World’s Largest Record Labels Are Suing a Popular YouTube Pirating Site
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A group of the world’s biggest record labels are suing a YouTube ripping website on a copyright infringement claim.
The website, youtube.mp3.org, has been the world’s largest YouTube ripping website according to the Recording Industry Association of America, with an estimated 60 million users per month. The site is being sued by UMG, Sony Music and Warner Bros., and the British Phonographic Industry has given the owners of the page a “formal notice of intended legal action,” according to the BBC.
The group of record labels are seeking damages from the German operator and owner of the company, including $150,000 for each and every alleged instance of piracy, the BBC reported. The legal papers that were filed claim that youtube-mp3.org is responsible for “upwards of 40 percent” of all the illegal music piracy in the world, The Verge reported.
But despite its place in such a high-profile legal case, youtube-mp3.org is just one of many websites that let users download high-quality audio files from YouTube. Record labels and artists have a problem with this because, while they do get paid for each YouTube play, neither will make money if users just permanently download a song to their computers, Engadget reported.
And this isn’t the music industry’s first salvo of legal action against online piracy sites, either. Earlier this year, major labels sued Pandora over royalties for older songs played on some of the service’s stations. And record labels also won their respective battles against popular pirating and torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents.
In addition to pirating sites, the industry also fired shots at Internet Service Providers and search engines like Google, alleging that facilitating access to pirating sites is not an ethical business practice.
“We hope that responsible advertisers, search engines, and hosting providers will also reflect on the ethics of supporting sites that enrich themselves by defrauding creators,” record label representation Geoff Taylor said.
