Shifting From P2P To Stream Ripping 577
An anonymous reader submits "As users continue to try fending off the ever more litigious music industry, some
seem to have dropped P2P entirely, moving to ripping instead. While
they lose some control over what they are downloading, it's a untraceable way
to download music (no way for the RIAA to track users or sue). With some
of the more powerful software that's been coming out recently, stream
ripping has become more main-stream. Some of the more well known software
packages, like StationRipper, allow
users to download several thousand songs on a daily basis. And, depending
on how you read the law, it's 100% legal. How will the RIAA respond?
As more users move to this type of technology to avoid the P2P lawsuits, how
will the music industry respond?"
Good idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
My parents used to do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Fees? (Score:0, Insightful)
How would the RIAA respond? (Score:4, Insightful)
Expect "internet radio" to disappear (Score:5, Insightful)
home taping (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious answer (Score:4, Insightful)
As stupidly as possible, just like normal.
Re:Good idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever considered streaming from high-quality stations then?
Re:cant see why i'd want this (Score:3, Insightful)
No, there aren't, because P2P by its nature requires each peer to know the address of the other peers.. and "anonymous" networks like Freenet are hopeless for music (so slow & poor content). You may be getting confused by blocklists which prevent certain address ranges connecting with your P2P client.
Re:home taping (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing was that no matter how good a system you had, a home recording never beat store bought.
Re:My parents used to do this (Score:5, Insightful)
Analog copies aren't as lossy as they used to be, especially when you're recording a source that did most of its travelling digitally until the last moment.
Questions: No record? Legal? (Score:2, Insightful)
How is it untraceable? As I understand it (and I could be wrong), when one listens to streamed music over the web (as opposed to music broadcast over the air waves), one must make a specific recordable connection with the source of the music. Your IP number will be recorded somewhere.
Perhaps what is meant is that while there will be a record that you were listening, there will be no proof that you were recording. Indeed, contrary to downloading a MP3, the presumption will be that you "only" listening and nothing (useable) remained on your hard drive.
Of course if enough people do this, that presumption will be reversed. Imagine a world where 95% of the people have and use software that will, with one click, correctly snip, save, and index every song streamed to their computers. When this happens, the RIAA will make a case that streaming a song is for all practical purposes the same as uploading an MP3 of the same song, and thus subject to the same copyright considerations.
Really? How? What interpretation of the law supports this? Any precedents? Your "right" to "back-up" that which you never owned rights to in the first place?
People have always recorded music off of the radio, and always will. However, that never made it "legal"; only cost-ineffective to police or prohibit. The one click recording of perfect digital data will be perceived as something different.
The makers of this software have probably just increased the likelihood of point to point DRM.
Cognitive dissonance (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words (Score:2, Insightful)
Lobbying
Litigation
That's how they will respond. I would bet a years supply of the best coffee beans money could buy on it.
re: depending on how you read the law... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what was said about Napster, look at how long that lasted. I think its a bit of a pipe dream to believe that there will be a legal way to acquire large amounts of copyrighted music for free w/o the consent of the copyright holder.
And on the off chance it was legal to do this you can be sure that Congress would put a stop to it pretty fast.
Re:My parents used to do this (Score:2, Insightful)
Darn right, that's what I say, too. If you're to hear the music before you buy it, the potential is there for it to be copied. I think the RIAA would prefer you just walk into a brick-and-mortar store and blindly buy CDs at their prices.
So far, I like the iTunes store. They've done a nice job with ease-of-use, prices, and DRM. I've messed with playfair, but I really have no need for it...maaaybe once in a while I decode a single song for a friend, but it's nothing that would bring down the music industry in one fell swoop
Encrypted streams sounds good. I read elsewhere that some RIAA-backed company is about to deliver a P2P scanning tool (or something like that..) that checks audio fingerprints. If we just gzipped files or used some basic encryption, it could be easily made useless.
Re:Good idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Feel free to name a few - Either >256k/s, or >160k/s VBR (I don't know of any VBR streams, since streaming inherently tends to require CBR content)...
