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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
The station you rip is streaming their songs with the ID3 tags otherwise the software won't know when to stop one MP3 and start another one.
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!
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.
As you know, XM Radio has a receiver for the Computer (XM PCR) that shows the music ID etc and a high quality stream with 120 channels. I wonder if any one thought of writing a software to rip the stream digitally?
don't forget streamripper.sourceforge.net They have support for just abt every os under the sun and if all else fails you can recompile yourself. I think finding a stream that spends 50% or more of it's time playing music you enjoy and ripping results in nice collection. (I do this because our bandwith at work is overused and streaming doesn't work out so well.)
:(){
Seeing as though the posting is a direct copy and paste of the techdirt article... how about we also read the bit that comes straight after that on their site which states that, really, this is hardly a threat to P2P...
"Well, some of the comments are a bit misleading. It's not clear just how mainstream this technology really is, and it's certainly not nearly as user friendly for users as basic file sharing applications. The idea is that it records songs directly from streaming radio stations (though, right now, it looks like only certain kinds of streaming radio stations work with the software). Also, copying a song off the radio (which is this basically equivalent to) often involves a lower quality offering with songs cutting into each other, DJs talking over the music and other radio-related reasons why it's not the same as getting a full track. "
I used to tape of the radio too, and ended up knowing songs as ending with 'And that was Vanilla Ice on 2KBY7 with the HOT Ice, Ice Baby... Keep rockin' dude... yeaaah'.*
It's not the same as a pure track... plus, as it says... crap quality.
* No, I didn't actually have any Vanilla Ice tracks on tape... no... really.
how will the music industry respond?
As stupidly as possible, just like normal.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Actually, for a small monthly fee you can have the nearly the whole world of RIAA music streaming at you by request.
$9.95 a month to Real Rhapsody will get you access to Real's entire library of 500,000ish songs in Real's streaming format, and $9.95 a month to the new Napster will get you access to Napster's library of 500,000ish songs in Windows Media format. In both cases, they've yet to establish a limit as to how many streams you can get per month.
Clearly, there's a rather gaping hole if you're able to save either of those sets of streams into any non-DRMed format.
.......(buffering)......(buffering).......
Start alsamixer
Set the capture source to "wave"
Jack up the "wave capture" setting
Capture the stream (or anything currently playing in fact) from /dev/dsp
Just think people have been bitching and moaning about the truly staggering number of ALSA settings for SB-Lives!, now see how it's useful?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
One of the cooler new ways of sharing music with my friends that I've been playing around with is the ml_www plug-in for Winamp (It was one of Justin Frankel's farewell gifts). The application lets you or anyone else access your media collection from anywhere, and stream or download your audio/video through a browser interface. Of course you can set up passwords and access privelidges. You can pick a song to listen to on your home computer while in the office; stuff like that.
All you need is a Winamp running with the plug-in, and someone--probably someone you trust--drops in your IP in a browser and one of these two windows pops up, depending on which template you're using. You can download the newest versions here.
There's a sourceforge project going on for the plug-in, but they haven't really brought that site up to speed yet. Most of the progress is in this Winamp Forums thread, with some occasional updates on Winamp Unlimited.
How about "Having halfway crossed the legal hurdles, stream ripping still has quite an upriver swim before it becomes mainstream"
Or maybe "Stream ripping, while not quite the open floodgates that bittorrent is, is gaining in popularity..."
Or, if you don't like it, "Stream ripping may soon come under the guns of the RIAA and have nowhere to go but downstream."
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
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Try inserting an icepick in your ear and it'll all become clear.
Well, UK and EU copyright law allows an exception for "time shifting" on domestic premises (i.e. video recording a television broadcast for playback later).
It doesn't state whether the time shifting copy could only be used once, but it's implied, and generally the copyright exceptions are subject to an overridding berne three step test that the exception is limited to acts that do not prejudice the right holder. This means that although the exceptions are available, if you abuse them in aggregate then it could be a problem.
However, theoretically, you could set up stream ripper to rip from thousands of stations, and only play back the song once at a later date, then delete it. Effectively, a music PVR. This would - in my interpretation - entirely justified under UK CDPA 1988 and the other EU national copyright laws that were harmonised in the late 1990s.
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
I don't know anyone who buys or has CDs. Seriously.
...
I'm the president of a huge club on campus, and I know many, many people. NO ONE has CDs. No one.
We do, however, have two OC-3s and a T-3...
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
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"
Alright, I have to reply to this one.
Yes, there are p2p applications that do prevent tracing. There's MUTE, which seems to have promise, although it's not particularly well documented. There's also GNUnet , which seems to be really intelligently designed, but I have no idea how well it works in practice, I don't think it's ready for mainstream use yet. And of course, freenet with FROST , but it's as slow and unreliable as the rest of freenet.
Ultimately, I think we can all agree that anonymous internet, especially filesharing, is coming and is going to render the RIAA's efforts useless.
As far as stream ripping, however, I think the idea was just that you could leech mp3s all day long and make a collection of whatever the stream is playing, not as an anonymous way of getting specific mp3s you want.
Every time I find a new way to get music, you /. pussies have to pick up on it and show the unwashed masses how to do it! Now radio stations can't handle the traffic. Now the RIAA's on the scent. Now I can't stream rip. Damn you for showing everyone the idea!
[puff puff]
I'm sorry for yelling. But you guys may have just ruined this by giving it this new audience.
Synergy is your friend
Just whatever you do, don't cross the streams.
