This isn't recording Spotify or Sirius XM. If I want to listen to a song 100 times on youtube, then how is that different from converting it to an mp3 and listening to it 100 times? Youtube is free. Should whoever posted the song have exclusive rights to the exact format you listen to something in? The only argument I can think of besides controlling distribution is getting rid of the ads.
Looking for reason, logic or restraint in lawnmowers[1] demanding utter, total and complete control and submission to their DRM demands is rather futile.
In all my time in the digital broadcasting industry, there was no logic or thought given from legal teams demand complete prevention of any kind of recording or usage beyond extremely draconian DRM terms. At the ISP/IPTV provider I worked with, at no point noone stopped and thought about how these provisions affect the users. DRM was demanded by content providers (or you didn't have content) and every year the demands for more control, spyware and lockdown of devices increased.
The fact that there is practically no concern given to fair use (which should be laid down by law, but has been trivially worked around by content providers' legal teams) means that as soon as technical DRM capabilities will expand, you'll soon only watch and listen to art on completely locked down devices that will call home constantly to make sure you've paid enough and seen enough ads. Removing DRM is already illegal under DMCA in USA anyway.
Cory Doctorow can explains and outline the utter catastrophe of modern state of DRM and draconian copyright laws better than I ever could in the new episode of The Changelog podcast [2].
I wonder if RIAA ever pushed YouTube to embed ads in videos downloaded by these sites. YouTube would object since they can't change the ads once it is downloaded so they'd have to sell a different ad package to advertisers for "permanent" ads.
Youtube is not free - ads and you're giving your data away. C'mon mate, you have to willfully be ignoring the fact that ripping the songs off of Youtube as opposed to listening to them online cuts the revenue stream.
Many sites do refuse to serve content on detecting Ad blocking but because you're not making a "copy" and storing it for later use, the websites can't sue you - only refuse to serve. If you "hack" the refusal to serve, they could potentially sue but generally won't bother given the economics.
In this case, downloading the offline copy gives them a leg to sue - and even then it is more economical to go after the enabling website.
What if I mute the ad? What if I minimize the browser window while the ad is playing? What if I go to the bathroom while the ad is playing?
Are any of those also conceptually the same as theft? If so, where do you draw the line? Is it wrong to mute commercials on OTA TV broadcasts? Is it wrong to change the channel when a commercial comes on? Is it only ethical to change channels between shows, when the ads are not based on the current show? Is it wrong to tear ads out of a magazine, since we all know the cost of the copy doesn't cover the cost of producing it?
Until you can answer these questions, you can't claim ad blocking is conceptually the same as theft or in any way illegal.
The bottom line is that, every time an advertiser purchases an ad, they take a gamble. It might be that no one sees it, or that it has no impact. Content freely offered obligates no one to watch any part of it, including any embedded advertisements. If they want to enforce restrictions, they must restrict and sell access to it.
See a lot of people make money when you listen to something on YouTube a hundred times. YouTube (via ads), the ad industry (brokering the said ads), the music industry and the artists (revenue share from loyalty based on number of plays). They are giving it away for "free" under the TOS that you "pay with your time" watching ads and don't copy their content.
So when you download an MP3 of the YouTube content and listen offline outside of the YouTube player, that money stream goes away - so naturally the people making money off it get angry. And this does violate TOS - so they have a leg to sue on.
In the end, the rights holder has the right to monetize their content. So if you do want to listen 100 times offline, buy the song or subscribe to something Spotify/Apple Music which do pay royalties on offline.
On one hand, I can see the popularity of sites like these since they require no additional software beyond a browser. On the other hand, since they have to themselves download the video and then you download it from them, there is quite a lot of bandwidth waste and they're centralised easily targeted single-points-of-failure.
Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the RIAA
I wonder if people like him live in constant fear of being targeted by pranksters, or worse...
> On the other hand, since they have to themselves download the video and then you download it from them
On the other other hand, if you ever watch that ripped video again on more than one separate occasion, you've already saved bandwidth / electricity on unnecessary transferring the data again. More than that, if you're interested only in the song, not the underlying video, you're saving even more bandwidth because - as far as I understand - those sites hit the audio channel directly, skipping the video download.
Also, I love them; they were godsent when I wanted to listen to something at work while being in China.
If nobody even TP'ed Jack Valenti's house for saying that the VCR was as dangerous to his industry as the Boston Strangler, I doubt Cary Sherman has much to worry about.
It depends. There are some sites that simply provide a direct link to a file on Google's CDN. That still wouldn't get rid of most of the charges against YouTube-MP3 though, such as circumvention and the like.
Morally, I agree with you. DRM is an exercise in futility. But you aren't really comparing apples to apples here.
I radio ripped my share of music too when I was a kid. It was a pain. I had no little control and often no warning about when a song I wanted would play. The dj would often talk over the start or end of the song. A song I wanted would sometimes fade transition with a song I didn't want. Reception sometimes stunk. If everything went right, the overall quality of the recording was still inferior to what you'd get if the single or album were just bought outright.
In the 80s, DRM was naturally built into the inconveniences of the technologies of the time. Now that technology has solved for those inconveniences, we find ourselves in a fundamentally different situation for both consumers and business.
The fun thing was that copyright law was probably never meant to be enforced against non-commercial copying. Of course, copyright laws are not the only example of laws that are poorly designed.
The truth is, you can't really design a law to withstand strong, powerful interest who simply want something not to happen. For RIAA, the society is kind of a piñata - you hit it with a stick, and candies fly out. A surprisingly popular business model, by the way.
At some point the piñata will break completely, though. Lots of candies, but then, game over.
Or ffmpeg, or the browser inspector (with which you can see the URLs to the video and audio clips and download them with any program), or Wireshark, or...
There's a lot more you can do by ripping mp3s off YouTube than just using it to get music for free. Sad that they're trying to stop people from using this for legitimate purposes because they're afraid of the tiny percentage of people who download music off YouTube. Also, how does this deal with people using the new YouTube Go app in India, since that has an option to download the videos?
A very interesting excerpt, apparently from the site's owner himself[1] regarding copyright and ad revenues:
"For years, I’ve had to watch how invisible frames have been attached to many websites that load my site. Such ‘malicious’ traffic has increased immensely and is becoming an increasingly large problem, because ads cannot be displayed to those users.“ Usually, Matesanz’ portal monetizes the site via imbedded ads. If these happen to be loaded in the background on third-party sites, they cannot be clicked. Fake traffic doesn’t generate any money and damages campaign performance on the site in the long term."
I feel like one of the biggest market failures here is that the average 16-18 year old doesn't have their own credit card, so they're excluded from legal ad-free methods of getting music, even if they make money at a part-time job.
I don't see what the DMCA has to do with this; they are alleging plain-old copyright infringement, which is illegal is almost every country (though whether the site is infringing may depend on each country's laws).