Although, I've asked before, and I'll probably ask again - Why not just rip from CDs borrowed from friends (or the library)? Equally untraceable (if not more so, since although they can't tell what you do with the stream, I'd imagine it must look exceedingly strange to see someone listening to half-a-dozen stations at a time, 24/7), and you get to have 100% control over the resulting rip. Best of all possible worlds - You get the songs, you get as high of a quality as you want, you get whatever format you prefer, and not even the person you borrow the CD from needs to know what you've done (although at least for friends, most really don't care, beyond asking for some reciprocation).
Like many
Broadcasters: Turn off crossfading (Score:5, Insightful)
I was doing this for a while. I streamed in about 15 niche stations that played the kind of music I liked, and got a lot of music. The error rate was fairly high, and I ended up with a lot of duplicates, but I found a lot of good music, and filled in some gaps in my collection.
If the RIAA was smart they'd love this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Depending on What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Notice the small change in the quoted text. And it's still 100% true.
This is not like the cat in the box where you cannot ever know if it's dead or alive till you open the box and discover it's dead/alive.
With this law once you discover it is illegal, it's been illegal since you started doing it. So it's a bad plan to do it on the basis that you don't know if its illegal or not.
Using a new legit tech for piracy only hurts it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now here we are saying Internet radio is good, legitimate fair use; and then we use it for piracy.
Just like how Apple tried to be relaxed with their AAC DRM, but people just had to crack it. Sure, ther e are valid reasons for this, but once again people will use a valid, legal technology for piracy and ruin it for the rest of us.
Re:home taping (Score:1, Insightful)
Who is the person that will make the judgement on how lossy the recording has to be in order to be considered legal?
Re:My parents used to do this (Score:2, Insightful)
If it can be played through a speaker, it can be copied. The end.
Dear RIAA (Score:2, Insightful)
I have posted this before and will gladly post it again, no matter how many 11 year old girls you extort money from or how many scare stories you purchase to be run on mainstream American media, you have failed. Some of the people you are trying to frighten happen to be the Nerds and GeeKs that will continue to come up with ways to circumvent your bullshit. How much money have you wasted on these tactics which will always be circumvented or skirted? How much do you pay your drones to try to search for victims instead of real talent that can put out an entire album worth a reasonable ten bux as apposed to the T&A no talent losers or one hit per album wonders? Dumbasses, you are invovled in a war of attrition that you cannot possibly win. You are limited by money, we are limited only by our freetime and creativity.
Music will be shared, downloaded, spread amoungst the internet quicker than the next M$ Virii of the day. It will be shared at LAN parties and USENET, it will be shared between wireless networks, and countless other ways that we can dream up since we don't need money to do so. The tighter you squeeze, the more creativity oozes with no love for your Evil Empire. You are the creator of your own worst monstrosity that you chose to confront with hostility. What will you do this article asks, who the fuck cares. We will find a way around it anyway.
Maybe you should try releasing to public record how much money you have wasted and will continue to waste on this failed campaign before you try to accuse other things.
Tired old formula (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone imediatly when to Gnutella-net. Since Gnutella net was not centralized it could not be shut down. But the problem was, not being centralized meant that propagating search querries was ridiculously expensive in bandwidth, thus it was a slight pain in the ass.
Then we were worried that they would start sueing individuals, so someone developed free net that would use everyone else as a proxy to hide the origionating IP, thus the IP you see is not that of the person downloading the file. This would have worked but was damn stupid as far as wasting bandwith for anonymity.
the RIAA held off while on individual lawsuits, freenet never took off, now that the lawsuits are becoming a problem again we come up with stupid solution 'B', this streaming data client.
Basically, our file sharing clients will get worse and worse, and it will boil down to asking ourselves "do I really want to get this song in a shoddy quality, with skips and pops/waste a half hour in failed attempts to get it, or is it easier to just buy the song online legally?
And in fact, this is the way it should work. There will always be free clients and you will always be able to pirate music, it just a question how much of a pain in the ass it will be, and whether or not you value your time and quality of music over your money.
If the RIAA was smart(they aren't), they would lower the price of song downloads to 20 cents (an artist usually makes 10 cents per song on each cd), no one would bother wading through all the fake songs on Kazaa and most people would flock to the pay sites.
$1-$2 a songs? ppppttttt. . . Pirating methods don't suck that much . . yet.
