Record companies were aggressively prosecuting “file sharing” sites for posting copyrighted music. I seem to remember “Kazaa” and “Bear Share” as examples.
A great many songs are posted, some in high quality, on YouTube. Tools are easily found for downloading the audio tracks.
Are the record companies pursuing YouTube? Or have they come to some arrangement?
I don’t know the answer but several artists and producers post their own “official” versions of recordings, as well as fans who post them. Either is just as easily copied (my kids long ago figured out that this was cheaper than buying them at $1.20 a pop on iTunes for their iPods).
I have posted a lot of videos on YouTube, some of which have music background dubbed in. YouTube has a pretty effective method of analyzing videos for copyrighted material in the soundtrack and I have gotten a few messages that indicate copyrighted material was found in my video. They don’t prevent you from uploading it, but a user with copyright violations will be limited in the duration of videos they can post (something like 10 or 15 minutes).
Sometimes the official videos are available so that the record companies can capture the advertising revenues from YouTube.
I remember hearing that Google (owner of YouTube) was going after the “Youtube to mp3” sites and suing to shut them down. The basis of their complaint was unauthorized use of Google’s API (software specifications). Typing the obvious search string still returns working sites so I don’t know what the status of Google’s complaint is.
Ahhh… story. Looks like they went after one big specific site. Remains to be seen about the rest.
Well, that website says, “Different from other services the whole conversion process will be perfomed by our infrastructure and you only have to download the audio file from our servers.” Their liability may be different because they are doing the conversion on their systems. The website I use has a Javascript applet that runs on my computer to do the conversion. And even if I didn’t use one of these services, I could still search the browser cache and find the FLV file from a YouTube video.
Yes, they have come to an arrangement. This is part of why YouTube is currently so copyright-owner-friendly, in order to give the companies more effective alternatives than legal action. YouTube provides copyright owners with tools that can search for the use of audio that said owners provide proof of ownership. This is why YouTube is the one video site with the fastest rate of pulling down of videos.
Few seem to know that one of the creators of YouTube specifically uploaded copyrighted videos himself, and this was highly influential to why YouTube became the most popular video site when there were quite a few alternatives at the time. YouTube has constantly been on thin ice with the MPAA and RIAA ever since, even after they were acquired by Google.
Pulling down the conversion sites won’t help at all, for one pretty big reason–you don’t need a site. YouTube offers DRM-free videos via HTML5. All you have to do is figure out what video you need to ask for from the site, and ask for it yourself.
And, anyways, the speed at which you can acquire MP3s in this fashion is much slower than the other ways you can do it, so it makes more sense to go after those other ways first.
In fact, there was a scam flaoting around for a while; Youtube would replace the uploader of a vieo with someone who claimed “that’s our copyright”. This new entity would get the ad revenue. So miscellaneous front companies in obscure eastern european countries would start claiming copyright on almost any video posted. Youtube emailed a notification to the poster. If the owner fought back, so what? If not, they collected a few weeks’ revenue before the system caught on.