Although piracy is illegal, due to the sheer number of illegal downloaders it has proven very difficult to regulate. Most anti-piracy regulations are aimed at P2P and torrent sites, which only account for a small percentage of the illegal downloads. The newest and most popular method to illegally share files is by ‘filehosters’ like Zippyshare, Rapidshare, Megaupload and Hotfile. A staggering 80 percent of all illegal downloads is obtained through filehosting sites. These sites rank among the most visited websites in the world: Rapidshare, the leading filehoster, with 30 million visitors per month, profits from viewed ads and offers paid plans for increased download speeds. Over 500 versions exist today and their numbers are growing rapidly.
Illegal Links:
A filehoster can best be seen as a virtual ‘locker’ where a file can be uploaded on the web. When the upload is complete, a ‘download-link’ is generated that offers direct access to the file, so other users can download a copy for free without paying the owner of the work. Since the link is a simple web-address, these links can be are easily shared as text by email, on fora, blogs and social media. There are dedicated searchengines to help illegal downloaders find illegal links swiftly, like 4shared.com and filestube.com. To make matters worse, searchengines like Google, Yahoo and Bing also display these infringements when the work or author is searched. So even people who are not specifically looking for pirated files may be offered an illegal download. Needless to say, this poses a serious threat for legit sales: some of the files we protect generate over 6000 links monthly and we have seen single links being downloaded more than 100.000 times. Since one single link can be downloaded indefinitely (we have seen up to 100.000 downloads from just 1 link), it's vital that all links are detected and removed as fast as possible.