Stream-ripping remains a top concern in music piracy, and several labels joined forces for a legal fight against the practice. Stream-ripping involves making an illegal copy off of legally accessed digital media. YouTube videos are a common source of this type of pirated material.
Universal, Warner Bros, Sony, and other labels have jointly filed a lawsuit against two stream-ripping sites based in Russia. FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com allow users to make illegal copies of the audio from YouTube videos. Combined, the platforms receive more than 120 million monthly visitors.
This isn’t the first legal move to curb stream-ripping. The majors united to take down a German website, YouTube-mp3.org, in 2016. Several reports on music piracy in recent years have noted that stream-ripping is a top choice for illegal access to content, although they have drawn mixed conclusions about whether piracy has been increasing or decreasing overall.