Record labels sue popular YouTube audio-ripping site - Polidicks

[QUOTE=BrickInHead;51127832]not to validate the RIAA but what other use is an audio ripping site good for? It's a question of negligence. Yeah you can argue that maybe news organisations or podcasters use it to grab audio for their programs, but the kind of traffic that these sites get that's a pretty hard sell. The attorneys will be attempting to prove that this website knowingly provided a service that allowed music piracy and made money off it. The defending attorneys will probably try to use defenses similar to p2p networks, but I'm not really familiar enough with suits around those to comment Being honest with ourselves it's very clear that the primary use for these websites is to download music without paying for it. Whether or not you feel that is immoral, I'd really find it a hard sell to say that's not the purpose of these sites 99.5% of the time. That's a pretty hard contrast to guns which you can demonstrate have a substantial following as a target shooting hobby.[/QUOTE] I'm sure that's where most of their traffic is coming from, but it's pretty easy to give examples of public domain content that could be extracted. Might not be licensed as such, but I know that I've used those services for legitimate reasons before. University lectures on YouTube are nice to have on long car rides. What about cover bands, etc?

using some rough math I've determined that they are suing youtube-mp3 for at least $432,000,000,000,000 going off their 60 million users per month, assuming each user is only ripping one song, and multiplying that by the 4 years youtube-mp3 has been up, then by the $150,000 per rip number they're suing for that's 24 times the GDP of the entire united states lol good luck [editline]29th September 2016[/editline] these companies should be penalized heavily for making such a fucking absurd claim "yeah this website has cost us literally 4 times the entire GDP of the whole planet in lost profits" is there not just a "fuck off" button judges can press

[QUOTE=Jelman;51127370]Awful in the actual rip quality or the whole concept? Because its technically not illegal and youtube make it extremely easy to download videos[/QUOTE] As in rip quality.

[QUOTE=Helix Snake;51127854]I use the site all the time to get video game music to use in my videos. I'm sure many other content creators do the same.[/QUOTE] Even if that can be considered fair use (i'm not personally educated enough on fair use to make that determination) that is an obvious minority of users. Even if the website owners articulate that as their mission, if the overwhelming majority of your users use your product for illegal activity then you're going to have a very difficult time convincing a judge that you weren't knowingly profiting off of illegal activity [editline]29th September 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=Grenadiac;51127958]using some rough math I've determined that they are suing youtube-mp3 for at least $432,000,000,000,000 going off their 60 million users per month, assuming each user is only ripping one song, and multiplying that by the 4 years youtube-mp3 has been up, then by the $150,000 per rip number they're suing for that's 24 times the GDP of the entire united states lol good luck [editline]29th September 2016[/editline] these companies should be penalized heavily for making such a fucking absurd claim "yeah this website has cost us literally 4 times than the entire GDP of the whole planet in lost profits" is there not just a "fuck off" button judges can press[/QUOTE] From a moral standpoint I already find these kinds of suits dumb, but from a legal standpoint the kind of damages these companies seek is ridiculous.

[url]https://github.com/fent/node-youtube-dl[/url] Infinitely better command line tool that's open source and downloads from basically anywhere that has a video on it.

There's a really good site where all you have to do is put "ss" before youtube ("ssyoutube.) on any youtube video and it'll direct you to their site where you can download the video.

I don't get how record companies can claim copyright on anything when they all make their money off repackaging old funk songs and putting a pretty girl in the video instead of the original band.

[QUOTE=Disseminate;51126952]Do they realize YouTube has links to the direct video files, and anyone with the video file and ffmpeg can do this?[/QUOTE] after looking for like 2 minutes, i can confirm that youtube does not have download links

You can just pull a video out of your browser cache after watching it, lol. Try suing that.

