Submitted via IRC for BoyceMagooglyMonkey
The music industry sees stream ripping as one of the largest piracy threats, worse than torrent sites or direct download portals.
The RIAA, IFPI, and BPI showed that they're serious about the issue when they filed legal action against YouTube-MP3, the largest stream ripping site at the time.
This case eventually resulted in a settlement where the site, once good for over a million daily visitors, agreed to shut down voluntarily last year.
YouTube-MP3's demise was a clear victory for the music groups, which swiftly identified their next targets, putting them under pressure, both in public and behind the scenes.
This week this appears to have taken its toll on several 'stream ripping' sites, which allowed users to download videos from YouTube and other platforms, with the option to convert files to MP3s.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-download-sites-throw-in-the-towel-under-legal-pressure-180614/
(Score: 3, Informative) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 17 2018, @05:29PM
I've used it recently. For the first time in many, many years I needed to grab something from Youtube. A particular historically important (to me) video that needed to be preserved where it couldn't just disappear overnight like so many other Youtube videos. Youtube-dl could be a tad easier to use, but I got what I needed with minimal hassle and no malware. It has some surprisingly powerful advanced features too, such as the ability to grab a large set of videos.