Month: October 2025

Under the international umbrella of IFPI, the RIAA in the United States, and the BPI in London, the world’s leading recording labels have been on a constant upwards trajectory for a decade.

After the likes of Napster, Grokster, and LimeWire gatecrashed the party and introduced unwelcome (not to mention illegal) competition into the equation, in 2002 revenues tumbled and somehow managed to keep going south until 2014.

Making peace with YouTube was a necessary step that contributed billions of dollars to the overall recovery. The turning point came in 2015, marking the start of ten consecutive years of growth. Revenues more than doubled, from a low of US$12.9 billion in 2014 to a high of US$29.6 billion in 2024.

Piracy hasn’t gone away, but visible legal action against traditional pirate adversaries has been minimal, at least when compared to the periods when revenue was headed in the opposite direction.

Increased Threat, Unfinished Business

IFPI’s reporting in 2019 was upbeat; piracy had fallen dramatically and music consumption was on the up. Yet a relatively new form of consumption was already causing alarm and was soon described as a greater threat than pirate sites.

So-called stream-ripping was nothing new, but when fueled by the massive repository of recorded music on YouTube, the preferred tactic of shutting down the source was effectively obsolete. So, continuing along lines similar to those that had shuttered YouTube-MP3 in 2017, the industry took what action it could against sites that converted YouTube links into MP3 downloads.

One of the most notable disputes saw the RIAA take on the Russian owner of 2conv.com and FLVTO.biz. In an ideal world, the $83 million judgment in the labels’ favor back in 2022 would’ve dampened enthusiasm among those tempted by the same line of business. Ongoing streaming-ripping complaints in the RIAA’s annual reports to the USTR suggested minimal deterrent effect.

Y2Mate and Eleven Similar Sites Call it Quits

In an announcement Tuesday, IFPI confirmed that one of the most persistent threats with the greatest volume of online traffic, has now been shut down.

Y2Mate.com had been featured in the RIAA’s reports to the USTR for several years, and while its traffic had shown signs of decline more recently, 620 million visits per year between Y2Mate and eleven other sites (under common ownership), is clearly significant.

“Y2mate has been subject to website blocking actions in 13 countries and has appeared in numerous editions of the USTR Notorious Markets Report and the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watchlist. The shutdown of the sites is a result of targeted enforcement action by IFPI against the operator of the sites,” IFPI reported.

“The operator of Y2mate and the other 11 websites agreed to shut down the sites for good and to stop infringing IFPI’s members rights in the future. Most of the domains are now in IFPI’s possession, including Y2mate.com, Yt1s.com, Utomp3.com, Tomp3.cc, and Y2mate.gg.”

Finer Details Go Unmentioned

Other than an agreement to shut down and a promise not to infringe IFPI’s members’ rights in the future, IFPI’s announcement offers no further detail on the agreement or the assumed change in circumstances that led to it. It’s reasonable to assume that domains were handed over as part of a deal, however.

The full list of domains is available below. Records suggest that several were updated recently, with at least one currently displaying the message below.

Given the record industry’s complaints over registrant details being hidden away, it’s somewhat ironic that most of the domains have WHOIS records displaying ‘Withheld for Privacy’. That being said, there are more significant gaps in the information being made available. The absence of a lawsuit is unusual; the lack of a large settlement amount, even more so.

Sites Operated From Vietnam

Considering that IFPI’s multi-year mission to shut down Y2Mate led them to Vietnam, and despite the chances of obtaining anything close to a deterrent custodial sentence being close to minimal, IFPI still managed to obtain the sites’ domain names.

In theory, this should make it more difficult to relaunch the sites, but in practical terms, Y2Mate has been evading site blocking measures for years and is unlikely to consider the loss of a few domains as especially problematic. Nevertheless, control of the domains means millions of eyes on the shutdown notice and any benefits that might bring.

None of this means that the return of the sites is inevitable. Yet, if that was the chosen path, preventing it would be almost impossible. Enforcement with lasting results remains elusive in Vietnam, and sites like these can be launched, torn down, and relaunched in the time it takes to eat a sandwich.

The full list of websites shut down by IFPI:

9convert.com
In-y2mate.com
Tomp3.cc
Ump3.cc
utomp3.com
y2mate.gg
yt1s.gg
youtubepp.com
y2mate.com
yt1s.com
vidcombo.com
Y2mates.com

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

With many millions of daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The platform celebrated its 20th anniversary this summer and has grown from a hobby site, started by two college roommates, to a billion-dollar company.

This growth also brought added responsibility. In addition to the billions of casual, insightful, and heartwarming messages, Reddit’s popularity was also embraced by those who color outside the lines of the law.

Reddit’s Transparency

One of the issues Reddit has to deal with is copyright infringement, a relatively small task early on. In the first transparency report published ten years ago, Reddit reported that it received 176 takedown requests in an entire year.

Most of these DMCA notices did not lead to any removals, with Reddit stating that the infringing content was often stored on external sites and that “links do not generally infringe copyright.”

Today, that perspective has changed. Reddit’s current copyright overview clearly states that hyperlinks can trigger copyright violations. This is also evident from the many subreddits that warn members not to link to pirated material.

2025: DMCA Notices Up, Removals Down

The volume of takedown notices has also evolved quite a bit. According to Reddit’s latest transparency report, the company received 58,920 copyright takedown notices in the first half of 2025, a 5% increase over the 56,210 notices in the same period last year.

Despite receiving more takedown notices, Reddit actually removed less content, in part due to notices containing fewer links. In the first half of 2025, the platform removed 220,233 pieces of content – a 31% drop from the same period last year.

More Fair Use

Reddit’s reasons for declining to remove content in response to some takedown requests reveal an interesting trend. The number of instances where the company declined to remove content for fair use reasons increased more than 1000%, from 110 to 1,243.

This suggests that Reddit is devoting more attention to defending user-generated commentary and criticism. The transparency report lists several examples of fair use cases, including a discussion about copyrighted poems.

“We received a removal request from the creator of multiple poems, for a Reddit image post featuring said poems. The Reddit post also contained interpretations and criticism of the author’s intent. We declined to remove this content because we believe it made fair use of the poems,” Reddit writes.

Fair use remains a relatively rare reason to decline takedown requests. Most of the time Reddit takes no action is because the content has already been removed or no infringement was found.

Subreddit and User Bans

The latest transparency report also shows a significant increase in the number of subreddits that were banned for repeat copyright violations. In the first half of 2025, the company removed 709 subreddits, more than double the number it removed in the same period last year.

While subreddit bans skyrocketed, bans against individual user accounts for repeat copyright infringements grew at a more modest pace. Reddit banned 837 user accounts in the first half of the year, up from 757 bans in H1 of 2024.

These swings may suggest that copyright-infringement-related bans are reaching new highs, but that is not the case. If we zoom out further, we see that Reddit banned 3,215 subreddits and 5,853 users for excessive copyright infringement in 2022, which was the all-time high.

A Speck on the Radar

Zooming out further, it soon becomes clear that a few hundred users and subreddits banned for infringement are little more than a speck on the radar. Reddit and its moderators remove many more for other reasons, including spam, violent content, and harassment.

In the first half of 2025, Reddit mods and admins removed more than 158 million pieces of content from the site, while over 2 billion new posts and comments were added.

During the same period, Reddit admins banned 430,544 subreddits, mostly related to spam, while 2,613,473 users were issued temporary and permanent account bans, with ‘violent content’ the most cited reason. From this perspective, a few hundred copyright-related bans sound rather insignificant.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.