RIAA updates list of biggest pirates

The Recording Industry Association Of America has updated the “notorious markets” list of big bad piracy websites that it provides to the US government each year. The latest version puts particular focus on stream-rippers, the record industry’s new big bugbear.

In its new report, the trade body starts off fairly chipper. It notes that a number of file-sharing sites have recently shut down. All of these ran off the Sharebeast platform, the operator of which recently pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges.

The labels group is also pretty pleased to be able to take YouTube-mp3 off its list, the highly popular stream-ripper having recently agreed to close as part of a settlement with the RIAA.

But there ends the positivity. Because if you can be sure of one thing on the internet, it’s that there’s always someone willing to fill an open space. Or several people.

“Unfortunately, [following the closure of YouTube-mp3] several other stream-ripping sites have ‘doubled down’ and carry on in this illegal behaviour, continuing to make this form of theft a major concern for the music industry”, says the RIAA. “The overall popularity of these sites and the staggering volume of traffic it attracts evidences the enormous damage being inflicted on the US record industry”.

The organisation says that it is now monitoring over 70 stream-ripping services, with the seven most popular – Mp3juices, Convert2mp3, Savefrom, Ytmp3, Convertmp3, Flvto and 2conv – added to its notorious markets list.

It adds that many of these sites use various means to mask their true locations, making legal action against them difficult. One service used to do this masking is the otherwise legit internet firm Cloudflare, which the RIAA has been getting particularly shirty about of late – in particular as part of its legal assault on MP3Skull.

“More sites are now employing services of Cloudflare, a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service”, says the report. “BitTorrent sites, like many other pirate sites, are increasing turning to Cloudflare because routing their site through Cloudflare obfuscates the IP address of the actual hosting provider, masking the location of the site”.

The focus in the report on Cloudflare, which is used by a great many websites of all types, suggests that the RIAA may be planning to ramp up its pressure on the company to act against the pirates using it.