YouTube-ripping site agrees to settlement after legal dispute
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has succeeded in a legal battle to shut down content-ripping website YouTube-mp3.org. Court documents indicate a settlement between the parties, which will see the operators of the website pay damages, hand over the domain to one of the record labels, and desist from running any similar service in future. YouTube-mp3.org, which allows users to rip music and video from YouTube, was facilitating hundreds of millions of illegal downloads per month, according to the RIAA.

Last year, record labels took the popular YouTube-ripping site YouTube-mp3.org to court seeking the pirating website's permanent shutdown and $150,000 per violation. Well, the labels, helmed by the RIAA, have, as of today, won with recent court filings pointing towards a settlement between the two parties.

These sorts of websites let users download audio and video files from YouTube and in their suit, the RIAA claimed that YouTube-mp3.org had around 60 million visitors and tens to hundreds of millions of illegal downloads per month. When the lawsuit was brought forth, RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement, "It should not be so easy to engage in this activity in the first place, and no stream ripping site should appear at the top of any search result or app chart."

The website's owner has agreed to pay a settlement, though the details of that haven't been released, and a proposed injunction prohibits anyone associated with the website from having anything to do with a "streamripping" website in the future. The website domain name will also be given to one of the record labels.

The proposed judgement and injunction haven't been approved and ordered by the court yet and the website is still up as of writing, but similar sites and apps are already being taken down. As Mac Rumors reports, ProTube was removed from the App Store last week after multiple requests from Google for it to be taken down.