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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.
Why? I do this all the time. If you don't want people listening to your music, maybe you shouldn't put it on the internet?
Just saying....
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.
So it's not about copyright infringement, it's about getting money from ads.
There's a hundred sites dedicating to YouTube ripping, not to mention browser extensions and command-line tools.
I can think of a few ways the media industry could prevent them, but suing one particular site will not do much in the end.
As soon as eidetic memory becomes popular, those same idiots will be suing everyone who simply listens and remembers a piece of new music.
A few facts:
1) The rent-seeking media licensing authorities aren't going to stop with their attempts to use their financial resources to defend their rents via litigation and buying politicians.
2) Geeks aren't going to stop writing tools that facilitate freedom in using media as people see fit
3) Ergo, the path of least resistance is to put such services that are ripe targets for litigation in countries where the licensing authorities do not have reach - ie. Eastern Europe, Asia, some parts of Africa.
Why a company would host a service that would become a target for litigation in Germany is beyond me.
Eventually, I can see a world where the services that the media rent-seekers hate are located in just the places they can't reach - we already see this in terms of torrent sites, and the rest will follow. Since they are very small potatoes in terms of the larger economy, I can't see anything like a war or even meaningful negotiation about the point. So, basically, I can't see any end result but the ultimate eclipse of the rent seekers.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
Ahh, the return of the Betamax case, should technology be banned because it can be used to infringe copyright? Supreme court said fuck no.
https://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/betamax/
"Jack Valenti: I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. "
VCRs went on to be by far the biggest income Hollywood ever got from movies. Jack Valenti nearly killed that at birth. It was nice rhetoric backed by lots of fake studies, sort of like this one. RIAA tried to stop YouTube, now their members put music on there for free with adverts attached and get a billion from Google. RIAA tried to force DRM onto us, when they removed the pesky DRM, they magically had more sales than ever before.
But hey, this is different, there's no legal use for a mechanism to save the audio or video from a track is there?... It's not like you could rip the audio off a video, make a travel video with that, upload it to youtube and youtube would automatically detect the music, and stick an advert on it, or enforce whatever copyright restriction applies, advert for which the artist gets paid for? All with agreement from the artists who own the copyright? Oh right, yeh that's how it works.
Jack Valenti nearly killed the biggest source of revenue the MPAA ever had. Hilary Rosen of the RIAA nearly did the same to the MP3 player, the biggest market they ever had too.
"... half of 16 to 24-year-olds use stream-ripping tools to copy music from sites like YouTube."
*cough* BULLSHIT! *cough*
End of line..
Even if they managed to shut down every last YT->MP3 service, it's still a simple matter to just record the audio using freeware like Audacity and save MP3s from it. .
It's trivial: youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 https://youtube.com/watch?v=vi...
First..on YouTube, so you don't know the source and quality and then ripped to lossy mp3 format, and I'm guessing it isn't likely to be very high quality mp3.
This is almost analogous to trying to record songs off FM radio onto cassettes...except without having to dodge the DJ talking over the music.
Does no one put value into decent sounding music (just talking about the fidelity of the recording here, not getting into the quality of actual musicianship in the modern day).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Just create a $0.10 per pop Download button in Youtube and look how fast you'll be cashing in.
I rip activist videos because so many of them disappear.
Half a decade ago.
Or, the cheap usb boombox....
Not everyone plays music only on their PC
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I'm picturing an SAS man with an iPod, and the officer's shouting at him: "Idiot! I told you to bring an MP5!"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sure, it may not be legal in some places. But if half the people are doing it, and less than 1% of people care that it's happening, maybe it's time to modernize the law and bring it in to line with societal norms...
Legality and morality are not the same thing, and when such a large percentage of people think something is right, and comparatively few feel that it's wrong, maybe the law is on the wrong side of the evolution of modern society.
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.
John_Chalisque
Hell, when I was about 12yrs, I went into a high end audio shop at the time, and heard my first pair of Klipschorns hooked to a McIntosh tube amp...and was hooked.
