Stream-ripping Is 'Fastest Growing' Music Piracy (bbc.com) 254
Stream-ripping is now the fastest-growing form of music piracy in the UK, new research has suggested. From a report: Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers. Record labels claim that "tens, or even hundreds of millions of tracks are illegally copied and distributed by stream-ripping services each month." One service alone is thought to have more than 60 million monthly users. According to research by the Intellectual Property Office and PRS For Music, 15 percent of adults in the UK regularly use these services, with 33 percent of them coming from the 16-24 age bracket. Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
Forget CD/DVD ripping... (Score:3, Informative)
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This! I went to see a band a few weeks ago and bought the CD on the way out of the concert venue.
I am debating if I should spend the 20 euro getting a CD player for the computer or just cut my losses and toss it.
Windows App Store (Score:4, Informative)
I bought an app last night in Microsoft's Windows App Store to rip content from YouTube. It isn't underground and you don't need to even use dubious apps or warez anymore to rip.
Re:Windows App Store (Score:5, Funny)
I bought an app last night in Microsoft's Windows App Store to rip content from YouTube. It isn't underground and you don't need to even use dubious apps or warez anymore to rip.
What could be more dubious than a closed-source app distributed through the windows store, so you can't even run it if you modify it?
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A closed-source app distributed via torrent link from a sketchy website.
Its FLVto.biz for me (Score:2)
I stumbled across this website a couple of years ago and I'll occasionally use it to rip the audio from YouTube. I primarily download audio that I can't find other places, like live songs or rare performances. As a reformed Pirate Bay avid user, I now very rarely download any audio now that I don't pay for.
As for quality, I typically find that it's adequate for general use.... working out, playing through motorcycle speakers, etc. A true audiophile won't like the quality, but most of us can't tell the di
Asus Xonar D2 Sound Card (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.trustedreviews.com/Asus-Xonar-D2-Sound-Card-review-asus-xonar-d2-sound-card-page-2
ASUS call ALT DRM backup, which lets you record what you are hearing, circumnavigating DRM restrictions."
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Why? Redirect the stream from alsa/jack/pulseaudio or directly from gstreamer into a file. This is lossless in the sense, that it does not introduce any quality loss which isn't present in the streamed media before.
Not illegal where allowed (Score:5, Insightful)
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format shifting is legal in many countries. It's probably against the terms of service though, and that might be illegal depending on where you are.
What's the big deal (Score:2)
Welcome back to Y2K (Score:3)
Stream ripping has been going on since Shoutcast days with programs like Odd Sock Streamripper https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Nothing new...
Youtube-DL (Score:2)
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My fave.
Ever heard of time shifting (Score:5, Insightful)
Several sites and apps allow users to turn Spotify songs, YouTube videos and other streaming content into permanent files to store on phones and computers.
You mean "time shifting". This has been litigated already [wikipedia.org].
Overall usage of stream-ripping sites increased by 141.3 percent between 2014 and 2016, overshadowing all other illegal music services.
Except that this isn't actually illegal. So now I wonder how many other apps services are incorrectly called "illegal" by this group.
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In brain usage? (Score:2)
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Please report to the Thought Police to pay your fine and purchase your non-exclusive performance rights to the song. That will be $15,000 per "performance," payable immediately and retroactive to your great grandparents' time.
Do a performance, get paid, be done with it. (Score:2)
Ever more draconian laws and technology will never get piracy under control so stop expecting it.
I work for a living. I get paid, and that's the end of it. I don't get paid every time someone uses a window I installed or a door I made or lung I transplanted.
To hell with the entertainment industry and with IP in general.
Oh no (Score:5, Funny)
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Hey, we have to stop sheet music sales... it's going to ruin all music... and player pianos too!
If you can hear it... (Score:3)
...you can pirate it. So obviously they need to sell CDs and MP3s that won't play and music players without speakers or any audio outs.
Except it isn't ... (Score:2)
Because stream ripping is perfectly legal in analogy to recording radio to tape.
The only (and big) BUT is, that you need to have live access to the stream while ripping it. Downloading rips while the stream is down is not legal.
You probably can argue that some websites like youtube-downloader may be illegal as you're not directly ripping the stream, but I guess a court will rule what's the process and result, not the technical details.
And you can use the youtube-dl tool to rip yourself instead of using webs
Is it piracy if there's no other way? (Score:2)
If I want to purchase a song but it's not available on iTunes/Amazon/etc for my country, is it really piracy?
