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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?"
I have tried playing with a couple stream rippers before, only problem is streams tend to be real low quality...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
They would put a tape recorder up to the radio and capture the latest songs, then make copies for their friends. Sure it sounded bad but they didn't care. And neither did the RIAA, because their albums sounded better than the crappy copies the kids made, so they figured they would still want to go out and buy the latest album because of the high fidelity sound. Now that we can get digital copies they are sorely afraid. THe next move will be toward an encrypted stream, but as I always say...if you can hear it, you can rip it.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Don't some internet radio stations have to pay fees of some sort ?
Why, bribe^h^h^h^h^hLobby Congress to make it illegal, of course.
If a respectable number of P2P users switch to this, internet radio itself will be attacked. It has already been attacked, actually, but P2P was a bigger boogeyman.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
In the 80's, it was believed (by large record companies mainly) that home taping of radio broadcasts was killing music. This is the exact same thing as home taping, and home taping is perfectly legal (is that time shifting or space shifting or something)! So really, there is no legal or moral reason not to do it, and the RIAA can't very well (unless I have too much faith in human reason- I hope not) sue people for taping the same broadcasts they get from the radio if they get it from the internet. That just seems far too arbritrary a lawsuit to happen... but the thought still scares me for some reason.
Esoteric reference.
how will the music industry respond?
As stupidly as possible, just like normal.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
No, there aren't, because P2P by its nature requires each peer to know the address of the other peers.. and "anonymous" networks like Freenet are hopeless for music (so slow & poor content). You may be getting confused by blocklists which prevent certain address ranges connecting with your P2P client.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
How is it untraceable? As I understand it (and I could be wrong), when one listens to streamed music over the web (as opposed to music broadcast over the air waves), one must make a specific recordable connection with the source of the music. Your IP number will be recorded somewhere.
Perhaps what is meant is that while there will be a record that you were listening, there will be no proof that you were recording. Indeed, contrary to downloading a MP3, the presumption will be that you "only" listening and nothing (useable) remained on your hard drive.
Of course if enough people do this, that presumption will be reversed. Imagine a world where 95% of the people have and use software that will, with one click, correctly snip, save, and index every song streamed to their computers. When this happens, the RIAA will make a case that streaming a song is for all practical purposes the same as uploading an MP3 of the same song, and thus subject to the same copyright considerations.
Really? How? What interpretation of the law supports this? Any precedents? Your "right" to "back-up" that which you never owned rights to in the first place?
People have always recorded music off of the radio, and always will. However, that never made it "legal"; only cost-ineffective to police or prohibit. The one click recording of perfect digital data will be perceived as something different.
The makers of this software have probably just increased the likelihood of point to point DRM.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Hey, rather than justifying new ways to get music without paying why don't you people shell out a measly $10/month for the 400,000 tracks on Rhapsody or Napster so that the artist can get something for their trouble?
And those are:
Lobbying
Litigation
That's how they will respond. I would bet a years supply of the best coffee beans money could buy on it.
And, depending on how you read the law, it's 100% legal.
This is exactly what was said about Napster, look at how long that lasted. I think its a bit of a pipe dream to believe that there will be a legal way to acquire large amounts of copyrighted music for free w/o the consent of the copyright holder.
And on the off chance it was legal to do this you can be sure that Congress would put a stop to it pretty fast.
It's really annoying when you get bits of the surrounding songs on your saved music. Turning off crossfading will facilitate smooth ripping. Thank you.
I was doing this for a while. I streamed in about 15 niche stations that played the kind of music I liked, and got a lot of music. The error rate was fairly high, and I ended up with a lot of duplicates, but I found a lot of good music, and filled in some gaps in my collection.
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
But they're not. What better way to kill P2P then to have the data pool flooded with crappy stream-ripped versions of songs? I, for one, would get really tired of having to download the same track 5 times to find one that was ripped properly from the CD, instead of stream-ripped or badly edited. It's already hugely in the RIAA's favor that any idiot can rip something badly anymore, but it washes in that the average listener doesn't have a discerning enough ear to notice it.
