RapidVideo Agreed to Pay ACE a Settlement and Hand Over its Domains

• RapidVideo hands over its domains to the Motion Picture Association (MPA), so its shutdown is final.
• The file-hosting service will also pay damage compensation to ACE and settle the legal case away from the court halls.
• Yet another big piracy-supporting entity falls, and it looks like there aren’t many big fishes left in the pond anymore.

The last nail in the coffin of the RapidVideo corpse is now being driven, as the once-popular file-hosting service has agreed to pay ACE a settlement and hand over its domains. This means that we won’t see the platform returning, and that’s final. Back in April, RapidVideo was forced to change its business model because the increasing number of Kodi freeloaders was making its operation non-feasible. By October, the platform shut down abruptly, following a lawsuit by the ACE, MPA, Warner Bros, and Netflix, which accused them of multiple copyright infringement violations.

RapidVideo was used by millions of people who were uploading and sharing videos on the platform, as it was free to use, reliable, featured fast post-processing and didn’t have any piracy filters in place. It is estimated that approximately 70% of RapidVideo’s userbase were people who uploaded or consumed pirated content. Thus, the four rightsholders mentioned above submitted a lawsuit in Germany and forced the platform to close down almost immediately and without announcing anything to the community. As it is proven now, this voluntary shutdown didn’t help in convincing the plaintiffs to stop the legal proceedings, as the latter wanted to ensure that RapidVideo wouldn’t come back alive after a while.

So, the ownership of ‘Rapidvideo.com’ and ‘Rapidvideo.is’ now passes to the MPA (Motion Picture Association), and RapidVideo will also pay an undisclosed amount to the plaintiffs, both acts being part of a settlement between the parties. The platform didn’t even bother to put up a fight on the court, as they probably thought that their chances of achieving anything notable were slim, plus they didn’t have the financial resources to face the giants with composure. This marks another big victory for ACE, which has caused unprecedented damage to the piracy scene in 2019, and they certainly plan to build upon this success in 2020.

As for the video file-sharing platforms that pirates can use right now, the choices are getting increasingly fewer. Openload and Streamango waved goodbye in November 2019, Share-Online.biz closed down in October 2019, and the few big platforms that are left are usually tackling piracy or at least pretend to do something about it. Of course, there are still quite a few file-hosting services out there that offer pirated content, but most of them are limited by their own infrastructure. This means that ACE is winning, and with every fort that falls, its job gets easier.