If you are using Mac OS X, you can use audio hijaak pro. It lets you record RealAudio, Windows Media and MP3 streams. I use it all the time to time shift radio shows I like to AAC or MP3 for my iPod. Works like a charm. You can set up schedules and file sizes. Really sharp.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Everyone who makes this joke is neglecting the fact that this part of the DMCA only applies to encryption added by the legitimate owner of the copyright on whatever is being protected. So, no, encrypting your Kazaa traffic will not let you countersue the RIAA when you get busted.
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?"
If you're doing this your only viable option is to encode to wav and use up a lot of space. The point of stream ripping is that it preserves the original encoding. There's no way i'm reencoding a 128 kbps MP3 from /dev/dsp.
Photos.
You can use ASFRecorder, or, what I've been doing lately, use MPlayer with the -dumpstream option to save absolutely anything. I've recorded Windows Media video (with audio), RealMedia streams, MP3, and more. Works like a charm.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
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."
I know on slashdot, there is always someone who will prove you wrong. Today, I am that guy. I'm 21 years old, live on a college campus with a fat pipe. I pretty much don't remember when we didnt have MP3s. I own between 500-600 cd's, and I feel that it is money well spent:
l: It's not illegal.
2: A hard drive crash doesnt erase my collection. Burned cd's, backups, what have you get scratched, and aren't reliable. My factory made cd's will last much longer.
3: I can legally rip them at a high-bitrate in whatever the common format is.
4: A lot of my collection is indie / small label punk, these bands probably make less than I do, stealing their cds instead of buying really does affect them.
5: The main reason I buy cds is that when I rip them, there are no pops, none of my tracks are cut short, there are no duplicates, and the tags are 100% correct. I can put them in a database, and magically all the songs by the same artist end up together. When you buy cds, you get much better quality.
If I do use an MP3 service, it is just to see if a cd I'm thinking about buying is any good. I generally use Limewire, and store what I download in a seperate folder away from my collection, so I can easily delete it.
The RIAA does some stupid things, but I still think it is worth the money to actually buy the CD, and I view boycotts as one of the most in-effective tools to combat the RIAA. I think a well-written letter will do so much more than 1% of the population boycotting cds.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
No CD is worth that much money.
I buy from BMG Music Club, which has monthly sales, and if you buy during those sales, you get CD's for just under $7 each.
That's a decent deal, and I find I'm willing to buy 6-10 at a time for those prices.
But for $16, Brittany better give me a BJ and agree to not talk when I'm around.
The RIAA has been expecting this for a while now. Over the past several months they have been lobbying the FCC to put copy protection on the new Digital Audio Broadcasting (IBOC) to prevent this very thing. So far the FCC has held back from doing anything because RIAA has failed to show harm already being done - I wonder if this will be their example?
They argue that ripping programs to individual songs is illegal because it is "librarying" - which is NOT a legitimate fair use. Rest assured, they will come after it.
There's an interesting thread here about it, scroll down to the one that starts "OK, here's the scoop on allofmp3.com" by ronross.
$.01/MB is about what I think is fair for online music, you like $.99/track great, I don't, I like $.05/track. If I thought artists deserve to live like rock stars I'd send them parts of every paycheck, or buy them coke, but I don't. If a musician makes more a year than I do for what is obviously less work then they can't complain.
The URL again where you can legally get tons of good quality music for $.01/MB is www.allofmp3.com
The English button is at the top left, FYI.
Oh, and by the way, I welcome all flames/spam/etc to my personal email address kgb@submarinefund.com
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
I think the parent poster was referring to www.di.fm, not FM radio. RDS only applies to over-the-air FM radio broadcasts.
For DI.FM's MP# streams, it would be ID3.
Home recording laws are an exception to copyright that allow people to record stuff from the radio or TV for their own use without paying any royalties. Congress decided this was fair because taping from the radio was poor quality anyway, and a hassle, so it didn't affect the value of a song in terms of sales.
/. attest, people want individual songs of the internet, not albums. Also, digital technology makes it easy to sort out the songs you like from a stream relatively easily. Therefore, even though people say it's unfair, home recording laws will not allow recording of digital radio, because it will eat into profits from legitimate sales online, and therefore, is at odds with copyright law. Remember that copyright is a constitutional right in the United States before you start screaming about how ther RIAA is going to bribe congress to take away your rights. Your standing on thin ice if you think you have the right to record internet streaming audio just because you could do it before with analog radio.
Now, as people on
Vote for Pedro
Umm... ok. That's exactly the iron-clad legal guarantee I was looking for!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
There is a catch though, you must use a device that is "commonly distributed to individuals for use by individuals" and for which the primary purpose of the device is to make such recordings. What are these devices? Well they are DAT tape recorders, Cassette recorders, and CD recorders sold in places like Best Buy that are set top units. CD-ROM drives and computers are not "marketed for the primary purpose" of making digital audio copies, so they don't fit the law. You must also use blanks that are for the express purpose of copying music. They must also contain the SCMS (serial copy management system) that prevents you from making copies of copies. Source disks must be originals in these devices. Obviously, these controls do not exist on CDROM drives or computers.
There is a tax on these devices and blanks that is distributed out to the artists as royalties based on their popularity, etc. That's the crux of the issue - CD-ROM drives are not marketed as primarily CD copying devices, nor are computers and they do not contain the record copyright controls. But these set top boxes have only one real function, and there is a additional tax levied on them in the U.S. to legitimize their use.
Find a copy of the law here.
Section 1001 defines a "digital audio recording device" as: "Any machine or device of a type commonly distributed to individuals for use by individuals, whether or not included with or as part of some other machine or device, the digital recording function of which is designed or marketed for the primary purpose of, and that is capable of, making a digital audio copied recording for private use ...".
Section 1008 says "No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the non-commercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog music recordings."