
RIAA Lawyers Botched a Big One Against flvto.biz – So What’s Next? - dmitriid
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/01/25/riaa-flvto-biz/
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drtillberg
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.

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ijpoijpoihpiuoh
> 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.

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PeanutNore
No, it is indeed a Federal court

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wp381640
full decision and docket

[https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
courts/virgini...](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
courts/virginia/vaedce/1:2018cv00957/393537/30/)

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...](https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/94d20c4dbb3304ccfdcee04bdf2c453f6cad6fc8a28eb1c3e35e30ce0facac10/detection)

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

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marcinzm
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.

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

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

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

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

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yalue
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.

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CM30
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.

