YouTube Video and MP3 Download Websites Succumb to Legal Threats

• Multiple YouTube video and MP3 conversion websites are shutting down following legal notices from the music industry.
• Popular websites for downloading YouTube content like video-download, easyload, pickvideo, and youtube-mp3 have disabled their services.
• The music industry has been pressuring YouTube to shut down these illegal services as it leads to a large number of copyright infringements happening on a daily basis.

The music industry is pressuring third-party websites that allow video and download websites from YouTube into closing down. Websites like video-download, easyload, pickvideo, and youtube-mp3 have succumbed to legal threats from the music industry and have disabled their services.

The music industry has been rallying organizations like IFPI, BPI, and RIAA to issue threats against video and mp3 download websites that rip off content from YouTube. The three organizations filed a lawsuit against YouTube-MP3 last year and pressured the platform into closing down. The download website had over a million users downloading music every day.

Image Courtesy of EasyLoad

With legal threats being delivered to owners of similar websites like PickVideo, Video-Download, and Easyload, the owners do not want to fight against the music industry. With no chance of winning lawsuits, the website owners are complying with the legal threats and are shutting down their websites.

Despite the music industry slowly winning the battle against piracy, people on the internet are continuously finding ways of pirating content. Smaller websites are already cropping up all over the internet, and as soon as websites are taken down, users are redirected to similar websites that crop up in a matter of hours or days. The music industry is trying to encourage the use of legal streaming websites, and with streaming services becoming cheaper than ever, the win against piracy does not seem very unlikely.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that MP3 downloading websites that rip off content from the video-sharing platform do not always infringe copyrights. Some video creators publicly allow access to their users to download and use their content. Audio extractions by default do not always infringe copyrights. However, the legal fees MP3 download services have to shell out to fight against organizations like IFPI, BPI and RIAA make shutting down services the more viable option for website owners.