While there is nothing wrong with appreciating high quality sound, being willing to pay big $ for it makes you something of an outlier among the General Public.
But I wasn't the stand out of my day...all of my friends for the most part worked for and bought good stereos for home.
They did so because that was the fashion of the day. I seriously doubt many of them were audiophiles. Most young people I've ever met with expensive home stereos tend to listen to them at volumes that will ensure loss of hearing so that they will never be able to appreciate quality sound. In my college dorms 20+ years ago it was de-rigeur to have a ridiculously oversized stereo and to play it at volumes that would wake the dead. Subtle details of the sound were not important. Some of them were actually genuinely nice pieces of kit but that wasn't why anyone bought them.
So, wondering when the masses stopped caring at all about how the music sounded?
Why do you assume they ever really cared? People want to listen to music that evokes an emotion in them. For most the quality of the sound is largely incidental to this. Nobody really gives a crap if the latest Brittney Spears album has amazing fidelity.
iTunes is weird, in that you need a special application which only runs on a couple of OSes, to be able to use it. You can play the music on nearly anything, but you can't simply buy it on anything.
They should make a web store. I think this web thing is going to take off; it's not a fad.
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My headset costs 15EUR. The music boxes I have at home are around the same price range. I listen to music to have background noise. Do you seriously think I need to have the perfect quality of music?
When I go to a live performance, I am more interested in the "sharing an experience with friends" part then I am listening to the music. In fact, some of the best evenings where when the music was absolutely horrible. (Lousy music AND lousy PA)
So no, I do not put value into decent sounding music. To me music is like a hammer, a tool to either share time with friends or family (that is what I value); a way to have memories about these events by listening to the music and have my memory triggered or just as background.
It could very well be that I value things you deem worthless and I will not judge you for that, so please do not look down on others who do not have the identical values as you have.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
How many lives does the music industry have anyway? Can't it just stay dead? It must have been killed by enough new technologies by now, with cassettes, CD-ROMs, MP3 players, USB thumb drives, and now Youtube rips laying into it.
0.5$ to 1$ is a decent price if you buy a CD at the store. You then need to pay for the whole distribution part, the physical CD and the profit of each person involved in the whole chain.
Please do not set your buying prices at what you are willing to pay. Set them at what they are willing to ask (and still make a profit).
The reason the labels are not giving what consumers want is because consumers tell them they are willing to pay 1USD. Now obviously there are solutions. bandcamp.com is one of them. 80-90% goes to the copyright holder and there that is most of the time the people who make the music. No DRM and flac if you want it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Hmm...I think this new way of thinking about music is a loud statement on the quality of music content being put out today.
Musicianship has gone out the door, and I think it is exemplified by music not seeming important to youth as yourself, no emotional or binding common anthem for your generation. I think popular music died sometime just at the start of the 90's for a plethora of reasons.
Your post is kinda starting to confirm that for me.
I find that sad.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
#!/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.
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16-bit @ 44 KHz was "good enough" for the average Joe.
And by that you mean "mathematically proven to capture everything the human ear can hear". But I'm sure your cables are danceable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Just use FFMPEG to split the audio from the video. It wont be mp3 (AAC IIRC), but it wont suffer a conversion loss.
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.
Problem not solved - you expect the money to pay those artists is just conjured out of thin air? Those artists get their pay out of the revenue generated by advertisers paying the platform to spread their brand. As a consumer, you're given a choice as to how to pay for your content - purchase it, subscribe to it, or have a third party pay for it in exchange for you seeing their ads.
Circumventing the site to get the content without paying is akin to shoplifting. The argument that stealing virtual media is different to physical media doesn't wash - someone still had to pay to produce & broadcast that media, and a good majority of the people on this site owe their livelihoods to being able to sell products based on their own virtual media (code).
I fully get the argument of certain types of ads being completely shitty, so I block anything flash & avoid the sites with abusive ads. But unless people start to accept that they either have to pay for the content directly, or indirectly via ad revenue, then we'll soon end up in a world where the product *is* the ad, and I personally think that's far far worse.
