Three major music labels—Sony Music Russia, Universal Music Russia, and Warner Music UK, subsidiaries of the “Big Three” music labels—have each separately filed copyright suits on Thursday against vKontakte (VK), the so-called “Russian Facebook.”

The suits, filed in Saint Petersburg and Leningrasky Region Arbitration Court, charged that vKontacke has created an unlicensed music service involving a large catalogue of copyright-infringing music. The labels claim that the social networking site (which boasts 143 million registered users globally, 88 million of whom are based in Russia) has deliberately promoted “large-scale piracy” on its website, according to The Guardian.

The record companies, which focus on a sampling of artists’ work in their suits, seek court orders to remove the infringing material and to require VK to implement content identification and removal measures like audio fingerprinting to prevent unauthorized uploading of infringing materials. The labels are demanding damages of as much as $1.4 million.

Russia: A “notorious” marketplace

For the past four years, VK, along with several other sites based out of Russia, have been included on the US Trade Representative’s annual review of “Notorious Marketplaces,” due to VK’s less-than-stellar record on copyright infringement. In October 2011, the Recording Industry Association of America commented that the site was “specifically designed to enable members to upload music and video files, hundreds of thousands of which contain unlicensed copyrighted works.”

“VK’s music service, unlike others in Russia, is an unlicensed file-sharing service that is designed for copyright infringement on a large scale,” said International Federation of the Phonographic Industry chief executive Frances Moore.

In December 2013, after being notified of nine major music labels’ intent to sue his site for infringement, VK founder Pavel Durov explained his willingness to abide by a notice-and-takedown system, telling TechCrunch, “If some music companies wish their content to be deleted from VK, we, as always, are willing to comply with their wish.”

Durov officially resigned from his post as CEO of VK on Tuesday. On Thursday, he retracted his resignation. “[I] clearly saw that my resignation at this difficult time would have been a betrayal of all that we have defended in the last seven years. It would be very easy and a very destructive way,” the International Business Times reported.