Guess who is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore? The RapidShare file service says it has had it up to its storage capacity with the treatment it's getting from Capitol Hill here in the United States, and has hired a lobbyist to tell Congress what's what.

The firm will help RapidShare "counter negative attacks on the company from US copyright interests," according to the registration form that it has filed with the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The Swiss outfit's move comes following a big content backed Congressional caucus calling out RapidShare and five other companies as the world's worst websites.

"As you can imagine, we're not very happy about that," RapidShare's new spokesperson Daniel Raimer told the Deutsche Welle news service. The company joined The Pirate Bay and Canada's IsoHunt in the alleged hall of shame, even though a German court has ruled that RapidShare was not to blame for infringement by its users and had no responsibility to block content.

Far from common knowledge

An expert in Internet law, the 36 year old Raimer has defended RapidShare in several key court cases. "There is a gap between the court decisions and RapidShare's public image," he noted following his appointment to the new position in November. "Unfortunately, it is far from being common knowledge that the service offered by RapidShare is a legal one, reviewed and legitimized by several courts."

The Swiss firm also told Deutsche Welle that about five percent of the 400,000 files uploaded to RapidShare each day are of the copyrighted music and movie variety, and the service tries to filter them out before they're uploaded.

"We believe that it's unfair that we're being put on the list," Raimer explained. "You can't just take a look at the number of infringing material that you can find on the server. Google has probably millions and millions of links to illegal files. Most people would probably agree that Google is not a bad company."

A coordinated program

Given these sorts of public statements, it should come as no surprise that RapidShare has hired the same lobbying firm that Google uses—the Dutko lobbying group.

The registration form that RapidShare filed with the government makes it pretty clear what the three lobbyists the company has hired will be focusing on: "Develop and implement a coordinated government affairs/public relations program for RapidShare targeted at Congress, the Administration and the media to help counter negative attacks on the company from US copyright interests."

Dutko is definitely a high-powered lobbying organization. According to the Open Secrets database, Dutko Worldwide generated $12,940,000 in lobbying income in 2010 in the course of advocating on behalf of Adobe Systems, Google, Motorola, Qualcomm, TiVO, Level 3 Communications, and dozens of other technology related firms.

As Ars readers know, RapidShare isn't going up against amateurs in the Capitol Hill influence game. The Motion Picture Association of America spent $1,320,000 in lobbying in 2010, and over $2.5 million in 2008. The Recording Industry Association of America spent a whopping $4,044,718 this year and over $6 million in both 2009 and 2008.

But given that Congress is considering legislation that would set up a process by which the US government could drop websites classified as pirates from the Domain Name System and bar credit card companies from processing their payments, it doesn't seem like RapidShare has gotten into the lobbying business too soon.