Other than the amount of money in Data that I'm saving by not watching a song.
The amount of money they're missing by not forcing all the ads on you.
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I'll probably be down-modded for being snarky but just because you're "tone deaf" and can't tell the difference between 16-bit @ 44 KHz and 24-bit @ 192 KHz doesn't imply everyone else is.
I never mentioned the shenanigans of bullshit cables such as this one:
https://www.amazon.com/AudioQu...
But keep bringing up non sequiturs.
So, wondering when the masses stopped caring at all about how the music sounded?
Somewhere around the time of the Loudness War when many recording artists stopped caring about dynamic range in their music and instead decided they liked the way that amplitude clipping sounded (~1994). As someone who has worked in pro audio stores, I appreciate high-quality systems and speakers. I listen to music encoded at least to 196k through Sennheiser headphones at work. Most of my friends are content with the label "Bose" or "Harmon Kardon". As long as the bass shakes them up a bit, they're happy. If it's any consolation, the tide seems to be returning to using more dynamic range in music... though maybe not for "pop music".
YouTube audio quality at the HD setting (720p/1080p) is 128kbps AAC, which is close to being considered "audibly transparent" (I believe for AAC the bitrate is a little higher for that - 192kbps?). At lower quality settings, the audio quality does go down.
And a lot of it is ripped, so you do start with a good source material.
16-bit @ 44 KHz was "good enough" for the average Joe.
And by that you mean "mathematically proven to capture everything the human ear can hear".
"Experimentally proven to capture everything the human ear can hear, and add some as well". Unfortunately, even the best 16b-bit 44kHz reproduction chains introduce uncorrelated high-order harmonics that fall in the audible range and can add a harshness to the sound that makes people tire of listening more quickly. Higher resolution and higher sample rates push these spurious components farther up in frequency, where they are inaudible, or at least less audible.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
introduce uncorrelated high-order harmonics that fall in the audible range
Arguing against math is rather pointless, you know.
and can add a harshness to the sound that makes people tire of listening more quickly.
It's rather the other way around. Most recordings, including some great early jazz recordings, are "unlistenable" if reproduced accurately, because the engineering simply didn't care abotu top-octave noise. In the early days, there wasn't any equipment to reproduce it with any fidelity, and recordings were mastered to sound great on the equipment of the day. More modern pop stuff people just don't care when mastering, as they know their audience will be listening to low-bitrate MP3s anyway, so again the songs are mastered to sound OK for that audience. PLay that on real, modern equipment and it's jarring.
So there's a crowd that loves tube amps, records, and other gear that's lossy (in a nice-sounding way) in that top octave.
But it's the very lack of accuracy that makes stuff sound better.
Also, of course, there's utter scams like HD-DVD, where they put both the normal and HD track on the disc, except they add noise to the "normal" track (really).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I have to say this thread reminds of the joke that audiophiles use music to listen to their equipment :-D
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And how much did you pay, after being convinced by the salesman that you could hear the difference? Or did you get scammed by HD-DVD? Do you believe you can hear 90 kHz, or do you believe Nyquist was wrong, or did you get taken by a staged A/B test?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The "masses" of yesterday didn't know either.
This "back in my" shit has to stop.
In the "70's" 90% of the public listened to music of fucking 8-tracks, shitty turntables, or fuckin am/fm radio with shitty single paper speakers.
In the "80's" they "upgraded" to cassettes. ROFL
In the "90's" we got CD and the snobs complained about the "loss" in sound? are you fucking kidding me?
"cheap" equipment and MP3's today is 10 times better then what 90% of the public used EVER.
That's all fine and well, for dealing with companies that offer websites to facilitate downloading from YouTube.
But how do you deal with download scripts? You can't. If I can download a YT video using my browser (because it's impossible to listen to the song without downloading it, after all), then I can do the exact same thing with a script like "youtube-dl".
Of course, if they succeed in shutting down the download websites, that'll probably end most unauthorized copying, since most users appear to be too stupid and/or lazy to use a script like youtube-dl. Just look at how many people keep using Windows 10 after all.