MarkMonitor, a self confessed global leader in enterprise brand protection, has monitored "illegal traffic levels" on 43 file-sharing sites and found that they generated more than 53 billion visits per year. The firm identified Rapidshare.com, Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com as being the top three "Digital Piracy" heavens, allegedly accounting for 21 billion visits per year.

Still, many of the related file sharing (cyberlocker) websites do not set out to encourage piracy and originally only started life as perfectly legitimate online file storage services, which are sadly often abused by pirates. The study found that North America and Western Europe represented the host location for 67% of the sites classified as "Digital Piracy".

In December 2010 the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) estimated that 13% of broadband ISP users in the UK were using such sites to access music unlawfully (here). MarkMonitor estimates the worldwide economic impact of online piracy and counterfeiting at £128bn ($200bn) annually.


However the number of visits that a website receives probably isn't a good gauge of how many actual downloads have occurred, which would also be a civil (unlawful) and not illegal offence. Indeed most such sites are used for legitimate purposes too, for example we use one to store our private home videos and share them with family and friends.

In addition RapidShare.com has successfully fended off more than a few legal cases against it, with the Higher Regional Court of Dusseldorf (Germany) this week ruling that the site was already taking "reasonable measures" to tackle the problem.

Naturally the situation represents a headache for both Rights Holders and File Storage sites alike. Unlike P2P (BitTorrent) transfers, websites give no public visibility of connection data, which makes it virtually impossible to identify who is downloading what; unless the website shares its private data (requires a court order and the data obtained would most likely be fake registration details or logs of only limited statistical use).

Meanwhile the websites themselves have a nightmare trying to police the situation and, in fairness, most usually respond to link removal requests quite quickly. As any website owner will known, you can usually only act once the files have been uploaded and then identified to you, which is always after the fact and then they could simply be re-uploaded again somewhere different.

Unfortunately this is the way of the internet. Any online website or service that allows files to be exchanged could potentially be abused and the only way to stop that is to switch off the internet.

Download the Report (PDF)
http://www.markmonitor.com/download/report/MarkMonitor_-_Traffic_Report_110111.pdf

UPDATE 13th January 2011

RapidShare has responded by threatening legal action against MarkMonitor's recent report, which unfairly labelled it as a "Digital Piracy" site.