The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has issued a DMCA subpoena to CloudFlare in order to discover the owner of one of its customers: the music hosting service Wi.to.
The music industry trade group is accusing Wi.to of allowing copyright infringement on its site. In its complaint against the service, the RIAA listed several infractions it found on the platform.
Wi.to is a file hosting service that is based in Estonia that focuses exclusively on music files.
In the past year, the RIAA has reportedly used similar subpoenas multiple times against Cloudflare, which, among other things, offers customers content delivery networks (CDNs) that could be used to facilitate digital piracy. In these subpoenas, the RIAA has sought to discover ownership details of those who run the actual sites.
It is said that CloudFlare, in general, complies with the subpoenas.
In response to the complaint, TorrentFreak reached out to the owner of Wi.to, which they identified as “Sergey.”
Sergey, who lives somewhere in Estonia, says that he learned about the subpoena during the previous week, and he does not seem too concerned about it.
He insists that he and his company “are not criminals.” He went on to say that “Wi.to is a service that makes it easy to publish music files DJs have created themselves. It’s true that the service is sometimes abused. But that’s something the users do. Also, services like Soundcloud or Dropbox are abused as well.”
Sergey further indicated that, because his company operates in Estonia, it is not subject to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its requirements. In spite of this, he insists that his company does process copyright complaints and that they regularly remove files found to be in violation of the platform’s policies.
One of the interesting facts about this case is that, while the RIAA has filed a subpoena to learn Wi.to’s identity, Sergey says that they have not actually asked the company to remove the files in question.