rd and 39th most popular sites, respectively.
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Piracy via paid file-hosting services
Movie industry watchdog voices its concern about increased popularity of such sites
By Chua Hian Hou
14 January 2010
Net-savvy Singaporeans are opting for paid file-hosting services to get their dose of pirated movies and software.
Fans say these services - which can range from US$10 (S$14) per month to US$200 for lifetime membership - offer faster, more reliable and less traceable downloads compared with other ways of getting bootleg materials.
According to global website-tracking service Alexa, there are five file-hosting sites within its top 100 website list as of yesterday. The two most popular with downloaders here, Megaupload and RapidShare, are Singapore’s 33rd and 39th most popular sites, respectively.
Such sites work by directly hosting a file that has been uploaded onto a server. Paid users are able to access the file - be it a blockbuster movie or a Microsoft application - via a Web link.
In comparison, popular auction portal eBay is in 32nd place, while the only BitTorrent file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay - which is free - is in 81st place.
According to Google search statistics, the number of users looking up ‘RapidShare’ has been rising steadily, from being so low as to be not measurable in 2005 to becoming one of the most popular search terms last year.
Searches for ‘Megaupload’ show a similar pattern.
Swiss-based RapidShare’s spokesman Katharina Scheid declined to say how many Singapore users are paying for its services, although she acknowledged that it has become more popular.
RapidShare was sued by the German music industry in 2007 for allegedly helping to distribute pirated music files.
Hong Kong’s Megaupload did not reply to a Straits Times request for answers.
The Motion Picture Association’s director for operations for the Asia-Pacific region, Mr. Edward Neubronner, said the movie industry watchdog is ‘aware and concerned’ about the increased popularity of such file-hosting services.
Fans of these sites say they are the fastest way to download bootleg materials, especially after Internet service providers like StarHub, concerned over the disproportionate amounts of data used by BitTorrent users, began cutting back on the bandwidth allocated to them.
‘Using BitTorrent, it can take between an afternoon to weeks to download a movie. With Megaupload, I can begin watching it in under an hour,’ said undergraduate L. Tan, 20, who declined to give his full name.
Mr. Tan, who shares access to a US$200 Megaupload lifetime account with three friends, said the US$50 he paid was worth every cent.
‘Since I started using it last year, I have downloaded dozens of (pirated) movies and games. If I had paid for them, it would have cost me much more, easily hundreds of dollars...and that’s not counting the stuff I will download in future,’ he said.
Users point to another advantage of these sites - that the sites help them stay under the radar of copyright owners.
There is some truth to this, said lawyer Bryan Tan.
Unlike file-sharing systems like BitTorrent, which download and upload files simultaneously, file-hosting is for downloading only. Users do not face heftier criminal charges connected to distribution of copyrighted materials, Mr. Tan said.
While people using pirated materials can be sued, few rights owners do this due to the expense and public backlash this can cause. The authorities have not charged users for illegal downloads here.
Due to the popularity of file-hosting sites, users have begun looking for ways to exploit them, such as sharing, reselling and even hacking accounts.
RapidShare’s Ms Scheid warns that account sharing ‘is forbidden and if we detect fraud we have to exclude these users from our service.’
But Mr. L. Tan is unfazed. ‘Just as we are using these sites to get around anti-piracy measures, there are also ways to get around such sites’ security.’
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