RIAA takes on stream-ripping in copyright lawsuit targeting YouTube-mp3
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If lawyers can get a job to sue whatever because money or because ownership and private property, you can bet lawyers will be put to work.
Legal disputes seem to follow murphy's law.
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].
Two related articles from him which also give a lot of good background on this:
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
...and one from RMS:
Remove the counting by allowing people to rip as mp3 and you remove the small revenue artists/labels share for each play.
There is a reason buying a song costs 99 cents (or so) on iTunes but a months subscription to a unlimited steaming service it about 10$ without ads.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
At some point the piñata will break completely, though. Lots of candies, but then, game over.
1. they store the illegal copy on their servers
2. they are profiting from this (probably a lot because it's the first result for "youtube mp3" in Google)
"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."
[1] http://www.onlinemarketingrockstars.de/philip-matesanz-youtu...
Because that teens don't have their own credit cards is something I'd call a great success for society.
It is DMCA that makes almost any operation with copyrighted content illegal.