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Tag: YouTube To MP3

  • YouTube Users File Petition To Allow For The Use Of Third-Party Recording Tools

    Should YouTube users be allowed to rip the content they like to their hard drive, much like a person would use a DVR to record a television show of interest? Some users believe they should have such capabilities, and so, they’ve started a petition essentially asking for DVR rights when using YouTube.

    The petition comes on the heels of the announcement that Google is going after the video-to-mp3 conversion site with the obvious title, YouTube-MP3.com, something that’s reflected in the petition’s introduction:

    For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business.

    Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube (“Broadcast yourself”). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software.

    I hereby ask Google to break their silence and participate in an open and fair discussion with the intention to find a solution that suits the needs of the users.

    It should be noted that while consumers could tape music from the radio or make duplicates of other tapes with a dual-cassette setup, it wasn’t necessarily smiled upon by the powers that were. In fact, the MPAA went all out against the technology that was videocassette recorders (VCRs). The difference being, media consumption in the 80s was very much a one-way process, with the consumer having little recourse regarding feedback. Sure, an occasional letter might have made capitalism work in your favor, but there certainly weren’t multiple avenues of communication like those offered by Facebook and Twitter.

    With that in mind, should users be able to make copies of YouTube content, be it in the form of third part video recording software or through sites that rip the video’s soundtrack out, converting it to an MP3? While the comparison between DVRs and Internet broadcasts are based in logic, it’s impossible to see the current powers that be siding with the user here, especially when you consider the massive fuss these content providers have made about YouTube in the past. Perhaps a balance could be struck allowing users who upload their own self-created content to give their viewers the option of downloading the file.

    Other than that, it’s hard to see a day that the RIAA says “sure, you can download any of the music you like from YouTube’s VEVO service, unless the song was purchased by the viewer first. As pointed out by GigaOm, the petition has over 180,000 signatures since it was put up three days prior. While the support is admirable, it’s hard to see this working out in their favor.

  • Google’s Going After YouTube-To-MP3 Site

    It’s actually surprising this thing has lasted as long as it has, but now that Google’s turned its attention towards the YouTube-MP3.com conversion site, it’s doubtful the service will be in existence much longer, at least under its current guise. The site does exactly what it says it does. That is, it rips the audiotrack from a YouTube video and converts it to the MP3 format, which can then be downloaded by the user who prompted the conversion.

    As pointed out by TorrentFreak, Google has apparently dropped a lawsuit threat on the site’s owners, which, from their perspective, is completely understandable. Considering all the intellectual property/copyright issues Google has faced with YouTube, the idea of them going after a site that makes a form copyright infringement, one that makes use of YouTube’s content, only makes sense. It’s actually more surprising that it took this long for Google to act.

    A quick WhoIs search reveals the service in question–YouTube-MP3.org–has been registered since September 2009, meaning it took Google almost three full years to respond. In the meantime, the service has converted untold amounts of YouTube content into downloadable MP3s. Even better, the site uses the YouTube API to rip the soundtrack out of the video “submitted” by the user. As far as the “untold amounts” go, the TorrentFreak article also reveals the service gets around 1.3 million viewers a day, which is an incredible amount of potential infringement, courtesy of YouTube’s content.

    To their credit, and my surprise, the site owners aren’t just turning tail and running away. Instead, they are trying to negotiate with Google, intimating that their service serves a lot users. The site owner, who goes by “Philip,” had this to say to TF’s author:

    “We would estimate that there are roughly 200 million people across the world that make use of services like ours and Google doesn’t just ignore all those people, they are about to criminalize them. With the way they are interpreting and creating their ToS every one of those 200 million users is threatened to be sued by Google.”

    Seeing how Google is going directly after the site owner, I’m not sure his “200 million users” reasoning is accurate. Google doesn’t seem to care about those that use the service. They just want the site itself to stop ripping audiotracks out of YouTube files, which, considering Google’s position, is reasonable enough.

    To that point, the article also reveals the YouTube-MP3.org (pretty slick move going with the .org TLD) has been blocked by Google from accessing YouTube and its content; although, their efforts don’t appear to working that well. Before posting this article, I tested the service to see if it still works. The answer, as the upcoming screenshot indicates, is a resounding yes:

    YouTube MP3

    So much for blocking the service from YouTube’s content. Maybe this, like other Google updates, is undergoing a gradual rollout.