Notice the small change in the quoted text. And it's still 100% true.
This is not like the cat in the box where you cannot ever know if it's dead or alive till you open the box and discover it's dead/alive.
With this law once you discover it is illegal, it's been illegal since you started doing it. So it's a bad plan to do it on the basis that you don't know if its illegal or not.
You know why the RIAA is going after P2P? Because its used mostly for piracy. Sure, some legit. songs are being downloaded, but the majority of it is blatant piracy.
Now here we are saying Internet radio is good, legitimate fair use; and then we use it for piracy.
Just like how Apple tried to be relaxed with their AAC DRM, but people just had to crack it. Sure, ther e are valid reasons for this, but once again people will use a valid, legal technology for piracy and ruin it for the rest of us.
no comment
Dear RIAA:
I have posted this before and will gladly post it again, no matter how many 11 year old girls you extort money from or how many scare stories you purchase to be run on mainstream American media, you have failed. Some of the people you are trying to frighten happen to be the Nerds and GeeKs that will continue to come up with ways to circumvent your bullshit. How much money have you wasted on these tactics which will always be circumvented or skirted? How much do you pay your drones to try to search for victims instead of real talent that can put out an entire album worth a reasonable ten bux as apposed to the T&A no talent losers or one hit per album wonders? Dumbasses, you are invovled in a war of attrition that you cannot possibly win. You are limited by money, we are limited only by our freetime and creativity.
Music will be shared, downloaded, spread amoungst the internet quicker than the next M$ Virii of the day. It will be shared at LAN parties and USENET, it will be shared between wireless networks, and countless other ways that we can dream up since we don't need money to do so. The tighter you squeeze, the more creativity oozes with no love for your Evil Empire. You are the creator of your own worst monstrosity that you chose to confront with hostility. What will you do this article asks, who the fuck cares. We will find a way around it anyway.
Maybe you should try releasing to public record how much money you have wasted and will continue to waste on this failed campaign before you try to accuse other things.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
I remember when they shut Napster down. Napster was great, and efficient, but since napster had a centralized server it was easy to target and take down.
Everyone imediatly when to Gnutella-net. Since Gnutella net was not centralized it could not be shut down. But the problem was, not being centralized meant that propagating search querries was ridiculously expensive in bandwidth, thus it was a slight pain in the ass.
Then we were worried that they would start sueing individuals, so someone developed free net that would use everyone else as a proxy to hide the origionating IP, thus the IP you see is not that of the person downloading the file. This would have worked but was damn stupid as far as wasting bandwith for anonymity.
the RIAA held off while on individual lawsuits, freenet never took off, now that the lawsuits are becoming a problem again we come up with stupid solution 'B', this streaming data client.
Basically, our file sharing clients will get worse and worse, and it will boil down to asking ourselves "do I really want to get this song in a shoddy quality, with skips and pops/waste a half hour in failed attempts to get it, or is it easier to just buy the song online legally?
And in fact, this is the way it should work. There will always be free clients and you will always be able to pirate music, it just a question how much of a pain in the ass it will be, and whether or not you value your time and quality of music over your money.
If the RIAA was smart(they aren't), they would lower the price of song downloads to 20 cents (an artist usually makes 10 cents per song on each cd), no one would bother wading through all the fake songs on Kazaa and most people would flock to the pay sites.
$1-$2 a songs? ppppttttt. . . Pirating methods don't suck that much . . yet.
Saying "Militia really just means National Gaurd" is like saying "Press really just means PBS"
It is truly amazing the lengths to which someone will go to obtain something they didn't pay for. Some people say, "Well, I wouldn't have bought it anyways, so whats the difference?" to which I reply, "If you wouldn't have bought it, why would you go through so much trouble to copy it?"
I tried stream ripping using RadioLover on a Mac. As it happens, there's an iTunes station that plays exactly the music I like, and nothing but. That being the case, I get much much better results from stream ripping than P2P, where I've spent far too much time searching for niche music no one is sharing.
