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In World First, Danish Court Rules Stream-Ripping Site Illegal
An anonymous reader shares a report: Convert2MP3 is a site that allows users to download audio from platforms including YouTube. Following legal action carried out by Rights Alliance on behalf of music industry group IFPI, Convert2MP3 has been declared unlawful by a Danish court which has now ordered ISPs to block it. It's the first time worldwide that a so-called stream-ripping site has been declared illegal.
Just download one of the many rippers available. For Linux there is youtube-dl
And here is the code you can use:
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3
Most ripping sites where just a shell arround youtube-dl anyway and as such limited the program to just a few options.
As you now have the source, you will be able to build your own website that does the same. With little ingenuity, you can have a bookmark in your browser and when you click it when you are on YouTube, it will start downloading to the directory of your choice.
Editing of MP3 can then be done with any MP3 editing program you desire,
You are on /. Behave like it. Now get of my lawn.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is from the Frederiksberg court.
It is not final. But most likely the alliance won because the people behind Convert2mp3 did not bother to show up in a Danish court. And they probable also will not appeal. The transcripts from the court is not made public yet as far is I know.
At the end of TFA, the Rights Alliance lawyer states:
“After the conversion process Convert2MP3 saves a copy on their servers in France for at least 4 hours.”
Instead of providing just real-time format conversion and sending it downstream to the user, Convert2MP3 stores a copy of the stream on its servers probably as cached data to be used for other requests of the same song. That's copyright infringement plain and simple.
And apparently Convert2MP3 just thought they could just ignore problem and didn't even bother to mount any kind legal defense which all but guaranteed that they would lose in court. So, yeah, none of this is surprising.
We got the same. In any other context something like this would be illegal. You're paying a fee on every medium, but at the same time copying anything that says that it has a copy protection (needn't even have one, just claiming to have one is enough) means you must not copy it.
Now tell me, what kind of content am I supposed to put on the medium that I just paid for to be allowed to put content on that I'm not allowed to put on.
Dear content industry: Go and die a quick and preferably painful, but I'd settle for just quick, death. Nobody needs you anymore. You're, essentially, a useless sponge on society in general and creative creators in particular. The faster you cease to exist, the better for all of us.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.