Two years after shutting down in the US, Russian stream-ripping website FLVTO.biz is interesting the $83 million verdict towards the location.
Main labels represented by the RIAA gained a significant victory towards FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. “The general recognition of those websites and the staggering quantity of visitors it attracts evidences the large harm being inflicted on the U.S. report trade,” the RIAA wrote in its lawsuit in 2021. FLVTO.biz attracted 94 million visits a month on the top of its recognition, with 12% of that visitors originating in the US.
In 2021 a Virginia federal court docket issued a default judgment towards operator Tofig Kurbanov after he failed to look for his U.S. court docket date. The RIAA demanded $83 million in damages and the court docket granted that request. Now Kurbanov seems to be preventing again after greater than two years primarily based on a submitting Digital Music Information obtained from the Court docket of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
A discover of enchantment was filed again in March 2022, however attorneys for the case have been silent till now. It’s unclear how Kurbanov’s protection group will method this case, however we do have just a few hints. Lawyer Val Gurvits advised TorrentFreak that his shopper intends to problem the truth that FLVTO.biz may be held chargeable for tens of millions of {dollars} in copyright infringement.
“If the report firms can actually get multi-million greenback judgments with out having to show a single occasion of infringement inside the US, then nobody who operates a web site is protected,” the lawyer stated in regards to the case on the time. It’s additionally unclear if that $83 million judgment precisely displays the state of the web site immediately.
Pulling the location up on SimilarWeb to verify the visitors, we are able to see that it solely will get round three million views per 30 days now. That’s a far cry from the tens of millions of views it commanded simply three years in the past—showcasing that the judgment and shutdown has curbed curiosity in stream ripping.