No it's not, because piracy means sailing a ship on water and stealing physical goods.
The jig is up. (Score:2)
Well the cat's out of the bag, we had a good run of ultra-convenient piracy. Back to torrrents where necessary I guess. I'm buying a lot of music DRM-free from Bandcamp these days anyway.
The recording industry needs to look at itself. (Score:5, Interesting)
A good friend of mine got his CPA as an older college student. Then he went to work for the big CPA firms in NYC. They used him for auditing and then spit him out at the end of audit season (after having told him, "You play your cards right and we'll put you on track to be a partner." Yeah, as if!). One audit he did is worth noting.
It seems this one former rocker whose group was filling the stadiums "back in the day" was accosted by a paparazzi and the rocker may have struck the paparazzi. He called his attorney when he got a letter from the alleged victim of his fist and asked for him to defend him. His attorney told him what it would cost to defend. The former rocker said, "But I'm broke!" His attorney said, "That's crazy—your music is still selling. In fact, my daughter just told me that she got your entire album from 1970-something on iTunes."
"I haven't received a royalty check for five years from anyone!" replied the former rocker.
His attorney, who drew up the contracts informed him that he had the "right to audit" the sales of his recordings. So, my friend Jim was hired to do the audit.
Here is what he found out:
To say the least, after the audit, the record company agreed to arbitration and wound up paying the members of the group unpaid moneys and had to pay interest to keep the story from the press. Jim never told me who the band was, but he did tell me that I would know right away who they were.
So, the next time you see the recording industry whining about people stealing "their" music, understand that it's the artist's music you are stealing—if you are, indeed, illegally copying music. But also understand that the recording industry, themselves, are just as guilty—they blame you for what they, themselves do.
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And if you haven't yet read it, John Fogerty goes on along the same lines in his very readable autobiography, "Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music" [amazon.com]. Reading what Fantasy Records under Saul Zaentz did to that poor bastard made my blood boil
Repeat after me.. Pricey is a Service problem... (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
I pay $14.99/month for Apple Music and the entire family listens to whatever they want whenever they want. No tracking down rips, no messing about with torrents. We always listen through the AppleTV, headphones, or the car, and it's it being Apple has never stopped any of that from working. I imagine the same holds for Spotify, etc.
Piracy just doesn't seem worth the effort anymore. The time to proactively track down music as opposed to just throwing $15/month at having an instant search just isn't worth it.
is this really surprising? (Score:3)
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Insightful)
do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
if you checked out the quality of the average ear-buds that people use with their phones, you would have the answer to that question.
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at classic rock songs before that era to get a good idea how much its changed and how much it affects music. Here's Stairway to Heaven [epicfrequency.com] which I'm sure most people are familiar with. That song would be practically impossible today since whatever dick weevil would be put in charge of mastering the album would have maxed it out immediately, removing any ability for the song to build-up musically as well as lyrically.
Any song being crafted for mainstream radio play just isn't going to be as good of a listen (I'm not even talking about whether the song is good lyrically or musically) because the shit stain producers utterly rob it of expressivity in order to make it stand out more amidst all the other noise. There needs to be something like a Director's Cut for albums that give us something other than the radio mix.
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Songs with high dynamic range are annoying to listen to in a lot of everyday situations, such as in a car or while working out at the gym, as volume has to constantly be adjusted. Not everyone listens to music in an underground bunker with perfect noise isolation, $10000 speakers, etc. Also, I doubt anyone here can truly differentiate between a lossless audio file and a reasonable MP3/AAC, most of you are just full of yourselves (many blind AB tests out there that people tend to ignore due to bias). Most pe
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
The last few cars that I've owned boosted the volume as you sped up or slowed down. This is a much better technical solution than ramming saturated music down everyone's throats.
And even my old-ass Sony tube TV has a dynamic range compression feature to help watch movies at low volume.
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Speeding up/slowing down isn't the issue; it's the ~70 dB noise floor of driving that makes anything quiet in the music impossible to hear (without going deaf during the loud parts). The simplest technical solution, which the industry has adopted, is to normalize the loudness in the track. No special music playback hardware required, works for all makes & models & years of cars/whatever playback device. Sure there may be better technical ways to do it, but cost and adoption will be a problem.
