YouTube-MP3 Ripping Site Sued By IFPI, RIAA and BPI (torrentfreak.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Two weeks ago, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry published research which claimed that half of 16 to 24-year-olds use stream-ripping tools to copy music from sites like YouTube. The industry group said that the problem of stream-ripping has become so serious that in volume terms it had overtaken downloading from 'pirate' sites. Given today's breaking news, the timing of the report was no coincidence. Earlier today in a California District Court, a huge coalition of recording labels sued the world's largest YouTube ripping site. UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Warner Bros, Sony Music, Arista Records, Atlantic Records and several others claim that YouTube-MP3 (YTMP3), owner Philip Matesanz, and Does 1-10 have infringed their rights. The labels allege that YouTube-MP3 is one of the most popular sites in the entire world and as a result its owner, German-based company PMD Technologies UG, is profiting handsomely from their intellectual property. YouTube-MP3 is being sued for direct, contributory, vicarious and inducement of copyright infringement, plus circumvention of technological measures. Among other things, the labels are also demanding a preliminary and permanent injunction forbidding the Defendants from further infringing their rights. They also want YouTube-MP3's domain name to be surrendered. "YTMP3 rapidly and seamlessly removes the audio tracks contained in videos streamed from YouTube that YTMP3's users access, converts those audio tracks to an MP3 format, copies and stores them on YTMP3's servers, and then distributes copies of the MP3 audio files from its servers to its users in the United States, enabling its users to download those MP3 files to their computers, tablets, or smartphones," the complaint reads. "Defendants are depriving Plaintiffs and their recording artists of the fruits of their labor, Defendants are profiting from the operation of the YTMP3 website. Through the promise of illicit delivery of free music, Defendants have attracted millions of users to the YTMP3 website, which in turn generates advertising revenues for Defendants," the labels add.

Comments

Re:Consumers

[StormReaver]

So any reason why all these labels dont giv consumer what consumers want?

This suit comes right on the heels of a study which concludes that lawsuits do nothing to prevent illegal copying, but that illegal copies have higher consumer value than the legal copies because of stupid decisions made by music and movie producers and distributors.

Just use Youtube-dl

[urbster1]

It's trivial: youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vi...

Just use an addon.

[John Allsup]

Given that you can youtube-dl to get an mkv of mp4 file, then ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -vn -c:a copy out.m4a, or similar, which ytmp3 just does behind the scenes and caches its output, this strikes me as yet another publicity stunt to get more and more pro-ip anti-tech laws. These guys think that nothing in the universe is as important than their financial income. Such greed is a cancer in society.

Re:Seriously...music off YouTube...?

[BringsApples]

As long as the sound isn't horrible, it's just a matter of listening to the music, and not the equipment. I know a guy that hears a song he likes on the radio, goes home to youtube, and gets it directly from there using some browser extension that downloads an MP4 video. In order to strip the MP3 out of the MP4, he then runs it through a simple bash script:

#!/bin/bash

OPTIND=1
while getopts "dh" OPTION; do
case "$OPTION" in
d) DEL=1 ;;
h) echo "-d will cause the original to be deleted"
esac
done
shift $((OPTIND-1))
for i in "$@"; do \
WAV=$(echo "$i" | sed 's/\.mp4/\.wav/')
MP3=$(echo "$i" | sed 's/\.mp4/\.mp3/')
mplayer -quiet "$i" -ao pcm:fast:file="$WAV" -vc dummy -vo null -channels 2
lame -h -b 192 "$WAV" "$MP3"
rm "$WAV"
if [[ "$DEL" = "1" ]]; then
rm "$i"
fi
done

Sounds fine. Not like a concert, but certainly good enough to enjoy on a CD.

Re:Seriously...music off YouTube...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use FFMPEG to split the audio from the video. It wont be mp3 (AAC IIRC), but it wont suffer a conversion loss.

Re:Consumers

[Gadget_Guy]

Anyone old enough to remember when CDs first came out, they were packed with all sorts of security by obscurity measures designed to make sure that they wouldn't play from your computer as well as from your car stereo.

I'm old enough to remember, but I don't remember that. Audio CDs have been around since the early 80s, but protected audio CDs didn't happen until a lot later. According to Wikipedia's page on copy protection:

By 2000, Napster had seen mainstream adoption, and several music publishers responded by starting to sell some CDs with various copy protection schemes. Most of these were playback restrictions that aimed to make the CD unusable in computers with CD-ROM drives, leaving only dedicated audio CD players for playback.

So it seems that CDs enjoyed nearly 20 years of unprotected playback. It's easy to see why. In the early 90s, a hard drive that was large enough to store a CD rip would have cost thousands of dollars. Even video games released in those days on optical media didn't bother to protect themselves because they didn't have to contend with cheap and large drives or affordable CD writers.