In all my time in the digital broadcasting industry, there was no logic or thought given from legal teams demand complete prevention of any kind of recording or usage beyond extremely draconian DRM terms. At the ISP/IPTV provider I worked with, at no point noone stopped and thought about how these provisions affect the users. DRM was demanded by content providers (or you didn't have content) and every year the demands for more control, spyware and lockdown of devices increased.
The fact that there is practically no concern given to fair use (which should be laid down by law, but has been trivially worked around by content providers' legal teams) means that as soon as technical DRM capabilities will expand, you'll soon only watch and listen to art on completely locked down devices that will call home constantly to make sure you've paid enough and seen enough ads. Removing DRM is already illegal under DMCA in USA anyway.
Cory Doctorow can explains and outline the utter catastrophe of modern state of DRM and draconian copyright laws better than I ever could in the new episode of The Changelog podcast [2].
Two related articles from him which also give a lot of good background on this:
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
...and one from RMS:
If lawyers can get a job to sue whatever because money or because ownership and private property, you can bet lawyers will be put to work.
Legal disputes seem to follow murphy's law.
Remove the counting by allowing people to rip as mp3 and you remove the small revenue artists/labels share for each play.
There is a reason buying a song costs 99 cents (or so) on iTunes but a months subscription to a unlimited steaming service it about 10$ without ads.
So when you download an MP3 of the YouTube content and listen offline outside of the YouTube player, that money stream goes away - so naturally the people making money off it get angry. And this does violate TOS - so they have a leg to sue on.
In the end, the rights holder has the right to monetize their content. So if you do want to listen 100 times offline, buy the song or subscribe to something Spotify/Apple Music which do pay royalties on offline.
I radio ripped my share of music too when I was a kid. It was a pain. I had no little control and often no warning about when a song I wanted would play. The dj would often talk over the start or end of the song. A song I wanted would sometimes fade transition with a song I didn't want. Reception sometimes stunk. If everything went right, the overall quality of the recording was still inferior to what you'd get if the single or album were just bought outright.
In the 80s, DRM was naturally built into the inconveniences of the technologies of the time. Now that technology has solved for those inconveniences, we find ourselves in a fundamentally different situation for both consumers and business.
Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the RIAA
I wonder if people like him live in constant fear of being targeted by pranksters, or worse...
On the other other hand, if you ever watch that ripped video again on more than one separate occasion, you've already saved bandwidth / electricity on unnecessary transferring the data again. More than that, if you're interested only in the song, not the underlying video, you're saving even more bandwidth because - as far as I understand - those sites hit the audio channel directly, skipping the video download.
Also, I love them; they were godsent when I wanted to listen to something at work while being in China.
It is DMCA that makes almost any operation with copyrighted content illegal.
1. they store the illegal copy on their servers
2. they are profiting from this (probably a lot because it's the first result for "youtube mp3" in Google)
Because that teens don't have their own credit cards is something I'd call a great success for society.
"For years, I’ve had to watch how invisible frames have been attached to many websites that load my site. Such ‘malicious’ traffic has increased immensely and is becoming an increasingly large problem, because ads cannot be displayed to those users.“ Usually, Matesanz’ portal monetizes the site via imbedded ads. If these happen to be loaded in the background on third-party sites, they cannot be clicked. Fake traffic doesn’t generate any money and damages campaign performance on the site in the long term."
[1] http://www.onlinemarketingrockstars.de/philip-matesanz-youtu...