There's a million alternatives to a single website, you'd figure legal technology departments would be catching up to the future yet labels and copyright catchers are still living in 2005 if you don't want people illegally ripping your songs, then start making some better alternatives to listen to the music rather than exclusively itunes or physicially buying it or whathaveyou as many dumb labels still do

There's no way to stop people ripping YouTube music, or any audio for that matter, other than putting a lawyer in every home staring at you while you listen to something. Any audio recording program can rip music, programs which have tons of legitimate uses for things like presentations, streaming gameplay, etc., a male to male headphone wire can connect to a recording device, ffmpeg or a browser extension can rip it directly, or if you wanted to be a caveman you could just hold a microphone up to your speakers. Any video can be converted into audio format by plenty of legitimate programs. What was stopping people 20-30 years ago from recording music from the radio and making mixtapes? All this is doing is going after low hanging fruit for easy money because it's entirely ineffectual, will not stop a single person from ripping due to the multiple sites/methods out there, and is just going to fuck people over who don't deserve it.

I think its part of a scheme that's more clever than people think. If they lose its no big deal because the cash won't be that significant. If they win it sets precedent to go after tools they hate like Kodi and Torrent clients to try and shut them down.

[QUOTE=Saxon;51130027]I think its part of a scheme that's more clever than people think. If they lose its no big deal because the cash won't be that significant. If they win it sets precedent to go after tools they hate like Kodi and Torrent clients to try and shut them down.[/QUOTE] If they win there may be a cascade of similar site owners shutting down their services out of fear. It has happened with torrent sites in the past.

Pls don't kill [url]http://peggo.tv[/url]

I remember when I audio ripped from youtube I buy songs now on bandcamp and it feels so much better. It's like... in 5 seconds I can obtain an album and actually contribute to the artist so they make more, and it doesn't sound like diahrea best part is so many musicians use 'pay what you want' so I can give them 1$ or nothing if I don't have the money and feel fine about it my music list has grown WAY FASTER now

Honestly im getting my songs the alternative way. Spotify+Audacity You can't stop me labels

Even if you killed off every youtube audio ripping site, people could still just do a desktop recording of a youtube video, then make it into an audio file.

[QUOTE=BrickInHead;51127832]not to validate the RIAA but what other use is an audio ripping site good for? It's a question of negligence. Yeah you can argue that maybe news organisations or podcasters use it to grab audio for their programs, but the kind of traffic that these sites get that's a pretty hard sell. The attorneys will be attempting to prove that this website knowingly provided a service that allowed music piracy and made money off it. The defending attorneys will probably try to use defenses similar to p2p networks, but I'm not really familiar enough with suits around those to comment Being honest with ourselves it's very clear that the primary use for these websites is to download music without paying for it. Whether or not you feel that is immoral, I'd really find it a hard sell to say that's not the purpose of these sites 99.5% of the time. That's a pretty hard contrast to guns which you can demonstrate have a substantial following as a target shooting hobby.[/QUOTE] This pretty much. While all of it is kinda dumb, these people were most likely making a lot of money by providing a service that is notorious for being the site everyone uses to pirate music with nothing in place to prevent people from using it to rip said music. Similar to the guy in the UK who got put in prison the other year for running the biggest website that linked people to illegal TV show streams; Yeah he wasn't hosting any of the illegal content, but he made hundreds of thousands in ad revenue by running a site that knowingly facilitated piracy. I don't really know the specifics of the charges/etc but anecdotal evidence of 'but it has some legit uses' probably won't fly since they will probably have to prove that the site is largely used for piracy.

[QUOTE=SleepyAl;51130023]will not stop a single person from ripping due to the multiple sites/methods out there[/QUOTE] You aren't representative of all users. They don't care about the niche power user who understands how to pull the audio stream from a youtube video, or set up audio recording software to record mirrored output. They care about your mom or your less tech-savvy friends whose technical knowledge stops at entering 'youtube mp3' in Google. That's why they went after Limewire and Napster; it's not like those were the only services offering free music, but everyone knew about them and even people who couldn't find their way around a torrent client could use them. What was stopping people decades ago from recording music from the radio and making mixtapes? Nothing. But it was sufficiently difficult and time-consuming that for most people it was way easier to just buy a tape. They don't need to stamp out the ability to download music, just make it marginally more difficult. For the vast majority of users, that's enough to make a $0.99 download the more attractive alternative.