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, cost is not a problem. The circuit is trivial and the trick can likely already be pulled off with the DSP electronics already present for tone control/equalization. This was even available in the analog days as a "loudness" knob.
"Adoption" would happen more or less immediately if the music wasn't already compressed. It was widely adopted in ye olden days.
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No, cost is not a problem. The circuit is trivial and the trick can likely already be pulled off with the DSP electronics already present for tone control/equalization. This was even available in the analog days as a "loudness" knob.
Your point is valid but just a minor point of correction: the "loudness" control didn't exactly do dynamic range compression. What it did was boost the bass at lower volumes.
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You are right that "loudness" controls don't really do DRC, but only the cheapest only boosted bass. [extron.com]
In any event, in the digital age we don't need kludges like prerecorded music with dynamic range compression. First of all, it assumes everyone's primary music environment is the car. My 15 minute commute barely affords me 3 or 4 songs. Second, the nicer car stereos (and premium cars) do background noise compensation, so people who care about their car audio already have solutions. Finally, I mean, it just so
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt anyone here can truly differentiate between a lossless audio file and a reasonable MP3/AAC
As someone who did professional audio engineering for quite a few years, I have to disagree --- sort of.
First, you say a "reasonable" MP3. A "reasonable" MP3 is indeed hard to tell from a lossless file, but most MP3s aren't all that "reasonable" and can be pretty easily distinguished.
My second caveat has to do with the listening environment. If you're listening on the Apple earbuds that came with your phone, you surely can't tell good from bad. If you listen on the JBL professional setup I had in my studio control room, you sure as heck can hear small differences.
I do agree that many modern (and many somewhat older) mixes are way over-engineered. The engineers try to get them to sound acceptable in loud environments, in stereo and in mono, on crappy car systems and crappier earbuds, and so on ... and what loses out is listening in a good environment on good equipment. Note that I say "many" mixes, not "all" mixes. In particular, New Age seems to be mixed with more of a view to quality listening.
Of course, taste is subjective. I'm sure some people like the sound of their Apple earbuds.
Re: But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:3)
The solution to that is for a mastered track with good dynamic range have a corresponding 'gain adjustment info' file (basically bounce the audio before smashing the crap out if it with a compressor - then record what the final stage of compression does to it - using standardised and publicly known algorithms). A playback device could then easily give the overcompressed output.
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Songs with high dynamic range are annoying to listen to in a lot of everyday situations, such as in a car or while working out at the gym, as volume has to constantly be adjusted.
That's why there are technical solutions available to these people who need to destroy the sound to make it listenable, e.g. the "loudness" option on my car radio which dials in the amount of dynamic range compression I get.
No need to mess up the source material. You can always compress. You can never uncompress.
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Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
I believe this is the reason... Bluetooth audio is also really bad and people still pay big $$$ for bluetooth
headphones.
Back in the day it was recording off FM onto cassette tape!!
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Interesting)
I did this VERY briefly early on...but also, early on, I noticed the sound sucked, and well...hard to always get the intro/outro of the song without the fscking DJ talking over it, or starting a new song over top of the last one....
But at a young age...I and most of my friends were sold on good quality audio.
We all worked, mowing lawns, baby sitting...later we got jobs washing dishes and bussing tables in HS.
But starting about 12 years old...I went into a high end audio shop, and heard a McIntosh tube amp hooked to Klipschorn speakers and my jaw hit the floor.
Starting from then...I earned and bought piece by piece as good of audio equipment as I could save and afford at the time...and have been trading up over all these years, till I now essentially have that first system I heard as a kid.
Of course, too many loud concerts have made my hearing not quite as sharp as back then, but still...I love good audio.
For the gym or car, sure..high quality mp3 is just fine, but for home...I want CD quality...usually I rip my stuff to FLAC and listen on the good stereo to that....
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Back in the day it was recording off FM onto cassette tape!!
When I was a teenager, for a few years my best friend and I used to set up a cassette recorder at one end of my parents' coffee-table hi-fi to record Casey Kasem's annual top 100 countdown at new year's (on AM radio!). We'd get a few extra-long-play cassettes, and set an alarm for the times we needed to switch tapes - try as we might, we couldn't manage to stay awake all night.
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I've heard the license to play the music required the DJ to talk over a portion of it, so that recordings were not perfect. A very early form of copy protection, really. Don't know if this is true however.
