Piracy used to be file-sharing. Now it’s stream-ripping

Stream-ripping is apparently on the rise.

The Notorious Markets List from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, an office that tracks the trade in counterfeit and stolen goods, says that this is a growing problem.

Though circumstances exist where stream ripping could be lawful, such as if the content were licensed for that purpose and the conversion were permitted under the legitimate service’s terms of use, the operations of many unauthorized stream ripping sites reportedly continue to contribute overwhelmingly to copyright infringement.

The report makes for some interesting reading. Dopefile.pk is a Bulgarian- and Pakistani-operated site that acts as a cyberlocker for stolen copyrighted material, including music. If you’ve ever ripped the audio from a YouTube video, you may have used Convert2MP3.net. MP3va.com is based in either Russia or Ukraine and traffics in song, many of which were stream-ripped.

Canada doesn’t get off scot-free. As the report points out “One advertising network based in Canada, WWWPromoter, is reportedly the fastest growing ad network among infringing sites and provides services to notorious markets listed below, including primewire.ag and 123movies.to.”