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: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:23AM (22 children)
Good thing there's always youtube-dl, which is Free Software and something they're highly unlikely to be able to do anything about. It's a futile effort on their part, but also not surprising that these greedy, censorious dinosaurs would do this.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:26AM
Alternatives emerge. Youtube is of the JEWS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:42AM
Spineless fucks can only go after little people. Don't have the balls to act against Google for distributing pirated content.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @05:18AM (10 children)
VLC Record. Or a camcorder. I'm sure the **AA will find a way to have everyone get a DRM implanted into all humans so you won't be able to see pirated content, instead you'll see goatse.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @06:22AM (9 children)
What I am hoping is that RIAA will succeed in is motivating an entire generation of young people to be aware of the antics of the "Control People" and be clever in the ways of detecting and avoiding the kind of ensnarement that we as a public are being driven into.
I noted other posters on another topic posting about avoiding "smart car" technologies because they are apt to rat you out. I am aware of how technology can be implemented to nanny me into whatever someone else wants.
The main use I see for the "smart car" is to insure payments are made in a timely manner. Skip a payment? Refuse to agree to new terms and conditions? Someone else has a beef against you and "works with" the people who made your car? Your car won't start. Why is it people like being on a leash so much, anyway?
Latest case in point... I just bought a new Android EnVizen tablet off HSN. When I powered it up, first thing I see is Google Maps won't work until I set up the Play Store. I know businessmen want like all dickens to get yet another ad-presentation and product ordering thingie into the public. Whereas I saw the thing as a standalone media player, web browser, email reader, and portable data storage bank ( FTP server ).
Ok. Maps. Loaded Maps.me. Open source offline mapping database. In my case, I have an almost certainity that if I am lost, I will be nowhere near a cell tower or hotspot anyway, but I will be able to see GPS satellites.
Knowing how dodgy some sites are, I did not want to risk visiting them or opening certain emails unless I have some completely isolated anonymous system to do so.
I've seen how certain parties will play this "Congratulations for buying our box, now all you have to do is visit this site, agree to all of our additional terms and conditions, then you can use the thing you just bought." paradigm. They convinced me of their intentions when they first started putting unskippable content on DVD's. What can I expect next after they have already demonstrated they will do this? Will I be forced to wait through an unskippable five minute face powder ad in the middle of presentations I paid for? Or would it be best to build my life around technology I understand and control?
Over my lifetime, I have seen the birth of TV, just as today's generation saw the birth of the internet. I have seen how TV first started out, and the wasteland it has become... nothing but advertising. Trying to watch today's TV without going through a VCR first is a colossal exercise in futility and anger management as the frustration caused by deliberately inserted diversions accrue...almost a kind of road rage. Bags under your eyes! You look terrible. Like this. Buy our stuff! Only ($High Price) , and you get it all! Free upgrade to Express Shipping. Just pay an additional fee. So full of businesstalk ( aka "undefined variables" ) and deceit attempts. Can I trust them? No.
People who do not find ways of circumventing others controlling them will spend their days tolerating all sorts of time consuming crap. And find themselves compelled to do all sorts of things they really did not want to do or agree to.
As far as I am concerned, I want to download everything I am interested in as a file, so I can examine it if necessary, or play it in something that is not important enough to make a system compromise a show stopping event for me. There were several sites that used to work for me for that purpose, but like this story illustrates, the powers that be are methodically stepping through having laws codified to back up their point of view that we should be incapable of controlling technology. They are successfully implanting the concept of knowledge being owned, despite it being public.
If you see me kindle a fire, do I have a right to keep you from kindling one too? Congress seems to have been woo'ed to think so.
All I see coming down the line is the new technology taking the place of the middle class. There will be those issuing the wishlists. The technology will enforce the wishlist by denying us its use until we comply, and there will be those who are trained to do whatever it takes to keep all the rent payments paid on time. I don't like what I see in store for probably 90% of us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @08:58AM (2 children)
"People who do not find ways of circumventing others controlling them will spend their days tolerating all sorts of time consuming crap. And find themselves compelled to do all sorts of things they really did not want to do or agree to."
I come to Soylent for this kind of incisive insight, which describes more than just this specific instance. Thanks for it, and for your first-person perspective on tech-driven social changes spanning over half a century.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @09:16AM (1 child)
I do not come here to post useless rants...
If that is all I am doing, annoying others, I will cut it out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:29PM
Mea culpa.. replied to the wrong post... I meant to reply to a lengthy offtopic diatribe I posted about cellphones and batteries. Admittedly, it was offtopic, but it was something that has been bugging me and I needed to spew some indignation over it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:06PM (2 children)
> Someone else has a beef against you and "works with" the people who made your car? Your car won't start.