However, as my wife pointed out, the point of saving the streams becomes moot, since I can always switch on the iTunes stream anyway - why duplicate the commercial free radio station? Good point. (On the other hand, the internet station *does* include rare vinyl tracks that are out of distribution, which you can't buy anywhere, and which are very difficult, if not impossible to find on P2P, so there is some value to stream ripping.)
This seems to be a similar situation to digital TV. The BBC plays commercial free movies at DVD quality. I click record on my EyeTV 400 PVR, and get DVD quality movies. Great again. Love it. However, the irony does not escape me that this makes the BBC the biggest faciliator of "pirated" movies around. It also makes me question the difference between digital TV recording and the olden days of VCR recording movies. What's the difference? The quality is better.
However, I'm getting quite used to the high quality of the movies, and to be frank, beyond my obsessive collecting and quality control obsessions, it really doesn't make a damned bit of difference. I can't share them on the internet cuz they are too big (1.4GB-4GB). My friends don't have computers for entertainment centres, so the movies I record are as useless to them as a copy-protected music disc, ie. a coaster. And besides, no one seems to think the value of a movie is nearly as high as the people selling them.
So what's changed? Ripping streams is like recording radio shows to cassettes. Hard disk recording digital TV is basically the same as using a VHS deck to record analog TV. The big difference is the quality is better. And...? That's about it.
The only people digital media would seem to help are commercial pirates, who with digital media can now make better counterfeit copies - and yet the RIAA/Hollywood doesn't seem to be doing much about them. (Hollywood themselves are responsible for the majority of movies in the wild anyway.) Greedy? Certainly. Insane? Possibly. The only thing worse than greedy insane people are the ones with enough money to buy polititions, high priced lawyers, and too much cocaine.
Still, it will be fun to tell the grandkids about it. (I was a student during the era of photocopy hysteria, so I've already got a sense of how ridiculous and incredible this is going to seem in the future.
"But wouldn't photocopying a book cost more than buying the book?"
"Yes, Virginia. It seems fear and uncertainty drive people to extreme forms of irrational thinking and behavior."
(a) it is, in fact, the RIAA that has them pissed off
(b) while the RIAA is ridiculously greedy and deceitful, nobody is entitled to just get free music whenever they want
(c) the RIAA should be blamed for 'taking' (inaccurate, sorry, but for lack of a better word) artists' money, not for 'being squares' or whatever and trying to protect the music they make money off of
1: I'm 21 years old, live on a college campus with a fat pipe.
2: I own between 500-600 cd's
Sooo. At $20 average cd price, and choosing the lower of the range you gave, $20*500 = $10,000. Ok, let's be REALLY conservative and say they were only $15 each. $15*500 = $7500. AND, you claim you are a student.
So, either you are bullshitting, or you are admitting to everyone here that you are from a family that is very very rich. Either way, your opinion is clearly from teh point of view of a very very small minority.
I view boycotts as one of the most in-effective tools to combat the RIAA.
Did you see their profits plummet? I think the boycott is working quite well. I can't believe you seriously suggest writting a LETTER to them. Give me a break. These are the same people who were convicted of price fixing by the US government. The prices are STILL high, and only seem to be goin higher.
Boycotting CD sales is the only way to combat the RIAA. Copying the songs only give the RIAA more excuses to justify their absurdly high prices. I have not bought a single RIAA affiliated CD in the past 3-4 years, and I urge everyone here to do the same. The only way to get through to these people is by hurting their bottom line. When they cannot afford their Ferraries anymore they might start to listen.
Given the reasonable assumption that the 'fair use' guidelines would permit me to make a copy of a CD I have
bought, what then happens if I sell or give the original
away? Am I somehow legally obligated to destroy my copy,
be it a duplicate of the original cd or mp3s ripped from it?
Yes, given thier current stance that loss in revenue MUST be from P2P and nothing else*, a quiet boycott won't change how they behave anytime soon.
The best ways to make a boycot work are to write them and tell them you've stoped buying thier products (and why), to get the media's attention in such a way that shows as many involved in a boycot as possible, and to stop downloading thier music! (if few to no songs are being shared online, yet thier down in sales by a huge amount that could not possibly be related to the number swapped they might get it).
