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Piracy Youtube Businesses Crime Music Technology

YouTube Download Sites Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry, Industry Figures Say (independent.co.uk) 149

Websites dedicated to "stream ripping" music from YouTube represent the biggest threat to the global music business, UK news outlet The Independent reported this week, citing industry figures, who added that that these shady sites are also posing business threat to "fantastic range" of legal streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music. The report describes the nature of the issue: Sites that allow YouTube videos to be converted into an MP3 file and illegally downloaded to someone's phone or computer are attracting millions of visitors, with estimates suggesting that a third of 16-24-year-olds in the UK have ripped music from the Google-owned platform. Other platforms affected by the illegal ripping sites include DailyMotion, SoundCloud and Vimeo, however YouTube is by far the most pirated. The results of a crackdown that began in 2016 are beginning to be seen, thanks to a coordinated effort by organizations representing record companies in the US and the UK. Earlier this week, stream ripping website MP3Fiber was forced to shut down following legal pressure. However, dozens of sites offering similar services still remain active and are easily accessible through Google, whose search engine provides more than 100 million results for the term "YouTube MP3 converter." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that even referring to the aforementioned questionable websites as "stream ripping" sites is misstating copyright law. "There exists a vast and growing volume of online video that is licensed for free downloading and modification, or contains audio tracks that are not subject to copyright," the EFF told the US Office of the United States Trade Representative last year. "Moreover, many audio extractions qualify as non-infringing fair uses under copyright. Providing a service that is capable of extracting audio tracks for these lawful purposes is itself lawful, even if some users infringe."
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YouTube Download Sites Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry, Industry Figures Say

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  • Speakers are (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:08AM (#57241864)

    If you can hear it, then you can rip it. Get rid of speakers that allow people to hear music and you've beaten piracy.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      If you can understand it, then you can rip it. Get rid of brains that allow people to even recognise music and you've beaten piracy.

      FTFY.

      Remember the human brain is the world's best copying device. Some even have perfect memory!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • The 3.5mm jack is a heck of a useful analog hole.

        Apple has been ramping up their Apple Music online service.

        Hmmm.

      • hole? Hole versus Loop changes the framing of a pragmatic (scientific/linguistics) model to one of security-- as in a weakness, or exploit. And likely a framing IP holders promulgate.
    • by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @02:30PM (#57242724)

      The best way to beat music piracy is to start making only crappy music. Oh wait, I think they're already working on that...

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        I feel they have been working on that solution for quite some time, decades. Turned really crap during the nineties in fact. Likely google the source because they have really old videos and people are tuning into anything, well, pre nineteen nineties and they would be the largest source for that. Crappy new versions of old music are not working either because crap music artists using autotune etc. and the only reason they get the job is because they are cheap and they are willing to 'cough' 'cough' suck coc

    • by amorsen ( 7485 )

      The funny thing is that Youtube music compression is often pretty terrible, no one should want to actually listen to that on a regular basis.

      Conveniently (for the rippers at least) modern music is deliberately engineered to sound like a 32kbps MP3. After going through the Youtube compression, it still sounds like a 32kbps MP3, so nothing of much value was lost.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Given how the Music publishers and 3rd party parasitic maggots all together rob at least 70% of an artist's profits for themselves; and how Incompetech is one of a myriad of perfect examples that you can get money streaming into your hands even when you have a completely open license for anyone to use his music for free, so long as you have talent which speaks for itself and which people automatically credit everywhere the music appears; and how YouTube has precisely made it possible for many talented artis

  • Tell me how (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:18AM (#57241912)

    this is any different from the Supreme Court ruling in 1984 about using VHS tapes to record TV. This is just the 2018 version of that.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Smart people know that file sharing is not a threat to the music industry.

      Idiots who can't see past the end of their noses call it "piracy" and seek to ruin the Internet in an utterly futile attempt to stop it.

    • While I don't think that YouTube download sites are in anyway a threat to the music industry, there are some differences. VHS tapes degraded over time, and the record quality wasn't even comparable to the original broadcast. I don't really see why anybody would even use a YouTube downloader. So much easier to just find an actual CD rip or some other existing audio file. YouTube audio tops out at 192 kbps, so, while it's adequate, it's hardly the best place to be getting your music.

    • 50 years ago most of my peers borrowed records (12" vinyl) and copied them to cassette tapes. The music industry complained but did not go bust. Youtube ripping is just today's copying to cassette. I agree that it is breaking copyright but it won't kill them, indeed it may be that Piracy Can Help Music Sales of Many Artists, Research Shows [torrentfreak.com].