Re:How would the RIAA respond? (Score:1, Insightful)
amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
This is all stupid (no offence) (Score:3, Insightful)
However, as my wife pointed out, the point of saving the streams becomes moot, since I can always switch on the iTunes stream anyway - why duplicate the commercial free radio station? Good point. (On the other hand, the internet station *does* include rare vinyl tracks that are out of distribution, which you can't buy anywhere, and which are very difficult, if not impossible to find on P2P, so there is some value to stream ripping.)
This seems to be a similar situation to digital TV. The BBC plays commercial free movies at DVD quality. I click record on my EyeTV 400 PVR, and get DVD quality movies. Great again. Love it. However, the irony does not escape me that this makes the BBC the biggest faciliator of "pirated" movies around. It also makes me question the difference between digital TV recording and the olden days of VCR recording movies. What's the difference? The quality is better.
However, I'm getting quite used to the high quality of the movies, and to be frank, beyond my obsessive collecting and quality control obsessions, it really doesn't make a damned bit of difference. I can't share them on the internet cuz they are too big (1.4GB-4GB). My friends don't have computers for entertainment centres, so the movies I record are as useless to them as a copy-protected music disc, ie. a coaster. And besides, no one seems to think the value of a movie is nearly as high as the people selling them.
So what's changed? Ripping streams is like recording radio shows to cassettes. Hard disk recording digital TV is basically the same as using a VHS deck to record analog TV. The big difference is the quality is better. And...? That's about it.
The only people digital media would seem to help are commercial pirates, who with digital media can now make better counterfeit copies - and yet the RIAA/Hollywood doesn't seem to be doing much about them. (Hollywood themselves are responsible for the majority of movies in the wild anyway.) Greedy? Certainly. Insane? Possibly. The only thing worse than greedy insane people are the ones with enough money to buy polititions, high priced lawyers, and too much cocaine.
Still, it will be fun to tell the grandkids about it. (I was a student during the era of photocopy hysteria, so I've already got a sense of how ridiculous and incredible this is going to seem in the future.
"But wouldn't photocopying a book cost more than buying the book?"
"Yes, Virginia. It seems fear and uncertainty drive people to extreme forms of irrational thinking and behavior."
Re:Good idea but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My parents used to do this (Score:3, Insightful)
I just use an FM transmitter from the CD/mp3 player to the radio. Not great quality, but it works, especially in a noisy pickup truck.
Re:home taping (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it isn't. The really scary thing for the recording industry isn't just that you can make a high quality copy, but that you can redistribute high quality copies with great ease. How many tapes or CDs can you make for friends before it feels like a lousy job? Even if you're willing, how many friends can you possibly have? On the other hand, how many copies can you share via P2P?
The Internet is what they're terrified about.
Re:Good idea but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly. This is the safest route and the person who lends you the CD is immune from prosecution (whereas the person who shares music online is at risk to lose their life savings to the RIAA).
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Stream-ripping software will be found illegal under the DMCA as a technology that enables piracy...
Re:Here is why I buy CD's (Score:3, Insightful)
(a) it is, in fact, the RIAA that has them pissed off
(b) while the RIAA is ridiculously greedy and deceitful, nobody is entitled to just get free music whenever they want
(c) the RIAA should be blamed for 'taking' (inaccurate, sorry, but for lack of a better word) artists' money, not for 'being squares' or whatever and trying to protect the music they make money off of
Re:My parents used to do this (Score:2, Insightful)
So how did they manage that, exactly?
Re:Here is why I buy CD's (Score:4, Insightful)
2: I own between 500-600 cd's
Sooo. At $20 average cd price, and choosing the lower of the range you gave, $20*500 = $10,000. Ok, let's be REALLY conservative and say they were only $15 each. $15*500 = $7500. AND, you claim you are a student.
So, either you are bullshitting, or you are admitting to everyone here that you are from a family that is very very rich. Either way, your opinion is clearly from teh point of view of a very very small minority.
I view boycotts as one of the most in-effective tools to combat the RIAA.
Did you see their profits plummet? I think the boycott is working quite well. I can't believe you seriously suggest writting a LETTER to them. Give me a break. These are the same people who were convicted of price fixing by the US government. The prices are STILL high, and only seem to be goin higher.
