Facebook clamps down on piracy as it wipes out several music-sharing groups

Gone are the days when internet forums were the go-to place for peer-to-peer music-sharing. Instead, music aficionados have moved to Facebook, where there are numerous groups housing tons of rare albums you won’t even find on torrent sites. But this might be about to change.

As is often the case with such communities, members tend to share a lot of pirated content on these platforms and this hasn’t gone unnoticed by anti-piracy activists.

Notorious Dutch anti-piracy watchdog BREIN has submitted a complaint to Facebook to remove nine file-sharing groups, where thousands of music albums were being distributed without permission from rightsholders, TorrentFreak reports.

“Links to infringing files hosted on cloud services were indexed on the pages. Knowingly posting links to infringing files is itself a violation,” BREIN said.

Facebook has since responded to the complaint by wiping out all nine ‘pirate’ groups.

Removing pirated content of the platform is nothing new. Earlier this year, Facebook removed a number of similar groups following a litany of infringement-related complaints.

Facebook initially introduced file-sharing in groups back in 2012 as part of its effort to encourage more meaningful interactions between friends and family. Unfortunately, not all users are using the feature as the social media giant intended.

BREIN is well-known for its unyielding pursuit of piracy. Back in 2015, the anti-piracy establishment went after torrent streaming service Torrents Time, slapping them with a cease and desist letter for encouraging illegal file-sharing.

As TorrentFreak remarks, while shutting down the ‘pirate’ groups might work for now, it’s likely that the people involved will simply regroup and move on to another platform.

The cat and mouse game continues.