Mp3skull

MP3Skull claimed to comply with the DMCA and removes infringing content reported by content owners. On 17 April 2015, a lawsuit was filed against the operators of the website. The music companies involved in the suit asked for $520 million in statutory damages and a permanent injunction that prevents domain registrars and registries from working with the site.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}

It has been speculated that the lawsuit was filed as a way for the record labels to backdoor SOPA and use it further as a precedent to take other domains and websites down.^[1] Similar lawsuits against Hotfile and IsoHunt ended with both sites being shut down and settlements of $80 million and $110 million respectively.^[9][10]

In October 2015, the website was submitted to USTR as a notorious pirate site by RIAA. According to RIAA, MP3Skull is the most highly trafficked MP3 website of its kind in the world as of 2015.^[11][12] As of February 9, 2016, RIAA had requested a total of 1,769,414 URLs on mp3skull.com to be removed from Google's search results.^[13][14] RIAA has mentioned the website specifically in their blog as well as in a public forum by CEO Cary Sherman.^[15][16]

The site's domain name was changed from mp3skull.com to mp3skull.to early in 2015, and the site has been operating via different domains ever since.^[12][17] On 24 February 2016 group of prominent RIAA labels have won a default judgment against the site in a lawsuit started on 17 April 2015. Listing 148 music tracks as evidence, the companies asked for the maximum $950,000 in statutory damages for each, bringing the total to more than $190 million. This award was granted by U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke, who additionally issued a permanent injunction preventing the site's operators from engaging in copyright-infringing activity in the future.^{[18][19][20][21][22]} The site is consequently now offline.^[18]

• Trade group efforts against file sharing