Like the historical act of putting a rotting corpse on display to warn other would-be pirates, Sharebeast.com now displays the familiar banner of the FBI on its site:
RIAA Chairwoman and CEO Cary Sherman called this a huge win for the music industry. “Sharebeast operated with flagrant disregard for the rights of artists and labels while undermining the legal marketplace,” she said in a release.
A related site, albumjams.com, was also taken down.
In a recent high-profile incident, Sharebeast was hosting a leak of Kanye West’s upcoming album SWISH, according to Ars Technica. But the offerings on the site were sprawling, from music to soccer to television shows.
“Millions of users accessed songs from Sharebeast each month without one penny of compensation going to countless artists, songwriters, labels and others who created the music,” Sherman said.
This takedown is perhaps the most significant action against filesharing by the United States since Megaupload was shut down in 2012. Most of the large filesharing sites, however, are not based in the U.S.
RapidShare, which was based in Switzerland, was voluntarily shuttered earlier this year.
Other types of illegal music sites have also felt the heat of law enforcement. Grooveshark, which was originally founded in 2006, quickly gained a following because of its on-demand catalog that allowed you to stream songs a la carte. This was long before Spotify even arrived on the scene.
But many of the songs uploaded to Grooveshark were copyrighted songs — and Grooveshark’s founders reportedly instructed employees to upload popular songs. This eventually led Grooveshark to go dark on April 30, and one of its cofounders was later found dead in his home.
Of course, the most famous filesharing site, The Pirate Bay, is still engaged in a game of “whack-a-mole” with European authorities. The site unveiled a defiant logo in May that sent the clear message that even if one domain is shut down, new domains will spring up in its place. The Pirate Bay’s cofounders, however, have faced legal battles including imprisonment in Sweden and Denmark.
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2015.