      • As YouTube is a "Free" service, I think it's more akin to recording off the radio, but yes, that is just me being nit-picky and not adding anything of value to the conversation :)

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's just the usual greed from the music industry. They love the idea of streaming but not the fact that they missed the boat and all their own platforms are failing and dying off. They could have been the new radio... But were too busy soiling their pants over stream ripping and trying to release broken DRM-infested crap.

        Piracy is their go-to excuse for their own incompetence. "Oh, we would have made so much more money if only people weren't downloading from YouTube so they can listen in the car! Surely th

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Everybody should be paid until their work fully depreciates. For example, someone gets paid $10/hr to paint a wall. They should continue to receive $10 every hour until the wall needs to be painted again. But the amount can lower over time according to the state of the wall.

    That's how it works for "artists" and they are doing well. It should be the same rules for everybody.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Anyone can paint a wall. Artists produce something unique. You can scoff and comment about music sounding the same, etc, but thatâ(TM)s just your age showing.

      • Anyone can paint a wall. Artists produce something unique. You can scoff and comment about music sounding the same, etc, but thatâ(TM)s just your age showing.

        Apart from the majority of pop songs being written by two or three people and then just sold to various pretty faces to 'sing'. Please don't insult actual creative talent by calling them artists.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by CaptainDork ( 3678879 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:20AM (#57241928)

    ... oh, sorry.

    The War On Piracy ...

    Know what?

    Both models work the same, as in not.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Both models work the same, as in not.

      Also, both models are promoted by self interested moralizing asshats who only want to put people in jail for profit.

      • Yep. Cost avoidance by not enforcing their shit themselves:

        Texas ISP Slams Music Industry For Trying To Turn It Into a 'Copyright Cop' [slashdot.org]

        "Having given up on actually pursuing direct infringers due to bad publicity, and having decided not to target the software and websites that make online file-sharing possible, the recording industry has shifted its focus to fashioning new forms of copyright liability that would require ISPs to act as the copyright police."

    • by dryeo ( 100693 )

      They do the job they're supposed to. The war on drugs has filled the prisons with poor people, often of particular demographics and often non-violent (who wants their prisons full of violent types? It costs money) types.
      The war on piracy is moving to being able to take down web sites and such without any judicial oversight, instead on the word of the copyright industry. This is a way to take down speech that the powers that be don't like as it is going to be part of NAFTA, it can be blamed on needing a trea

  • LOL (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) <treboreel@live.com> on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:25AM (#57241960) Journal

    The music industry and the sampled rebroadcast crap they call music for the most part are the biggest danger to the music industry today.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Hometaping didn't kill music. [wikipedia.org] In fact, it preceded the most profitable era the music industry has ever enjoyed. Take your fucking propaganda and shove it where the sun don't shine.

  • There once was a time when being a musician was more a profession--than a lottery.
  • And why would you use a site when there's nice opensource software for downloading directly?
  • by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:38AM (#57242024)
    That ability to record radio is a serious threat that steals food from the mouths of poor artists. We *must* ban all casette recorders due to this terrible threat. If people can record radio in an unregulated fashion the music industry will die. Sorry I meant to say that if people can dub casette tapes the music industry will die. Erm, I mean if people can record music digitally the music industry will die. *cough* Apologies. I meant that if people can send each other MP3s music will cease to exist. (But is there a pattern? -The music industry is going from strength tk strength FYI)
    • On radio, the industry still gets to control the playlists, and through that, availability. Not so much on a site where you can pull up any track ever, on demand.
  • by dissy ( 172727 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @11:44AM (#57242052)

    Are the Biggest Piracy Threat To Music Industry

    You've used that phrase so many times that it's lost all meaning.

    Besides, I've consulted with our crack team of honey badgers and we are in unanimous consensus that the music industry is the biggest threat to the music industry.
    It's a scientific fact.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The DASH audio opus @160k (format code 251) I download from YT with youtube-dl plays just fine on my Android phone if I rename the file to .ogg. Thanks, Alphabet!

    The music industry seems mostly concerned with control (read: metrics and, ultimately, dollars). Funnily enough, the loss of control (Napster.....Youtube, and before that, tapes!) has probably helped them more than it has hurt. Perhaps the best step would be to have a streaming site with an undocumented (but very wink-wink, nudge-nudge) download fe

  • by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:05PM (#57242144) Homepage

    This is a further reminder that there has ALWAYS be "free" content for as long as broadcasting has been around. That's longer than there has been paid physical media. If you can watch it for free on YouTube then IT DOESN'T MATTER that you can "record" it. You ALREADY have a payment avoidance mechanism.