Someone else has a beef against you and "works with" the people who made your car? Your car waits until there are no people on board, then drives itself to the repo lot.
FTFY
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:53PM (1 child)
Actually, I see that as quite a plausible thing for them to do. Once they have it in their power to do it, would not surprise me at all to see it happen.
I am pretty sure that if video piracy wasn't all that common, it would be impossible to watch a commercially sold DVD without all the interstitial ads one has to tolerate now on TV. Mopney talks. And its hard for a DVD producer not to listen to a man thrusting handfuls of cash at him for inserting unskippable ads. But I think the DVD producers know full good and well if they take advantage of their "we won't let you skip this part" technology to insert unskippable ads, piracy will just explode in popularity, likely placing all their hard-won lobbied-for DMCA law into jeopardy as their wooed law-makers have to face a large constituency of people pirating.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Sunday June 17 2018, @02:55PM
No, it's common practice for many studios to put unskippable advertisements on their DVDs, especially advertisements for other videos that they sell. Disney is especially bad at this.
If you think they know better than to abuse this power for unskippable commercials, you are mistaken.
If you think that such arrogant and offensive conduct would jeopardize DMCA protection, you are apparently mistaken there as well, as the DMCA doesn't appear to be in jeopardy.
Wikipedia for User Operation Prohibition [wikipedia.org], The DVD and blu-ray code phrase for DRM-enforced unskippable content:
It's a thing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Sunday June 17 2018, @05:43PM (2 children)
In a strange way I hope the RIAA and pals keep it up. I envision a dystopia future where NOBODY possesses or listens to music because it is "too dangerous". What was once an integral part of humanity is now locked up in a vault and never leaves. Siting in front of that vault, shaking and starving, long since out of crack and hookers, is the last RIAA exec. He sits there all day imagining in his head fantastic plans to sue the world because someone MUST still be pirating somewhere. But, in fact, all of the music is gone. Nobody wants it. He killed it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday June 17 2018, @11:25PM
I hope you're right too, but I don't think this will come to pass unfortunately.
I had the misfortune to be forced to listen to a pop music radio station today, as I donated blood, and the 3 or 4 songs I had to listen to were frankly just clones of each other, from the autotuned voices to the bland verse-chorus-verse structure.
I know I'm just an old man shaking my fist at a cloud, but it it really did sound like a series of smooth, bland boring, corporate products rolled out one after the other.
McDonalds makes a lot of money because people like things they are familiar with, and pop music in the 21st century has turned into safe and familiar.
I wonder how a Led Zepplin or Sex Pistols or David Bowie would get a chance today. My guess is that they wouldn't because they don't fit the corporate sound.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @04:00AM
It's GONE.
That Window of making nice nice with music customers, linking music sales to concerts, providing decent online platforms where people can buy music and use it anywhere are over. Too late.
Consumers of music were screwed.
Now who pays for what they get for free.
If I can't rip a DVD I won't buy it. So I don't buy DVDs anymore.
Trust? Gone
This ship has sailed.
Good luck getting this fart back in the asshole.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 17 2018, @06:01AM (3 children)
Yes - but I wonder how many people have even tried it. Not only can you download your favorite video(s), but you can choose what format to download. You want 1080p? You get 1080p. You only want the audio? Fine, which audio format? It's entirely up to you what you download, and how it is saved. It's a safe bet that most people here have used it, but the uneducated, unwashed masses seem to be mostly unaware of it.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:35AM (1 child)
That's why they're going after the download sites - those are more likely to work without doing all sorts of jumping through hoops.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 19 2018, @02:35PM
Over the years, I've had some problems with it. An upgrade will bork things, or Youtube changes something that borks it. Seriously, I've done upgrades, a day later, do some downloads, then a day or two later with no fresh updates, Youtube-dl stops working. Youtube changed something up, and broke it, so then you have to wait for a new update. Ehhh, that's life, I guess.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:30PM
There's also NewPipe [f-droid.org] for your Android Youtube watching and downloading pleasure.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday June 17 2018, @05:54PM (3 children)
A better answer is to boycott all MPAA and RIAA products. Piracy doesn't hurt them, even though they make lots of noise about it. Avoiding them cuts their profits.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday June 17 2018, @11:41PM (2 children)
That would be great, and I'm with you, take away their income and they'll die, except they are hugly profitable multinationals and buy up their competition until there is a very limited choice of media available.