Boycotting CD sales is the only way to combat the RIAA. Copying the songs only give the RIAA more excuses to justify their absurdly high prices. I have not bought a single RIAA affiliated CD in the past 3-4 years, and I urge everyone here to do the same. The only way to get through to these people is by hurting their bottom line. When they cannot afford their Ferraries anymore they might start to listen.
Legal Question (was Re:Good idea but...) (Score:3, Insightful)
bought, what then happens if I sell or give the original
away? Am I somehow legally obligated to destroy my copy,
be it a duplicate of the original cd or mp3s ripped from it?
Re:Here is why I buy CD's (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, given thier current stance that loss in revenue MUST be from P2P and nothing else*, a quiet boycott won't change how they behave anytime soon.
The best ways to make a boycot work are to write them and tell them you've stoped buying thier products (and why), to get the media's attention in such a way that shows as many involved in a boycot as possible, and to stop downloading thier music! (if few to no songs are being shared online, yet thier down in sales by a huge amount that could not possibly be related to the number swapped they might get it).
The anti-RIAA t-shirt is acutally a good idea. If enough people were wearing t-shirts or whatever that said boycott the RIAA, especialy if they made it hard to connect to p2p, this would help create a 'buzz' that would be hard to ignore. Somthing like "I Won't buy, download, or listen to anything the RIAA produces. Ask me about the big RIAA boycott". Well probably better get someone who's actually good at t-shirt messages.
In summary, for a boycott to work, it'll take more effort than just not buying thier shiny disc's that somtimes plays in cd players and somtimes just locks up your mac.
Mycroft
*e.g.:The bad dip the economy took, the low percieved quality of many of thier cookie cutter bands, the angry people who've gotten sick of thier bullying, copy protection schemes that cause problems, the larger numbers of people hearing of how they mistreat acts, the perception that thier prices are to high, and many more I'm sure.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
why bother ripping streams? (Score:1, Insightful)
If there's a song or album I really like, I still want to own it, and a 128-192 stream is not a good enough copy for me. Same thing with p2p sharing, the bit-rate is usually too low.
I hardly download any new music any more, in a large part due to streaming. I consider that if I go through the trouble of looking for something to download, I'm probably at best going to get a copy at 192, and I hear all this stuff in rotation as weel as a lot I already have on the streams. So I lose a little choice in track selection, right now the streams have been doing well enough with their variety. I figure I can spend my time better doing something else, let them hunt down on the new tracks and rip and encode them.
You can do this with... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can do this with:
If you have any other good suggestions of things that the RIAA should burn, post replies(Is that "allowed" here? etiquette?). (I even checked to make sure that this article is less than a week old before posting)
Re:Here is why I buy CD's (Score:3, Insightful)
yes, that's a really plausible defence.
Re:Good idea but... (Score:4, Insightful)
And here I thought that you could just connect to the station, record the bytes of the stream to a file as they comes, and later cut the file to individual songs (with possible human intervention).
I didn't realize that you would need to keep on connecting and cutting connection and then parsing the resulting buffers together, when there was so much easier and more reliable solution.
But you must be correct, because you got modded informative. Moderators wouldn't be moderating comments up without both reading and understanding them, no would they ?
Suddenly I lost all sympathy for him (Score:5, Insightful)
This is where the problems lie. Stop trying to go public with services/sharing/selling. You are stealing from somebody.
Kids copy a few tracks off the radio, or from their friend's CD, and no-one cares that much. It's what we've had for decades, and we can all live quite happilly thank-you.
As soon as someone starts distributing en masse to the world at large - to people they don't really know - the balance tips.
We have a balance between how much hassle/loss of quality we'll endure for free music. The record industry has a balance between how much hassle it is to track/sue people against how well organised they are, and how widely they're distributing their stuff.
Re:I just signed up for allofmp3.com (Score:1, Insightful)
This is one of the ways where the music industry harpoons itself, IMHO. They portray the big stars glamourously as if they are always having fun, and they don't portray the lesser artists at all. Thus meaning that nobody gets to see the huge amount of lugging expensive kit around without it breaking, playing/singing the same thing over and over again to get it to sound right, revising bits to create a proper balance, etc.. or if the public DO get to see it, they only get to see the bits where everyone was laughing.
Musicians work. Maybe not so much that they deserve millions, but they do work.
Why? (Score:1, Insightful)