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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, 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.