US industry body the RIAA has submitted its latest list of ‘notorious markets’ for piracy to the US Trade Representative, with a focus on the “growing complexity” of stream-ripping sites that convert video or audio streams to MP3 downloads.
Its submission notes that the most popular site, YouTube-MP3, has been put out of action following a lawsuit brought by labels, with several other sites shutting down pre-emptively to avoid a similar fate.
“Unfortunately, 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,” wrote the RIAA.
The body is currently tracking more than 70 active ‘ripper’ sites, and cites Mp3juices, Convert2mp3, Savefrom, YouTube2mp3, Convertmp3, FLVTO and 2Conv as prime offenders. These sites have annual visits in the billions and high hundred-millions, according to the RIAA’s calculations.
Elsewhere in the submission, The Pirate Bay remains on the RIAA’s list of notorious BitTorrent indexing sites, after years of fruitless attempts to shut that site down.
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