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Yesterday Daniel Raimer, chief legal officer of the file-locker service RapidShare, met with tech-biz figures and law enforcement officials at the Technology Policy Institute’s multidisciplinary Aspen Forum. Like other file-locker services, RapidShare has attracted substantial criticism because it’s seen as abetting copyright violations on an epic scale. File lockers are of course popular for legitimate purposes too, like sharing large files between collaborators—the project files for a digital-recording collaboration between two geographically distant musicians, for instance—but when combined with blogs and other social media they provide an easy way to share copyrighted material without the exposure of seeding on a P2P network, where snoops can sniff out your IP address and serve you with multimillion-dollar RIAA lawsuits.
