
YouTube download sites are “biggest piracy threat” to music industry - pmoriarty
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/youtube-mp3-converter-download-piracy-a8505131.html
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eyeball
You can have my youtube-dl when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

~~~
bArray
I was just thinking "nobody tell them about youtube-dl"! I wouldn't be
surprised if half of these YouTube-to-MP3 sites are using it in the background
- why wouldn't they? Should be pretty easy to containerize the program. I
actually wonder sometimes how they are able to provide these conversions given
progressions in ad-blockers.

 _There is absolutely no way_ to stop pirating. Long before the internet was
fast enough (or even existing) people were recording songs with phones,
copying tapes, ripping records, etc. Anything a human can hear can be
recorded. Anything that a human can see can be recorded. It's a losing battle.

There is evidence to suggest it helps improve sales overall [1] [2]. Like most
laws, this will probably have the biggest impact on poorer people who can't
afford to buy every single at the price point they charge.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-
piracy...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy-
doesnt-hurt-game-sales-may-actually-help/)

[2] [https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-
upload/2017/09/displacement_s...](https://cdn.netzpolitik.org/wp-
upload/2017/09/displacement_study.pdf)

~~~
tim333
I don't think they need to stop pirating so much as hassle people pirating
sufficiently that a decent percentage still pay up.

~~~
zeta0134
If they'd just make the content available on Spotify, which _all_ of my pirate
friendly but otherwise non-technical friends use, they'd have their
conversion. Piracy continues to solve the discovery and "listen to just this
one song I like" problem that the industry ignores, and until the paid options
are as useful as the pirate versions, the battle will continue.

(Also, I'm ignoring some philosophical things: I like to own things and not
stream them for bandwidth reasons, and tech folks tend to not like DRM, but
the general public doesn't seem to care much about those things.)

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whoopdedo
We talk about the technical futility of copy protection. Or the erosion of
fair use rights. But I have little sympathy for the parasitic websites that
have built a business model out of violating Youtube's TOS. When Mozilla
recently axed 23 extensions that were leaking browser history, 7 of them were
for downloading videos or blocking ads on Youtube. This cottage industry is
full of actors much less principled than the copyright cartel.

Now, if Google was smart they'd find a way to sell downloads. But good luck
getting the media licensers to agree to it.

~~~
i_am_nomad
With regards to the people who install such extensions and end up with
spyware, I’m reminded of the saying, “It’s hard to cheat an honest person.”

~~~
crtasm
I don't know about that, there's plenty of innocuous extensions that either
started off with hidden bad intentions or sold their userbase and went rogue.

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foxfired
The biggest piracy threat to the music industry is my sound card. I can record
any sound that comes out of the speakers.

~~~
Krasnol
Don't say it too loud or they'll replace your ports with some fancy DRM safe
stuff.

~~~
fasafsaf3
Like they did with HDMI?

~~~
jordigh
Wait, what? There's DRM in HDMI?

Bloody hell!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
bandwidth_Digital_Content...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection)

Stop protecting bytes from being copied!

~~~
jazzyjackson
Which of course is added complexity and a source of incompatibility between
playback devices and screens. Can't count the number of times in the early
years of HDMI that I couldn't play a DVD because my projector didn't support
it.

On the other hand, the pirated copy still worked great.

------
neotek
It might interest some of you to know that youtube-dl has an awesome archive
feature which will allow you to scrape a playlist periodically and only
download new additions to that playlist.

So when I stumble across a track I like, I just add it to my “favourites”
playlist, and my PC at home will automatically download it, convert it to MP3,
trim any silence from the beginning and end of the track, attempt to tag it
(although that fails more often than not), and it’ll be there waiting for me
the next time I feel like sorting through my music download folder.

~~~
corobo
For anyone else that wonders as I did, --download-archive downloaded.txt

downloaded.txt will be used to store a list of video IDs. Any ID listed will
not be re-downloaded

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sharkjacobs
This doesn't make any sense to me.

My impression is that listening to locally stored mp3 files is becoming less
and less common in favor of streaming music services.

~~~
bootlooped
"Websites dedicated to “stream ripping” music from YouTube represent the
biggest threat to the global music business, industry figures have warned...

... estimates suggesting that a third of 16-24-year-olds in the UK have ripped
music from the Google-owned platform."

I find the "1 in 3 young people have done it" highly suspect, especially if
that estimate comes from "industry figures". Even if that were true, "1 in 3
have done it" doesn't say anything about the frequency at which they do it.

I think this is mostly alarmist, and my personal opinion is that music piracy
is in decline in the face of easy and cheap legal alternatives.

