In May 2019, TF discovered that the RIAA had obtained a DMCA subpoena which compelled CDN company Cloudflare to reveal the identities of several site operators using its services.
Among the several domains listed was DBR.ee, a file-hosting site that had was utilized by some of its users for hosting pre-release music leaks. This clearly didn't sit well with the RIAA and within a month of the subpoena being obtained, DBR.ee shut itself down.
Initially it wasn't clear if the subpoena and the closure were linked but soon after a message appeared on the site which advised that it had been shut down for copyright infringement following action by the RIAA, IFPI, and Music Canada.
The DBR.ee shutdown notice
Early September, however, a new site appeared. Sporting the DBREE name and graphics but located under a different URL (DBREE.co), the site seemed to want to pick up where the original had left off. It's not currently known whether the same people are behind the resurrection but the RIAA appears keen to find out.
Late November the RIAA obtained a pair of DMCA subpoenas at a Columbia federal court, one targeting domain registrar Namecheap and the other CDN service Cloudflare. Their aim is to uncover the identities of several site operators, DBREE.co's included.
"The purpose for which this subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of the individual assigned to these websites who has induced the infringement of, and has directly engaged in the infringement of, our members' copyrighted sound recordings without their authorization," the subpoenas read.
DBREE.co stands accused of infringement on three tracks – Lover by Taylor Swift, Under the Graveyard by Ozzy Osbourne, and Thailand by Lil Uzi Vert.
FLACC.org, a music release blog that links to content hosted elsewhere, is also accused of infringing copyrights on three tracks from Celine Dion, Ed Sheeran, and Tech N9ne.
Hiphopeasy.xyz, an album, single, and mixtape indexing site, is currently offline. Nevertheless, the RIAA claims it infringed the rights of Post Malone, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran. Another platform, identified by the RIAA as operating from Ovzy.xyz and its subdomains, is also inaccessible.
As usual, the subpoenas require Namecheap and Cloudflare to give up every piece of information they hold on the site's alleged operators. Both companies are also asked to consider "the widespread and infringing nature" of the sites to determine whether they are in breach of terms of service agreements or repeat infringer policies.
Whether Namecheap or Cloudflare have any useful information to hand over to the RIAA remains to be seen but they are both expected to comply.
The DMCA subpoenas are available here and here (pdf)
Instead of the usual DMCA copyright notices, the music group asked the search engine to remove various URLs for alleged violations of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.
This proved to be quite effective. After taking down the many links to FLVTO, 2Conv, Y2Mate, and Yout, the RIAA expanded its scope to other streamrippers. In total, the music group targeted hundreds of URLs in a few dozen notices.
And the RIAA is not alone. Other copyright holders are using the anti-circumvention route as well. This includes game companies such as Nintendo and Rockstar Games, as well as Netflix.
One upside for rightsholders is that there's no official counter-notification option. This means that affected sites can't easily complain when they are mistakenly targeted. However, there's another major benefit as well.
Some sites that don't infringe any copyrights directly, can be seen as anti-circumvention tools. This gives rightsholders an extra option to remove URLs. To illustrate this, we only have to look at the RIAA's recent takedown efforts.
When the music group sent a standard DMCA takedown request to Google for several streamripper URLs in November, the search engine didn't take these offline. However, a similar DMCA circumvention notice that was sent a few days later was successful.
This may be why there has been quite an increase in these anti-circumvention notices lately. While Google doesn't list these by default in its transparency report, we used the Lumen database to find out how many notices were sent this year.
At the time of writing, Google has received 6,281 DMCA anti-circumvention notices in 2019. These notices can contain multiple links, sometimes even hundreds. The number of notices has increased significantly compared to last year when 2,960 notices came in.
In 2017 there were even fewer anti-circumvention notices, 921 to be precise.
While today's numbers are still very modest, there's definitely a visible upward trend that hasn't been reported before. This increase is all the more interesting because Google now receives fewer standard copyright takedown notices.
TorrentFreak reached out to the RIAA to hear more about their motivation to use anti-circumvention notices, but the music group declined to comment on the issue.
Considering the effectiveness of their campaign to remove steamrippers from Google's search results, we expect the efforts to continue. And when more rightsholders discover this option, we expect the number of anti-circumvention notices to grow further still.
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