Slashdot Mirror
Shifting From P2P To Stream Ripping
An anonymous reader submits "As users continue to try fending off the ever more litigious music industry, some
seem to have dropped P2P entirely, moving to ripping instead. While
they lose some control over what they are downloading, it's a untraceable way
to download music (no way for the RIAA to track users or sue). With some
of the more powerful software that's been coming out recently, stream
ripping has become more main-stream. Some of the more well known software
packages, like StationRipper, allow
users to download several thousand songs on a daily basis. And, depending
on how you read the law, it's 100% legal. How will the RIAA respond?
As more users move to this type of technology to avoid the P2P lawsuits, how
will the music industry respond?"
why would i want to rip streams? i can get higher quality from stand alone downloads.
graspee
Media: Cheap tapes were far more expensive then than CD media is today and good ones (CrO2 and the like) could cost the pretty much the same as an album.
Time: Copying an album to tape occurred in real time - if the album was 46 minutes, it took you 50 minutes (46 minutes of music, 4 minutes of getting the needle in the right place, making sure that the tape leader in the right place, etc) to do it. If you wanted to pass it around to a few friends, multiply the time by the number of friends to get the result...
Distribution: If you wanted some friend in New York to have a copy and you lived in California, time to pay a visit to the post office...
A lot of us who copied albums to tape did it to preserve the album or to get a good copy before the disk got dirty/scratched/etc - which was a real possibility, unlike the "I want to back up the CD in case it gets scratched" excuses some people like to use today.