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The quality of Bluetooth audio depends heavily on the codec supported by both devices. You can stream AAC or MP3 without re-encoding over Bluetooth or one of the newer transport codecs like aptX.
The problem is that it's not easy to find this information out.
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honestly, bluetooth audio has come a long ways. I use a pair of jaybird X-2's, and the audio quality is basically indistinguishable from wired headphones.
(granted i'm no audiophile, I have a life -- but for spotify and assorted MP3's while working out, they are just fine)
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Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Funny)
Close...
They emit gold particles that when ionized create a gold nano-filament between the ear buds and the device -- allowing for perfect signal transmission. It gets kind of expensive having to refill the reservoir with fresh gold (i don't have the money to invest in the recycling adapter), but still miles and miles better than wired headphones.
Re: But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:4, Funny)
My mp3 player has a burnished walnut knob.
I know the difference between an integrated amp and a "receiver."
But that Grateful Dead you listen to with your pristine Dynaco amp and vintage Klipsh speakers was originally recorded on cassette.
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm guessing they're getting FAR less than even dismal mp3 quality music ripping off of streaming services, that aren't putting out very high quality music at all....
I would guess this wouldn't sound very good even on a portable player or in a car, much less even a modestly decent home sound system....
Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify, etc., but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think. But honestly, no, no young people care at all about sound quality. If it's not terrible, it's good enough for them. One thing my conversations with young people has made clear is that they are simply not ever going to buy music in a physical format, like CDs, ever. They'd rather not have music than do that. And streaming meets their needs because they prefer to listen to pretty random selections of songs rather than being fans of specific artists.
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You seem to have described the common music hipster.
I will let you know, Sir, however cliche it might be, that many of us youngings don't subscribe to this way of life.
Audio codecs. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify,
Spotify do the compression themselves from original audio (so there aren't many copy-generational problems).
Spotify uses Vorbis (better quality than MP3 at same bitrate according to A/B test. Definitely better than WMA), because back when they started, that was the best license-free codec guaranteed to be available in the largest set of browsers (it was an IETF standard), and a permissive free library (easy to embed into apps).
(This was back before OPUS, the current IETF standard came and basically killed n
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Yes, "Hi-Fi" was really only a thing marketed to baby boomers.
Well, as a baby boomer myself ...
Hi-Fi was a big thing back in the day because AM radio sounded terrible, and most record players (we played those old 45 RPM discs with the big hole in the center) sounded almost as bad. Hi-Fi, with a good amp, good speakers, a decent preamp, and a turntable that didn't feature 50dB of rumble, provided a listening experience orders of magnitude above the ordinary.
The advent of digital technology of course brought big changes.
Now, today, vinyl is back for whatever reason. May
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Why? Probably for the same reason some people download tens of thousands of pirated movies... so they can brag about the size of their collection which they never watch.
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Music is somewhat different to movies. Most of the time, movies can only be watched once or twice and then they're boring. Maybe a few really good ones you'll go back and rewatch once every year or three but on average, they're use-and-forget.
Music on the other hand can be played over and over again and generally doesn't get boring. It can also be played equally well in the background (or sometimes better) while doing something else rather than having to fully focus on it as you usually do with a movie.
Y
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There is also the matter of investment. A song you are not enjoying that might might be preferable to listen to for the sake of variety. Its only ~3-4min after all of your time, which as you say is often not even dedicated time.
A movie on the other hand running ~2hrs amounts to 8-10% of your waking day. Even if you are using a movie as 'background' it still consumes much more of your attention than the radio. The bar is simply higher for movies for those reasons.
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Really? I can't stand 4:3 stretched, or 235:100 clipped or vertically stretched etc..
However, you're probably right. No one gives a damn anymore. It's too bad.
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I'll tell you my use-case and then you can be as judgy as you want.
I have an 11-year-old. Before a long road trip or plane ride, she makes a YouTube playlist. We use a tool to convert the entire playlist into music files (MP3?) and load them on her tablet for the ride. Quality is unimportant, as the headphones are a $10 pair from Walgreens and the ambient conditions are either a car or airplane.
I have a similar use-case for when my wife goes jogging.
Personally, I tend to use iTunes to keep my music organize
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The sound on a HD Youtube video is not actually that bad. Sure it's not CD quality, but good enough on a portable MP3 player or in the car.
I've been using 4K Youtube to MP3 and it works very well. https://www.4kdownload.com/ [4kdownload.com]
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends.