[QUOTE=Biotoxsin;51127221]Yeah, do you know about the Limewire lawsuit? The RIAA sued the developers for something like $72 trillion.[/QUOTE] at that point you may as well either commit suicide or try to get a new identity

please dont kill vidtomp3

[QUOTE=BrickInHead;51127832]not to validate the RIAA but what other use is an audio ripping site good for? It's a question of negligence. Yeah you can argue that maybe news organisations or podcasters use it to grab audio for their programs, but the kind of traffic that these sites get that's a pretty hard sell. The attorneys will be attempting to prove that this website knowingly provided a service that allowed music piracy and made money off it. The defending attorneys will probably try to use defenses similar to p2p networks, but I'm not really familiar enough with suits around those to comment Being honest with ourselves it's very clear that the primary use for these websites is to download music without paying for it. Whether or not you feel that is immoral, I'd really find it a hard sell to say that's not the purpose of these sites 99.5% of the time.[/QUOTE] This entire line of arguing falls apart when one simply points out that everyone who listens to the Youtube videos in question HAS to download them onto their computer to even watch them in the first place. How can it be piracy if they willingly and knowingly put these videos up for download for free themselves? This doesn't even involve any third party website or tools. Immediately after watching the video the entire file you just downloaded will be located somewhere in the browser's cache on your hard drive, hence the website that is being sued here is really just making use of services that are already being offered by Youtube and just simplifies the process of extracting the videos for the end user. My view is, that if the labels didn't want their music to be downloaded, they should never have put them up on Youtube, it's that simple.

[QUOTE=meharryp;51128105][url]https://github.com/fent/node-youtube-dl[/url] Infinitely better command line tool that's open source and downloads from basically anywhere that has a video on it.[/QUOTE] [url]https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/[/url] Youtube-dl really is the best tool. Especially combined with FFMPEG. "youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 [video/playlist]." Nobody should need anymore

[QUOTE=Doom64hunter;51133614]My view is, that if the labels didn't want their music to be downloaded, they should never have put them up on Youtube, it's that simple.[/QUOTE] You know that they're generally not the ones putting music on Youtube and RIAA members regularly DMCA Youtube to remove their music, right? Kind of an odd complaint.

I just remembered youtube-mp3 won't allow the download to go through if it's VEVO, youtube's automatically generated music channels, or another "official" copyrighted source - so really they're doing the best they could be expected to do short of having a human moderating each request, which is an absurd demand. The fault would arguably lie with youtube itself for ineffectively policing its own content, but really it's not youtube's fault either. This coupled with the exorbitant claimed damages (432 trillion dollars lmfao) should make this an easy case for any halfway competent lawyer to fight.

I could also hold a tape recorder up to my speakers and "download" the song that way. Sue me.

[QUOTE=Grenadiac;51134671]I just remembered youtube-mp3 won't allow the download to go through if it's VEVO, youtube's automatically generated music channels, or another "official" copyrighted source - so really they're doing the best they could be expected to do short of having a human moderating each request, which is an absurd demand. The fault would arguably lie with youtube itself for ineffectively policing its own content, but really it's not youtube's fault either. This coupled with the exorbitant claimed damages (432 trillion dollars lmfao) should make this an easy case for any halfway competent lawyer to fight.[/QUOTE] Let's hope they have a halfway competent lawyer. Sick of record labels pushing people around.

[QUOTE=catbarf;51132351]What was stopping people decades ago from recording music from the radio and making mixtapes? Nothing. But it was sufficiently difficult and time-consuming that for most people it was way easier to just buy a tape.[/QUOTE] What's complicated about 'Put empty casette in boombox, wait till desired song plays, press record'?

[QUOTE=TestECull;51135230]What's complicated about 'Put empty casette in boombox, wait till desired song plays, press record'?[/QUOTE] Getting a casette and boombox. It's just hassle most people would rather not go through.

[QUOTE=Hatley;51132183]Even if you killed off every youtube audio ripping site, people could still just do a desktop recording of a youtube video, then make it into an audio file.[/QUOTE] Why not just record system audio directly? Better quality too and no need to mess with ripping audio out.