WORLD’S ‘MOST-INFRINGING’ MUSIC SITE FACES LEGAL ACTION

[AsAp]

A music downloading website subjected to more Google takedown notices than any other in the past year has changed its business model following legal action. Google received 9.7 million notices for Dilandau.eu in the past 12 months alone, making the site the second largest all-time infringer according to the search engine's Transparency Report.

Perhaps surprisingly, Google’s Transparency Report reveals that there are a few dozen sites that receive more infringement notices than The Pirate Bay. The top five most-reported sites have received in excess of six million notices each in the last year alone, pushing Sweden’s pirate haven way down the list.

In fact, when it comes to crowning the past year’s ‘King of the Notices’ one site comes out head and shoulders above all the rest, which is particularly interesting since most in the mainstream will have never heard of it.

Called Dilandau, this music search engine has been providing easy access to MP3s and full albums for some time and as a result has amassed a staggering 9,698,946 notices with Google in the past 12 months alone. The site beats file-hosting service RapidGator into second place with a measly 7,120,128 notices and ZippyShare into third with 6,971,163.

 

 

In the last four weeks Google received 571,942 notices related to Dilandau but that pattern is set to change following what appears to be a forced major modification to Dilandau’s business model.

Guillaume Champeau of French news outlet Numerama informs TorrentFreak that authorities recently launched legal proceedings against Dilandau following a complaint from SACEM, a music rights organization behind many previous local anti-piracy operations.

Dilandau’s operator is reportedly Spanish but it’s believed that French cybercrime police seized his France-based servers three or four weeks ago. Dilandau is currently up and hosted in Germany, but there have been some telling changes to the site.

Navigation to the site’s main domain, Dilandau.eu now results in a diversion to another domain, Dilandau.la. A check into Dilandau’s .EU domain reveals that the domain has been put “ON HOLDâ€. EURiD, the registry for .EU domain names, reports that while the domain is currently active it “may not be transferred pending the outcome of legal activity.â€

Once on Dilandau.la, however, the biggest changes yet become apparent. Gone are the tools and indexes which allowed visitors to download unlimited quantities of free MP3 files of the biggest artists around. In their place is a brand new interface which allows the visitor to view only the artists’ YouTube videos.

Only adding to the intrigue is the fact that a Google search for Dilandau fails to turn up the site in the first results. Instead searchers are presented with a fake site that appears to have nothing to do with the original. Only by searching for a precise URL (dilandau.eu or dilandau.la) does Google return the correct site.

Dilandau’s operators declined to comment on any possible legal action, telling TorrentFreak, “We just want to stay away from downloads.â€