I'm an old person. But back when I was a teenager, I used to record stuff off the radio to listen to--the AM Radio [youtube.com]. Why? Because it's free. Yeah, the quality sucked. Yeah, I sometimes ended up with some DJ talking up the song. But I was willing to forgo all that because it was free.
I assume it's a similar thing here.
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Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
People care a bit about sound fidelity, But they don't care enough to spend an extra $1 per song.
Let them get their high-fidelity audio files for $0.05 per 3 minute song or 20 songs per $1, and people will buy it.
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Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
They don't care. People don't need a lot of fidelity to enjoy music. As long as it isn't actually dropping out left and right, people can enjoy it. My wife frequently listens to her ipod with her earbuds sitting on the table next to her. I've enjoyed songs heard through the leakage of the headphones of the person sitting next to me in a waiting room...
The noise reaching our ears isn't the music we hear in our heads. Normal people don't continually focus on the fidelity of the noise hitting our ears... we're
yeah, but considering (Score:2)
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Hey, people will ride standing up in an airplane if the price is right.
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The fun thing about digital is that it doesn't degrade when you copy it -- as long as the source stream is good quality, the rip will be equally good. And there are a lot of streams that offer good-to-high quality audio providing you have sufficient bandwidth to handle it.
But generally speaking, no most people don't care much about quality. Obviously if given an equal choice between the two, almost everyone would choose the higher quality. But if its a choice between a low quality and not having the song
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ONLY if you are copying it in a lossless format.
If you are taking a mp3 (which has already lost fidelity by its nature)...and rip that to another mp3 copy...you lose more...do it again...you lose more quality.
SO...it depends if the whole copy workflow is lossless vs lossy.
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ONLY if you are copying it in a lossless format.
Nope. Once its digital, the bits don't change.
If you are taking a mp3 (which has already lost fidelity by its nature)...and rip that to another mp3 copy...you lose more...do it again...you lose more quality.
Yes, but the solution there is "don't do that." If its already in mp3 format, then why would you bother reencoding it back to mp3? Just copy it as it is.
SO...it depends if the whole copy workflow is lossless vs lossy.
Only for the original encoding. After that, there's little reason to reencode unless you absolutely have to format shift for some reason, but that's rare these days. Audio has settled into a small handful of formats that are all generally recognized by modern players, and the ones that don't usually have pl
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Nope. Once its digital, the bits don't change.
I suppose to clarify, that should really be "once its encoded," whether lossless or not.
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What you do is download the videos onto your home PC, transfer the videos onto a hundred GByte SD card and view them that way, rather than blowing your monthly data network allowance on streaming the same video over and over again. So the solution is ... get rid of the data caps or allow Youtbe to use DRM to store a video that you mark as "cache locally". You also use a decent pair of DJ/gaming headphones to listen to the music rather than the tinny speaker.
You don't know what Da Sux is. (Score:3)
In the late 70’s and early 80’s I worked as a DJ in a roller rink. Kids would line up their boom-boxes along the wall and record our whole show. Then they’d play it back to their friends in the parking lot. The recorded sound was awful (those built in mics were crap, not that the speakers were much better), but they didn’t care. They had their music – the quality of which must have been augmented by the memories of it when they heard it over our actually pretty good Altec-L
Re:But why? The quality MUST suck... (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't care about anything but 'FREE'. So who cares about paying for the product any longer.
Then their favorite artist stops touring and producing music and they complain because "They were my favorite band".
I don't pirate music- but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money. They tour because THAT's where they make most of their money.
Smaller bands probably aren't going to be on most streaming sites anyway.
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
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If it wasn't for music piracy, I would have never heard of any of my favourite bands. I've spent thousands of dollars going to gigs and buying merch from bands whose music I haven't paid for.
You could certainly make an argument that piracy hurts music sales: some people who would have bought it will get it for free instead, but some who wouldn't have heard it otherwise might buy it. Which side you think is a bigger influence is definitely up for debate.
Tours, however, are only ever HELPED by piracy. "A band
Home taping (Score:3)
In reality, stream ripping isn't really much different to copying to cassette from the radio like everyone was doing in the 80's.
"But *this time around*, home taping will be killing the music [wikipedia.org]. For sure. Honest !"
-- brought to you by the industry that keep crying "wolf".
(Under the command of CEOs who would like to outlaw the huming of copyrighted music)
{...} but I don't exactly think the music artists of large bands are really struggling for money.