The anti-RIAA t-shirt is acutally a good idea. If enough people were wearing t-shirts or whatever that said boycott the RIAA, especialy if they made it hard to connect to p2p, this would help create a 'buzz' that would be hard to ignore. Somthing like "I Won't buy, download, or listen to anything the RIAA produces. Ask me about the big RIAA boycott". Well probably better get someone who's actually good at t-shirt messages.
In summary, for a boycott to work, it'll take more effort than just not buying thier shiny disc's that somtimes plays in cd players and somtimes just locks up your mac.
Mycroft
*e.g.:The bad dip the economy took, the low percieved quality of many of thier cookie cutter bands, the angry people who've gotten sick of thier bullying, copy protection schemes that cause problems, the larger numbers of people hearing of how they mistreat acts, the perception that thier prices are to high, and many more I'm sure.
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Unless you're in Canada or somewhere where they don't have real money, CDs are *not* $20. Try $7-$10. $14 at the most, for brand new releases. So your so-called "REALLY conservative" estimate, $15, is close, if you only buy the new releases from major label bands at a Best Buy or something, and are unfortunate enough to live somewhere with sales tax.
Also, plenty of students have a lot of spending money. It's called "not being a lazy ass" or "having a job". $7500 over several years isn't that much, if music is what you enjoy and spend money on. Hell, students at my old school probably spent that much just on weed over the four years... well, the ones who smoked weed were there for longer, but you get the point.
Basically, you're another example for the need for a (-1, Stupid) moderation choice.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
As it is now, I can find a lot of different streams that play something I will enjoy any time of the day I try. Given that, what's the point of saving it to disk, just find another stream, etc.
If there's a song or album I really like, I still want to own it, and a 128-192 stream is not a good enough copy for me. Same thing with p2p sharing, the bit-rate is usually too low.
I hardly download any new music any more, in a large part due to streaming. I consider that if I go through the trouble of looking for something to download, I'm probably at best going to get a copy at 192, and I hear all this stuff in rotation as weel as a lot I already have on the streams. So I lose a little choice in track selection, right now the streams have been doing well enough with their variety. I figure I can spend my time better doing something else, let them hunt down on the new tracks and rip and encode them.
You can do this with:
If you have any other good suggestions of things that the RIAA should burn, post replies(Is that "allowed" here? etiquette?). (I even checked to make sure that this article is less than a week old before posting)
"Contrary to popular belief, downloading music (pirated or not) is NOT illegal. Since all you have to rely on is the NAME of the file you are downloading, you can claim negligence. Hey, how are we supposed to know if the song is pirated or not? What if we live in a cave? Brittney Spears, who?"
yes, that's a really plausible defence.
This is where the problems lie. Stop trying to go public with services/sharing/selling. You are stealing from somebody.
Kids copy a few tracks off the radio, or from their friend's CD, and no-one cares that much. It's what we've had for decades, and we can all live quite happilly thank-you.
As soon as someone starts distributing en masse to the world at large - to people they don't really know - the balance tips.
We have a balance between how much hassle/loss of quality we'll endure for free music. The record industry has a balance between how much hassle it is to track/sue people against how well organised they are, and how widely they're distributing their stuff.
Dude, don't assume that writing music is easy work.
This is one of the ways where the music industry harpoons itself, IMHO. They portray the big stars glamourously as if they are always having fun, and they don't portray the lesser artists at all. Thus meaning that nobody gets to see the huge amount of lugging expensive kit around without it breaking, playing/singing the same thing over and over again to get it to sound right, revising bits to create a proper balance, etc.. or if the public DO get to see it, they only get to see the bits where everyone was laughing.
Musicians work. Maybe not so much that they deserve millions, but they do work.
From what I've been reading, the idea is ripping isn't always 100% (crossfades, DJ's talking, bad cut's etc). Use ripping to find stuff you like... and then the software enables you to actually BUY the things you want to listen to more. The software itself isnt' selling the music. It'd be like recording off of FM, liking a song, and being able to tell your old tape deck "hey, I like that... let me buy the CD"