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YouTube-MP3 Ripper Creator Takes On Google
judgecorp writes "21-year old computer science student Philip Matesanz is ignoring a 'cease and desist' order from Google over his site YouTube-mp3.org, which rips audio tracks from videos hosted on YouTube. Instead, he has launched a public campaign against Google, arguing that German law allows what he is doing. Matesanz has an online petition."
There are videos with copyrighted material on YouTube which is allowed to be on YouTube (many artists/labels put music up themselves). That doesn't mean anyone is free to turn it into an mp3. Though, I'm not sure why Google would go after a site like this, rather than the music industry... perhaps someone else can explain that :)
It's long been a well-known secret among technologically capable people (like you, dear reader) that it's very easy to download the video files for youtube videos. Extracting the audio is just another simple step away from that. Google has ignored such services in the past because they really don't care if people download these videos or the music on them. Sure, it might eat in to their revenues a little bit, but not much, since most people will just keep coming back to the site anyway.
The real issue here is that copyright holders (those big evil RIAA members) never realized how easy stripping music from youtube videos actually was. That's the only reason they let all their music go up on the site (albeit slathered with advertising and overlays.) Anytime someone draws attention to how easy getting the audio (or video) actually is, it makes copyright holders skittish. They think that this guy has somehow discovered some sort of technological loophole that allows him to download the files in a way others can't (he hasn't.) Google is probably under tremendous pressure to shut this guy down, and they'll do it just so that nobody starts asking questions about why it's so easy to do what he's doing anyway.
Better that one man takes the fall (and just shuts down his site) than that the whole world suffers losing unfettered access to youtube source files.
TSIA
As long as the US still has military bases in Germany it would be a relatively simple operation to pick him up off the street, throw him in a van with diplomatic plates, put him in a crate marked "diplomatic cargo", and fly him to one of many secret US prisons around the world (there's probably one on Rammstein, so he wouldn't even have to leave Germany). Since he's not a US citizen, he has no rights under the US Constitution, and America doesn't give a crap about the sovereignty of other "so called" nations that it defeated in WWII.
All Google has to do is suggest that this young "hacker" is a "cyber terrorist" acting against the interests of American corporations, which doesn't seem like much of a challenge given how our government always goes along with anything a corporate lobbyist tells them.
You're welcome.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Actually a German citizen can not be extradited from Germany. It actually even works the other way around. If you happen to commit a crime in a foreign country, the German government will try "everything" (at different degrees of everything) to get you back to Germany and then try you under German law. This is done since German law is seen as fair and others as barbaric. There where a few high profile cases of drug possession in Tailand (which will get you executed), where the German government intervened.