[4] Schmid avoids the public eye, but took over management of the company after longtime CEO and COO Bobby Chang left in April 2010.

[7] The company changed its focus to B2B cloud storage services, but a drop in revenue led to a reduction in staffing by three quarters in May 2013.

As of mid-March, RapidShare was reported as operating with only one employee, a support person who answered the telephone and managed customers and accounts.

RapidShare discontinued the program to avoid the impression it rewarded its users for uploading copyrighted material.

[14] RapidShare offered two computer programs to simplify file managing: This software allowed queuing of uploads.

[citation needed] On 19 January 2007, the German performance rights organisation GEMA claimed to have won a temporary injunction against both RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com.

[21][22] The incident is reported to have arisen due to a leak of a pre-release copy of metal band Metallica's Death Magnetic album.

Plaintiffs in the case were Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, LLC a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning Inc.; Elsevier Inc; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; and Pearson Education, Inc.

[citation needed] The US government's congressional international anti-piracy caucus stated that the site was "overwhelmingly used for the global exchange of illegal movies, music and other copyrighted works".

[24] The Düsseldorf higher regional court twice overturned injunctions filed against RapidShare by Capelight Pictures, a German film and DVD rental company.

In a 2009–2010 case brought against RapidShare by Atari Europe,[28] the Düsseldorf higher regional court concluded on appeal that illegal use of RapidShare was by a small minority of its users[29] and that to assume otherwise amounted to "a general suspicion of shared hosting services and their users that cannot be justified".

[28] It also judged that RapidShare could not be held liable for copyright infringements by its users, and that while the service was legal, a minority of illegal use[29] could not be prevented by other measures proposed - for example keyword-based filtering (which could impair legal use), manual review of uploads (not feasible), or IP address analysis (as IP addresses can change frequently).

[31][32] In December 2010, in response to the congressional international anti-piracy caucus' press release and the German court ruling, RapidShare enlisted the services of Dutko Worldwide to lobby its interests in the United States Congress.

[33] In March 2012, the Hamburg higher regional court upheld three earlier decisions that the file hoster could be held liable for publication of copyright protected material by third parties.