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Google Bars Site That Converts YouTube Songs Into MP3s
An anonymous reader writes "Google is apparently cracking down on a popular site that converts the music from YouTube videos into MP3s. YouTube-MP3.org has received a letter from Google, YouTube's parent company, notifying the site operators that converting videos this way violates YouTube's terms of service, according to the blog TorrentFreak, which said it has seen the letter. In addition, YouTube apparently has blocked YouTube-MP3.org's servers from accessing the site."
It is trivial to extract the audio from a youtube video and convert it to an mp3. There are tools on Windows, Linux, and OSX that can do that without a lot of effort. So, shutting down this site is, IMO, an exercise in futility.
I suspect that you are underestimating the degree of laziness, technical ignorance, and futzing-with-youtube-on-computers-they-can't-install-stuff-on-because-they-are-at-work/school, at play here.
Obviously, Google knows that you can do whatever you damn well want with the video once you've downloaded it(and, while they receive no further ad revenue, it also doesn't cost them anything further, and they have no way of going after you, so they aren't going to bother).
I suspect, though, that Google takes a dim view of tools, usable even by morons, that eat their bandwidth, throw away any ads they serve, and quite possibly upset the RIAA and friends without any benefit to Google.
They're blocking their servers from downloading the videos. They aren't removing it from their search results. That's exactly what I'd do in their case. They'll simply feed it URLs, see who connects to download the video, block the IP, and repeat.
This seems like a complete non-story to me. But then, I've never heard of that site before. If it is actually popular, I can see why that alone would make it news-worthy. As a technical person, I'd look for a browser plugin to download the video, then a desktop app to rip the audio. Searching for a website which automates the process wouldn't have even occurred to me. It's funny how being technical can cause you to miss the boat on some trends just because the problem addressed was just never a problem for you in the first place..