I know it is certainly possible to watch movies and listen to music not from either of those organisations, but I'm not sure how practical it would be to check before purchase.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday June 18 2018, @03:45AM
Buy used, they don't get any money and it is much cheaper. Drawback is that you have to wait and there are less DVD's coming on the market as people switch to streaming.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday June 18 2018, @05:42PM
Well, I've been avoiding them for decades now, and haven't missed them for a very long time. So it's quite possible. I don't expect it to ever be a mass action, but *I* feel better for not supporting them. (And even pirates support them, but
"telling" others that their work is desirable.)
These days when I see an ad for a film, my first reaction often is "Why would I want to watch people with expressions like that?".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:46AM
How questionable are these downloader sites? Sounds like the kind of sites that would show up on search results by the ton promising the world.
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Sunday June 17 2018, @04:48AM
Hooktube is still up and still has a download button. Simply replace the word -you- with -hook- in a YouTube URL. Avoids the tracking as well.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by drussell on Sunday June 17 2018, @09:00AM (6 children)
Are they ever going to realize that it is futile to try to stop people from recording things?
If you can hear it.... you can record it.
If you can see it.... you can record it.
Until the only consumption method is hooked directly to your brain with an encrypted interface, it is impossible to stop recording. :facepalm:
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday June 17 2018, @09:33AM (5 children)
Worse: you can also remember a song to the point that replaying it in your head is almost like hearing it. Listen to something enough times and the soundtrack is engraved in your brain forever. Hell, I've been trying to forget Rick Astley since the 1980s...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:56PM
Ahhh... the advertising jingle. I still remember when I was in high school, there was this ad for beans, beans, tender-hearted beans, and I simply could not get it out of my head.
And I hate beans!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @01:13PM
Better to get stuck on something great, try some Rahsaan Roland Kirk blues for an example,
https://hooktube.com/watch?v=Gx_uXzOF64U [hooktube.com]
(Score: 2) by Pav on Sunday June 17 2018, @02:14PM (1 child)
This is a rather novel fix for your Rick [youtube.com] problem ie. Rick Astley remixed into some Nine Inch Nails. It... actually... works. Makes one wonder if he'd be famous for different reasons if he'd had some decent backing back in the day.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @06:38AM
I prefer this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT3mCybbhf0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @03:55AM
Thief!!! Erase our property from your head immediately!! You are not licensed for personal individual internal song performance!!!!!
psst
buddy
got a sec?
We can help you
get you a license
on the cheap
cash only
no cops
no worries
we'll look after you
we'll protect you from the RIAA
we'll never give you up
quality guarantee signed sealed delivered
we'll never let you down
247 support
run around and check us out
this is the just dessert you deserve
(Score: 3, Insightful) by suburbanitemediocrity on Sunday June 17 2018, @11:59AM (2 children)
1. Record to mp3 recorder with patch cord
https://www.amazon.com/Cmple-3-5mm-Stereo-Auxiliary-Headphones/dp/B003ZJAQZW/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1529236691&sr=1-5&keywords=patch+cable+1%2F8 [amazon.com]
https://www.amazon.com/Recorder-Digital-Dictaphone-Activated-Seconds/dp/B073JDF3YW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529236513&sr=8-3&keywords=mp3+recorder [amazon.com]
2. Profit
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @01:11PM
Yup, just bought a Tecsun MP3 recorder [amazon.com] just for that purpose! ( Runs on 18650 lithium ion cells too! If you don't know about these, do yourself a favor and do a little research. )
I wanted the ability to plug into whatever sounded interesting and record same.
Its an AM/FM radio, MP3 recorder/player, and powered external computer speaker if you wish. ( its still unknown to me if the thing records in stereo ).
Be very cautious about plugging the thing into your computer's USB port, though. It won't let you access its TF card via USB, like a camera will, but it will register itself as a sound card, and load a driver, and in my case, it really screwed up YouTube audio, and made me system restore to get back to before I messed with it. Use the audio cable only for your computer to avoid that pesky driver download. I don't know if it will screw you up, but it screwed me up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 17 2018, @07:20PM
I just use Audacity to capture the output directly when playing a Youtube video that has audio I want to keep (usually called "stereo mix" or "monitor"), skipping the external/cables part of the analog path. Any quality loss gets buried under the noise level of the source recording.
(Score: 4, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:41PM (3 children)
Use any programming language of your heart's desire.
Please compete to see who can write a stream-ripper in the fewest lines of code.
On your marks... get set...
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Sunday June 17 2018, @07:40PM
Hey! I saw this, and thought of you!
It's in Portland.
Cheers!
(Score: 3, Informative) by EETech1 on Sunday June 17 2018, @07:42PM (1 child)
Sorry...
Forgot the link!
https://acmeaom.com/jobs#jobs [acmeaom.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 18 2018, @05:59AM
BEHOLD:
http://soggy.jobs/computer/united-states/oregon/multnomah/portland/ [soggy.jobs]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]