The large bands aren't struggling for money anyway and won't feel the impact of piracy much.
The smaller bands are actually under horrendous contracts where they don't actually make that much money anyway. Piracy at least helps getting their music known, and might actually help
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The reason they tour is that they make a pittance from music sales. It was bad enough when record companies sold CDs, which were lose-lose propositions for both artists & customers: one had to sink something like $20 for a CD w/ just 1 song worth listening, while the record company took the biggest cut and the artists were left w/ crumbs. It didn't help that most songs were quickly in & out of favor w/ the public.
Once Apple entered, they introduced granularity by allowing people to buy 1 song at
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Like only what?
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I just don't see how this is any different than recording songs from the radio or recording shows on TV. It's perfectly legit.
Recording something you are receiving has generally been OK'd in the legal arena. Distributing that copy hasn't.
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The music industry did bitch about cassettes back in the day. It usually came out when they tried to charge higher royalties and the radio stations refused pay. A settlement got negotiated as the music industry couldn't exist without radio marketing their new albums and radio couldn't exist without music to play on the air.
Anyone remembers the cassette tax?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy [wikipedia.org]
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Anyone remembers the cassette tax?
That's exactly what I was thinking when I started reading your post. As I recall, it was proposed to be quite a large amount, like almost half the price. It would have increased the cost of those TDK Silver 6 packs I'd buy.
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It would have increased the cost of those TDK Silver 6 packs I'd buy.
I bought a lot of cassette packs to store data when I had a Commodore VIC-20 in the early 1980's.
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In 1971 I worked in a small store that sold stereo equipment and also did a thriving business selling cassette tapes copied from vinyl records. At the time it was legal. We would make a master tape from the vinyl and had tape duplicating equipment which would make four cassette tapes at a time. We had a rather large catalog of popular music. About that time, the passed a law which allowed record companies to copyright vinyl. After that, we had to watch for the symbol (P in a circle) since we couldn't copy t
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On one of the album covers from the black metal band Venom, they had the "Home taping is killing music" note with the logo, and below it said "So are Venom"
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Found it! [tumblr.com]
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Wasn't it decided with Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
that it was fair use (legal) to record things off the tv (and by implication radio) to watch/listen to later?
Ah I see the song was released in 1980 and the court decision was in 1984 so at the time the song was released people actually thought it was illegal to record music off the radio to listen to later?
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Stream ripping from services that let you pick the exact content is probably illegal.
Recording things from tv or radio for personal use is however absolutely legal.
As for a slightly related question if ignorance of the law is no defense why is it so difficult to find (requiring a lawyer and even then it's iffy) what laws actually apply to a situation?
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We've been saying that this is a problem my entire adult life. The establishment and those that defend them keep writing more laws. Tens of thousands of pages of legislation year in, year out.
They even pass laws that nobody has read yet, or did you miss the "we have to pass it in order to find out whats in it"
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If a law isn't accessible by the layman it shouldn't be enforceable. Ignorance of the law absolutely should be a defense in such cases that no person would have reasonably known about it or even been able to find out about it for that matter.
In today's world that would mean it has to be publicly available online storing it in a filing cabinet in the Central Bureaucracy available only to lawyers shouldn't be acceptable.
That's not really enough but it should be the minimum.
At work a law change put our industr
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I guess you haven't been paying attention. "On the internet!" makes everything completely different when it comes to IP.
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Perhaps this is just the studios making yet another case that
- DRM is still needed
- Streaming is evil and needs to die (because they have wrested control from the studios), or at least these companies should give them a bigger slice of the pie
- Every pirate is a thief who deserves some old f
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Or, for those stuck with Comcast, even home bandwidth caps. [Luckily, I'm not subjected to them.] But if you listen a lot and have a bandwidth cap, you might be hitting that level what with all of the streaming people are doing these days (Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.)
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They're still bent out of shape that their old business model just isn't working anymore. As has been said many times in *every* slashdot post about music piracy - it's the industries fault. They cling to physical sales when their audience wants to stream. They sell full albums when their audience wants variety and selection. They push their own distribution instead of going to the consumer via Amazon or Apple (in many cases, anyway). They insist on $1 a song, or more... then full albums at $9.99 or more to
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Oh, yes, just awful. Heaven forfend that the owner of the box be able to get inside and administrate it. Perfectly dreadful.
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