RIAA Lawyers Botched a Big One Against flvto.biz – So What’s Next? | Hacker News Reader

RIAA Lawyers Botched a Big One Against flvto.biz – So What’s Next?

digitalmusicnews.com

56 pointsdmitriid21 comments

The title is not consistent with the article. The judge decided a Russian website could not be required to defend itself in a U.S. Federal court. Notable decision, but that alone doesn't mean the lawyers "botched" it. On the contrary, it sounds like the 3 law firms employed by the website operator did a remarkable job of persuading the judge.

The RIAA lawyers botched it because their strategy was essentially banking on the other party not appearing in court and thus getting a default judgement. When they showed up with proper representation, the music industry hired lawyers were essentially caught with their pants down.

> The judge decided a Russian website could not be required to defend itself in a U.S. Federal court.

U.S. state court, I think. A Virginia district court judge does not have the power to decide whether or not an action can be taken in federal court. Technically, I doubt he can prevent the RIAA from filing in CA either, because I don't think state court judges have authority over judges in other states. I believe the only thing the judge can decide is whether the lawsuit in question can be moved to another jurisdiction. But what do I know? I'm no lawyer.

No, it is indeed a Federal court

full decision and docket

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/virgini...

my biggest question from this case is if and how defendant is earning enough income from the websites to hire lawyers - i'm thinking it might have something to do with the .exe the sites push on users

edit: yep - that is what he's doing, multiple systems mark his download as adware/trojan downloader

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/94d20c4dbb3304ccfdcee04bdf...

You don't have to depend on adware with this amount of users. https://www.similarweb.com/website/flvto.biz

As I understand it, it's hard to monetize shady websites using anything except shady things like adware. Look at 4chan and it's perpetual struggle to get advertisers.

4chan is known for hosting porn and snuff. Flvto is for downloading YouTube videos.

the docket mentions that - it's 260M sessions/visits p.a but only ~10% are from the USA with most traffic from emerging markets, so not really monetizable[0]

pay-per-download malware, otoh, can pay $5+ a hit even in those markets

the court filings don't mention malware but it might be a much more effective way to have the domains seized

[0] also indicative of this is the ad networks used - propellerads, pushwhy, addthis, yandex - the first two are blocked almost everywhere because of malware distribution

the defendant could also have multiple sources of money, what a concept

And all that for a youtube to mp3 converter. Didn't even realize those sites got prosecuted nowadays.

If I write in a comment the command "youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <video URL>", does Hacker News risk to be prosecuted ?

Thanks I was using ffmpeg for the conversion up til now = TIL

I'm pretty sure youtube-dl just invokes ffmpeg in the background to extract the audio for you; all it means is that you don't need to remember the exact ffmpeg commands.

Wouldn’t that result in transcoding from one lossy audio format to another? I’ve always been advised against that.

Generally, that would result in a lossy-to-lossy conversion (at least on youtube, which primarily serves aac and opus audio).

But even ignoring that, most youtube videos go through a lossy-to-lossy conversion/re-encode when it's uploaded in the first place. Authors typically encode their videos into a lossy format before uploading them, and at least the video stream is always re-encoded by youtube itself once the video has been uploaded.

In addition, the source material (like screen captures etc.) is often encoded in a lossy format as well, which would result in the following chain:

lossless video capture -> saved to disk (lossy encoding) -> video editor, then save result (lossy encoding) -> upload to youtube -> youtube encodes to formats to be delivered to viewers (lossy encoding)

If you specify a non-lossless format to youtube-dl, then append -> youtube-dl re-encode to chosen format (lossy encoding).

A corporation filing a statement of claim in a civil lawsuit is not a criminal prosecution.

In defense of parent comment, I think this is actually a correct usage. As a verb, 'prosecute', doesn't necessarily imply criminal action, just pressing a claim. The first definition per Google is "institute legal proceedings against."

All of the specific legal definitions indicate alleged violation of criminal law, and the example text for that Google search (obstruction of a highway) is also criminal, not civil.

I'm not aware of any common usage of "prosecute" that refers to civil complaints.

To name a couple in the legal context specifically:

* under the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a civil plaintiff who doesn't show up to trial has their case dismissed for failure to prosecute [0][1]

* a claim of malicious prosecution can be brought based on an unjustified criminal or civil claim (though some jurisdictions do call the tort "abuse of process" if it's based on a civil claim)[2]

[0] https://definitions.uslegal.com/f/failure-to-prosecute/ [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_41 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_prosecution

Seems like the law working as it was meant to. It should always be about the jurisdiction of the person running the site or business that matters, not whatever one their users 'happen' to be based in. The whole US idea of people being found guilty of so and so because someone from the US used their site or services is ridiculous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com