    It's just like radio. It's just like MTV.

  • Man has to listen to quality music on the go. But I think piracy stiffens out creativity
  • If your revenue stream is imperilled by a completely legal and technically simple method of recording content, the obvious action is to sue everyone, and get the laws changed! Next up - mandatory email filters to scan for copyright attachments, and your laptop mic will listen for songs being played so you can be charged a penny everytime you listen to copyright work.
  • Still around (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:11PM (#57242182) Homepage Journal

    Napster came out 16 years ago, the music industry is still here and still making money. You can only cry wolf so many times before people start ignoring you.

    • Napster came out 16 years ago

      I see your 16 and raise you: The cassette recorder came out 56 years ago and the music industry is still here and still making money despite our assurances that they would go bankrupt overnight.

      • Also long as musicians are still making less than record label conglomerates then all is right with the world. Or so my masters tell me.

  • It's interesting to see how this has become an issue considering that sites such as Amazon, and Spotify allow you to legally stream music on a per-month fee basis dirt cheap rather than having to buy music, or even download it.

  • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:15PM (#57242204)
    My apologies to you young'uns who have no idea what a broken record sounds like (the needle skips a groove so the same section of music plays over and over again [youtube.com]).
    • Cassette tapes were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed people to make their own copies of music.
    • Combination radios with cassette recorders were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed people to record music playing on the radio.
    • The VCR was the biggest piracy threat to the movie industry [slashdot.org].
    • Videotape rental stores were the biggest piracy threat to the movie industry, since people could just watch any movie they wanted.
    • MP3s were the biggest piracy threat since they allowed music to be freely traded without any media.
    • The Internet was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed music and movies to be distributed without needing physical media.
    • YouTube is the biggest piracy threat since it makes it easy for people to capture a copy of a song they're listening to.

    Everyone else understands that new technology comes with advantages and disadvantages. But the new technology is preferred because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Only the music and movie industries don't seem to get this, and focus only on the disadvantages while ignoring the advantages. Their piracy claims have been wrong every single time. Cassette tapes led to increased music sales, since it freed music from a record needle sitting in a groove, meaning you could now listen to music in your car or while jogging. Radio/cassette recorders allowed people to listen to music two different ways with a single device, so led to people listening to more music since the playback devices now cost less them less. VCRs spawned the movie sale industry, allowing movie studios to make more money than they ever could through theater releases alone. Sales to video rental stores eventually eclipsed videotape sales as the biggest revenue source for movie studios. MP3s became the ubiquitous method to store and distribute music in the 21st century. Internet-based music and movie sales and rentals have now eclipsed disc-based sales and rentals. And YouTube remains the easiest way to quickly check out new releases and new genres of music, and view movie trailers on demand without having to hope to catch it during a commercial break on TV

    In every single case, their prophecies of doom by piracy have not only been proven wrong, but the new technology has led to increased sales of music and movies. Yet these two industries cannot seem to break their habit of demanding the new technology be shut down before it "destroys" them. Life isn't perfect. You're never going to get rid of piracy. As long as the benefits of a service like YouTube outweigh the piracy drawbacks, it's a net win. Just like retail stores don't shut down just because they lose some inventory to shoplifting. The benefits of increased sales from allowing customers to see, feel, and browse the merchandise in person outweighs the drawback of loss due to shoplifting.

    • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:42PM (#57242278)

      Great list! I would also add:

      * Humming music was the biggest piracy threat because artists weren't getting their "fair share"

      * Used CD sales was the biggest piracy threat because according to clueless, greedy asshats [latimes.com] artists aren't paid royalties on these transactions,

      * Guitar Hero [wired.com] was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed gamers to play music over and over again onlyh having to pay once,

      Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from Guitar Hero : Aerosmith than from any single album in the band's history.

      * iTunes was the biggest piracy threat since it allowed music and movies to be distributed without needing physical media.

      This is different from .mp3 since Apple's .aac used to be DRM protected but did these wankers complain about that when Apple removed DRM from their music?

      Furthermore, why did it take a computer company to sell music???

      The only thing the music industry knows how to is whine, constantly. It's not fucking rocket science. People just want:

      * Access to music, regardless of device, and
      * The ability to pay for it.

