It hasn’t been an especially felicitous year for the founder of file-sharing site MegaUpload: his domain name has been seized, his assets have been impounded, and Kim Dotcom faces potential extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges of copyright infringement.

That’s a fate that RapidShare is determined to avoid. The Swiss company says it wants to be a legitimate hosting service that not only responds promptly to removal requests from copyright holders, but that goes far beyond what the law requires.

RapidShare’s “responsible practices” policy may have pleased Hollywood when it was announced in April, but it nevertheless remains controversial. The U.S. advocacy group Public Knowledge responded by saying the policy “implies that cloud services that choose to merely comply with copyright law” are “somehow morally deficient or in favor of copyright infringement.”

RapidShare says it employs over 50 people and has over 400,000 files a day uploaded by its users to over 1,000 servers.

CNET spoke this week with Daniel Raimer, the company’s general counsel, about the techniques RapidShare uses to detect piratical material, and how far it’s willing to go.

MORE:  RapidShare: We’ll help Hollywood, but ‘not at all costs’ (Q&A) | Politics and Law – CNET News.