Record labels collaborate to sue popular music piracy site MP3Skull

[Scorpus]

Despite the growing popularity of paid music streaming services over the last couple of years, some people still choose to pirate their music, whether that's through a torrent site, or through a dedicated music download site like MP3Skull.

While torrent sites have historically been hard to target, major record labels believe that they can cripple MP3Skull through the courts. That's why Capitol Records, Sony Music, Warner Bros. Records and Universal Music Group have banded together to file a lawsuit against the website's operators, claiming that the site's sole purpose is to facilitate copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The lawsuit alleges that MP3Skull uses a database that contains "millions of links to MP3 music files from around the Internet," which users can search for the purposes of piracy. It's also been alleged that MP3Skull promotes piracy through their social media channels, and that they provide workarounds for when takedown notices remove large batches of links.

As MP3Skull is simple and has quickly become very popular, the lawsuit claims that the website generates significant revenue (through ads) at the expense of the record labels. Naturally the labels are demanding damages in the millions of dollars, alongside an injunction that would prevent other business, such as domain registrars and advertising companies, from working with or supporting MP3Skull.

It's not completely clear who is the owner of MP3Skull, but Whois data has previously indicated the .to domain name is registered to Russian Monica Vasilenko. The coalition of record labels might have a hard time suing the website without firmly knowing who is running it, but they are trying their hardest to crush the website with the power of law.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/60429-record-labels-sue-music-piracy-site-mp3skull.html

 

[m4a4]

"millions of links..."
So they don't host the actual downloads, they are getting sued for encouraging piracy?

Personally, I am against these Record labels. They refuse to make downloading the odd song here and there as easy as MP3Skull does, at least not without several barriers and price gouging....

 

[BlueDrake]

They happily price gouge everyone, including their own artists all for their own personal greed. The way of old is slowly phasing out, they just want to cling onto what they know. Pirates will never disappear all because one site is dead, just slowly find another means to getting what they want. It's obvious not everyone wants to be locked in, with Apple and their whole iTunes service either.

Just because you offer one way of easy access, doesn't mean everyone will flock behind that idea. Especially when things are usually locked down, I could be wrong but I've never had a real care for the company. Personally never touched MP3 downloading since the old days, at least for mainstream music since I've found it's gone downhill. So-called artists being dragged in and basically chained to labels, all the while trying to seem important enough for us to listen.

That's another topic but the main issue is, people don't want to be chained to one service for things. Or be using any service at all, if it means paying and not everyone is up for streaming services also. Bandwidth is still an issue to sort out, when ISPs and carriers have caps on almost everything. Even the so-called unlimited packages are really in the end, a cap they have predetermined as high enough for using throttling measures.