

ASk HN: can youtube be considered a file sharing service now? - at-fates-hands

I'm finding more and more people on youtube are posting full length albums to their accounts for people to stream and listen to. I know there are a ton of applications which make it easy to convert these to virtually any audio format. With this in mind, can they be considered a music/file sharing service since its so easy for users to illegally download music from their site?
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lewisgodowski
Hmmm. Interesting question. I'm not sure it could be considered a file sharing
service, because technically they aren't sharing the files. It's perfectly
legal to allow music and whatnot to be streamed online (assuming you own the
rights to the content). Users have just found a way around that so they can
rip whatever is shared there.

Using your same logic, couldn't movie studios selling DVDs be considered a
file sharing service, because of how easy it is to rip the content off of them
and onto your computer?

From a producer and sound design/engineering perspective, I would never
consider ripping a YouTube video due to the terrible bitrate of the audio. The
max bitrate supported by YouTube is 192kbps, which is really lossy. If I can't
get my hands on a lossless format (WAV), the lowest I'll consider going is
320kbps.

Although, for the average listener, 192kbps is probably good enough.
Especially when factoring in the fact that they're probably listening on
crappy laptop speakers or overpriced Beats headphones.

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stfu
I was wondering about the same. It seems that YouTube is on the one hand super
sensitive about certain types of content, while on the other completely
ignoring very obvious issues. I would argue that at least 50% of videos with a
length of 30 minutes or more are in some form either a tv or movie rips.