      Piracy shows you have a distribution opportunity not a price problem.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Agreed. A couple of footnotes:

        In terms of music industry understanding its markets, credit to the bootleggers (in it for the money) and sharers (in it for love of the music and believing good music should be heard) who, combined, led the music industry to belatedly release more music that would otherwise have sat in the vaults.

        "Home taping is killing music" is a genuine wikipedia article. Truth is, brickwalling is more likely to be killing music.

    • I think we're sort of missing the point of the article though. It's not an article about how the music industry is doomed, it's a study on what's currently the most popular way to pirate music.

      Each of those methods was the most widely used method at one point. Cassette dubbing, MP3 sharing, and now ripping the audio track of a YouTube video. And each remained the most popular method until something better came along. MP3s offered perfect digital duplication, and now you can do the same thing by ripping YouT

  • If you download a song from Youtube, and it sounds good enough to be listenable (vs. the quality of a purchased music file), then the problem isn't piracy.

    The problem is that your music naturally sounds like reproducible, sterile, "Millenial Whoop" and familiarity/brainwashing driven, forgettable and disposable sound bytes - not memorable music.

    To the music industry: Stop spending millions of dollars on marketing campaigns and psychological tricks to make people consume your brand of music. Instead, go chea

    • The problem is that your music naturally sounds like reproducible, sterile, "Millenial Whoop" and familiarity/brainwashing driven, forgettable and disposable sound bytes - not memorable music.

      Old codgers have been saying that about every genreation of music, including the one you think is good.

      If you start waving your cane when you say it it's much more convincing.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:40PM (#57242272)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Does your browser support piracy by allowing you to view the code?
  • "Alexa, stop playing songs from YouTube copies!"

    "Siri, don't listen to my MP3s. They'll charge me for a performance!"

  • by citizenr ( 871508 ) on Sunday September 02, 2018 @02:20PM (#57242670) Homepage

    Remember that retarded blank CD tax? Guess what - it came with legal language allowing personal copy.
    PERFECTLY LEGAL in my country (and probably half the developed world).

  • I see quite few references to cassettes but for many there was LOTS of copying going on for 15 years prior to the invention of the audio cassette by Philips. I have hundreds of reels of tape, some made out of paper, dating to the late-1940s with off-the-air recordings of music and copies of 78s and LPs. The cassette added convenience and a lower entry price to something that was already underway.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    ...and being afraid to use things like LimeWire, BitTorrent, etc., so I just used a 3.5mm male-to-male audio cable, running from line-out to line-in and used Audacity to record the audio while I played the music on Grooveshark, YouTube, et. al. It was rudimentary and was kind of funny now that I look back at it but it worked.

    Even still, my 12 yo paranoid self thought I was going to be caught somehow (I theorized that the RIAA would detect that I was running Audacity while recording something off the Interne

  • one might say the abandonment of physical media for online presence might be an encouragement, too.
  • ... can't figure out how to grab a copy of the streaming content from a local cache. And then set up a codec to convert it to a usable file format. The download sites make it possible for the average user to bypass all this nonsense and get an MP3 with one click.

    The music industry is just trying to plug the big leaks. They'll never stop those with the tech savvy.

  • There are open source command line tools that let you rip MP3's straight from YouTube.
  • Grew up in the 60's through 80's era of music. Once tek-no-pop and (c)rap came along, it all turned to crap. I already have either my LP albums, or MP3's of everything I want to listen to, plus we have a 24/7 NO ADS blues/jazz station that is in our area that also streams, so I don't even bother listening to the "radio" anymore for music.
  • Reencoding youtube's 128Kbit/s AAC to MP3 gains you quite an awful audio quality in the end because you enjoy AAC encoding artifacts multiplied by MP3 encoding artifacts.

    I don't know a single decent youtube ripping website which allows you to download youtube's AAC/Opus audio directly.

  • I am not a great fan of Kim Dotcom.

    But he had a point when he treated that. Dotcom was spied on, raided, had all of his property confiscated. Dotcom had millions of dollars taken from him.

    All because he was distributing copyright material.

    Why do google/youtube execs enjoy a different standard?

  • Just download the Youtube-dl utility, it downloads video & audio directly from Youtube, it even has a simple GUI. Works great on Playlists as well and has an automatic download resume. The occasional error crops up but a simple re-download solves that.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • there will always be a way to hack music, it's almost impossible to get rid of it. ____________________________________________________ https://downloader.vip/minecra... [downloader.vip] https://downloader.vip/google-... [downloader.vip] https://downloader.vip/counter... [downloader.vip]

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