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The operator of MP3Juices and YTMP3, two of the most popular YouTube downloaders, is taking steps to protect these valuable brands. The sites have many imitators and competitors who use the brand's keywords to attract search traffic. The operator wants this to stop and has asked Google to remove the 'infringing' sites from its search results.
Every day, millions of people use YouTube rippers, tools that are often used to download free music.
The music industry is not happy with these services. Stream ripping is considered the biggest piracy problem, one that is more serious than those posed by torrent sites and direct download portals.
In response to this threat, the RIAA and its members have taken legal steps to close sites or have them blocked by internet providers. On top of that, rights holders have also sent hundreds of thousands of removal requests to Google, asking the company to remove stream-rippers from its search results.
These DMCA notices can be quite effective, but since many of the targeted sites take countermeasures, it's still a game of cat and mouse.
MP3Juices and YTMP3 take action
This month, we learned that the proverbial mice are also engaging in an elimination battle of their own. Apparently, the operator of two of the most well-known stream mining sites, MP3Juices.cc and YTMP3.cc, is also seeking help from Google.
As with the most popular brands on the Internet, the keywords 'MP3Juices' and 'YTMP3' are used by third parties to attract search traffic. The official site is heavily demoted because it is repeatedly targeted by rights holders, so these 'copycats' often end up higher in search results than the original.
This is a problem for the operator, who wants to put an end to it. And what better tool to achieve this than to send a DMCA Takedown Notice?
'Brand offenders'
The notice in question came in a few days ago and was sent by someone by the name of Ryan Milne. The first request covers the trademarks 'MP3 Juice' and 'YTMP3' and 22 URLs that use these terms without permission.
โAll the reported websites copied our brand 'MP3 Juice' without any authorization. We request the immediate removal of all infringing URLs from Google's index and help us protect our copyrights. Thank you," it reads.
Interestingly, most of the reported sites don't use copied logos or other content that we can see, so any copyright infringement isn't immediately obvious to us.
All the sites use the keywords 'MP3 Juice' and 'YTMP3', but that would fall into the category of trademark infringement. However, a search of the respective trademarks in the registry returned no results.
TorrentFreak reached out to the sites operator for more information about the removal request and the motivations behind it. So far, we have not received a response yet.
Google also appears to be puzzled by the notice. After a week, most of the URLs were still in the tail earring and the search engine finally decided not to remove them. However, there is a similar "YTMP3" removal request sent someone named Hunter Kipling, which resulted in the elimination from nearly two dozen 'competing' URLs.
To update: YT1S is turning the table on YTMP#.cc now, accusing the site of using their trademark...