~~~
catdog
This alarmist thing is going on for decades now ("Home Taping Is Killing
Music") but the music industry still exists.

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tomcooks
> biggest piracy threat to Youtube's dishonest business model

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fapjacks
Seems like they're always bitching about something. How about innovating,
guys?

~~~
rayiner
Innovation is what you need to do if people don’t want your product. Here,
people clearly want the product, so how would innovation help?

~~~
mikeash
I don’t think this is quite correct. “Want to pay for your product” would be
more accurate here.

~~~
coldtea
Well, would these people still not want to pay for that product, if paying was
the only way to get it?

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nathcd
Seems pretty likely that YouTube will switch to EME at some point, doesn't it?
Seems like record labels and the like would be demanding it.

When and if that happens, I hope PeerTube and other video hosts can take off
in the fediverse.

~~~
Rjevski
EME can be cracked if it isn’t already.

Anything can be cracked. The only way to not get your content copied is to not
give it to the user in the first place. If the user can see/hear the content
then he can also copy it.

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CM30
Or their outdated business modal is the biggest threat to their industry.

Honestly, my thought on anything like this is 'just go bankrupt and be done
with it'. Your business model clearly doesn't work anymore, you may as well
just accept it and shut down.

Then again, that's my opinion on basically every business complaining to the
government about how the internet is taking away their profits/how
competitors/startups whatever are taking their market/can't stay solvent
because of bad decisions (see banks). Capitalism is capitalism, the market is
right, and if you can't deal with it, you go under. Simple as that.

~~~
imperio59
Explain how it's an outdated business model? Content creator (musician, film
studio) makes content. They must make money to recoup the costs of making said
content so they can (at least) make more of the same content.

Are you saying all musicians should just go back to only doing live shows and
concerts and give up recording music altogether?

This kind of comment just blatantly ignores the fact that there are very real
issues at play, especially when big names in music are taking their music down
from places like Spotify because they're just hardly getting any reward for
it.

~~~
Bahamut
For the big labels, most of the money is not going into the costs of making
the content itself - most of it is going into marketing, executives, etc. The
musicians themselves get a small portion of it.

The model faces some threat due to the shift of musicians moving to do their
own marketing themselves without a label, and releasing the music themselves
onto services like Bandcamp, or even directly to services such as Amazon,
iTunes, etc. The internet has provided a powerful medium to fight against the
entrenched interests of the big labels that don't feel like they need to do
more for their artists.

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daenz
500 years in the future, when we all have cochlear augmentations:

>Listening to music is the "biggest piracy threat" to music industry

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wruza
Just mix half-loud ads into every stream and remove it in a player by using a
sophisticated, autoevolving one-time js/wasm +cookie algorithm.

~~~
binmanthrowaway
This could become a genre, like rap when someone talks over music.

------
contravariant
Downloading the sound of youtube videos is illegal now?

~~~
coldtea
It has always been illegal.

Both for songs and for regular videos, even vlogs. You don't have the
copyright to the recording, the creator of the video (or the owner for the
sync/mechanical rights for a piece of music) has.

~~~
salutonmundo
Really? I was under the impression that there's no legal distinction between
"the website sending you a file and you caching it in memory" and "the website
sending you a file and you storing it on your hard drive". (Redistributing the
file, or breaking DRM, are different matters.)

~~~
coldtea
The have a terms of service, and ripping in this way is against it.

"It IS illegal to convert copyrighted music videos into downloads. That said,
nobody has been sued for this (yet).

Again, it is completely legal to watch any video you want on YouTube.
Streaming from a legitimate site is permitted under copyright law. And if it
doesn’t involve creating a video mp3 or download, you’re in the clear.

But, it IS illegal to create a personal download conversion of a copyrighted
work under US copyright law. That includes an mp3, mp4, or any other download
file type from your videos convert process."

[https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/10/youtube-to-
mp3-s...](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/10/10/youtube-to-mp3-sites-
illegal/)

~~~
framp
That doesn't look like a reputable source for legal advice.

It is certainly violating YouTube terms of service.

Given the video is available publicly, copying the video is what happens every
time you watch it from your computer.

The conversion point doesn't apply as YouTube videos are mp4 and you can just
play a mp4 as audio.

I'd argue it's covered by fair use but I'm not a lawyer.

~~~
coldtea
> _Given the video is available publicly, copying the video is what happens
> every time you watch it from your computer._

What's copying technically and what's from a legal perspective is not
necessarily the same thing (and one version can be allowed while another is
not).

> _I 'd argue it's covered by fair use but I'm not a lawyer._

Fair use is a US thing.

