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RipRequests Dead After RIAA 'Hand Delivers' Piracy Cease-and-DesistAndy Maxwell, 20 Dec 10:48 AM Until last month, RipRequests was a popular hangout

RipRequests Dead After RIAA 'Hand Delivers' Piracy Cease-and-Desist Andy Maxwell, 20 Dec 10:48 AM Until last month, RipRequests was a popular hangout for those looking to download music without the hassle of paying and, in some cases, waiting for an official release to come out. While that worked well for years, the release of Adele's new album '30' last month resulted in the Discord server and associated Reddit forum receiving some unwanted attention. According to RipRequests' operator, they only leaked '30' around 10 hours before its official release but, under US law at least, that is a criminal offense that could potentially carry a sentence of up to 10 years. What followed was a cease-and-desist from the RIAA which advised that "Such activity is illegal, and these actions must stop at once." In response to the complaint, Discord took down the RipRequests server while the RipRequests team voluntarily took action to set its Reddit forum to private, meaning that only approved members could take part in discussions. With RipRequests in limbo, the only thing left to clarify was its potential return date. Report: RIAA Tracks Down Home of RipRequests Operator On Saturday, a Twitter account associated with RipRequests posted an 'interesting' message indicating that the RIAA may have ruined someone's weekend. We presume the tweet shouldn't be taken literally but it seems fairly safe to conclude that the day might've been memorable for all the wrong reasons. In a post to Reddit's /r/riprequest (which was created after its sister sub was made private), user 'BrodyArgo', who identifies as RipRequests operator, posted the story behind his ruined weekend. According to him, the RIAA "somehow" found out where he lives and took the opportunity to hand-deliver a cease-and-desist notice. RipRequests Will Not Return On Reddit, BrodyArgo responded to some questions from fans. Of note is that the RIAA reportedly ordered both the RipRequests Discord server and corresponding Reddit forum closed down. Permanently. "Close the sub and discord," he said of the RIAA's demands. "Which I did. I'm not going to jail for y'all." No one mentioned involuntary cosmetic surgery so at this point it seems safe to assume the tweet was metaphorical. However, the people from RipRequests have released an interesting track on Bandcamp which appears to feature a telephone recording of an RIAA counsel issuing a warning to BrodyArgo's parents about their son's unacceptable behavior. As BrodyArgo explains, the track is part of an album released by RipRequests to mark the end of the service and an era. "After nearly 4 years, Rip Requests has finally shuttered its doors for good due to unforeseen circumstances (ok let's be honest we all saw it coming)," he writes. "This album was a [work in progress] that I was expecting to drop on Christmas, but I decided to expedite the release after today's events. It is compiled of tracks submitted by the most talented members of the Rip Requests Discord server / members I reached out to, and I'd like to believe that it is a proper send-off. "It has been an honor to chat with each and every member of the subreddit and Discord server. Thank you all," he concludes. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. Fakku Sends DMCA Takedown Request Targeting TorrentFreak Ernesto Van der Sar, 19 Dec 08:22 PM When Fakku launched 15 years ago, it was an aggregator for unlicensed scanlations of adult manga, also known as hentai. The site's founder, Jacob Grady, studied computer science in Massachusetts at the time and used student loans to pay the server bills of a site that was essentially a pirate operation. Fakku never sought trouble with rightsholders though. It simply wanted to expand the manga niche to a broader audience by aggregating translations. That worked well as the platform kept growing. As the years passed things got more serious and Fakku slowly but steadily signed deals with rightsholders. By the end of 2015, it had completed the transformation from a 'pirate site' into a licensed publisher, which is a laudable achievement. This new role in the manga ecosystem also meant that Fakku became interested in protecting its rights. After all, you don't want other people to profit from 'your' content. This meant that the publisher started to send takedown notices to pirate sites, and more. Over the past few months, Fakku has repeatedly gone to court trying to unmask the operators of sites such as Hentai.cafe and HentaiNexus. These two domains have since disappeared. At the same time, the publisher is sending millions of takedown notices to various online platforms. Google alone has received over 45 million takedown requests from the company since early this year. Unfortunately, not all of these are correct. A few days ago the company sent a DMCA notice to Google asking it to remove 1,110 URLs from its search results. Most of these point to pirated content, but TorrentFreak was listed among these sites as well. In fact, Fakku suggests that our news article covering the legal action against Hentai.cafe is somehow copyright infringing. We're not aware of any wrongdoing, of course, and the "commutative" [sic] episode list provided in the takedown notice doesn't ring any bells either. Mistakes can happen, of course, and luckily Google stepped in and decided to keep the article in its search engine. We don't want to make a big deal out of it really, but it would be great if Fakku could be a bit sharper going forward. TorrentFreak asked Fakku for a comment on our findings but the company didn't immediately reply. Our news article isn't the only unusual URL in the takedown notice though. We also spotted a blog post from Doujins.com, which reports on a row between Fakku and Hentai Heaven from two years ago, which appears to have been sorted out later. That post was removed from Google's search results, but a copy under another URL is still indexed. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more. ©2021 TorrentFreak | Office 21338 PO Box 4336 Manchester, North West M61 0BW United Kingdom Web Version   Preferences   Forward   Unsubscribe     Powered by Mad Mimi®A GoDaddy® company