Business News Digital Labels & Publishers Legal

Key stream-ripping site voluntarily disables YouTube ripping

By | Published on Thursday 25 July 2019

YouTube

One of the big stream-ripping websites has said that it is voluntarily disabling its tools for ripping audio from YouTube videos, seemingly because it doesn’t want to get into a game of cat and mouse with the Google video platform.

Stream-ripping has been, of course, the music industry’s top piracy gripe for some time now. Both legal action and the threat of legal action by the labels has had some success, with some notable stream-ripping outfits shutting themselves down. But there are always plenty of alternative sites where people can still get permanent downloads from temporary streams.

With YouTube the most popular streaming site from which the rippers rip their audio, the music industry has also often called on the Google platform to do more to stop the rippers from ripping content from the videos it delivers. YouTube has occasionally issued stern statements about stream-ripping, though in the main its response, whether legal or technical, has been low-key.

However, the other week a whole load of YouTube-centric stream-ripping platforms stopped working, seemingly because of some technical measures implemented by Google. Of course, as is often the way with technical measures, most of the affected sites quickly found a way around the newly instigated blocking, and so the ripping of YouTube streams continues.

But Onlinevideoconverter.com has now told Torrentfreak that, while it also found a way to circumvent YouTube’s new anti-piracy measures, it has nevertheless decided to stop allowing people to rip YouTube audio via its site.

And this isn’t the result of legal letters from either the music industry or Google. Rather, it seems Onlinevideoconverter.com is saying that if YouTube is now planning on going into battle with the stream-rippers, it would rather not have to get involved in any such battling.

The team behind Onlinevideoconverter.com simply told Torrentfreak: “In view of YouTube’s latest stance, we’ve decided to disable the conversion of all YouTube videos on our service”.

At the moment attempting to rip audio from a YouTube video on that site delivers a non-specific error message. It’s not clear if copy will be updated to formally explain that YouTube audio can no longer be ripped.

Given how much stream-ripping involves YouTube audio, the move will be welcomed by the music industry. It may now be less likely to threaten legal action, even though Onlinevideoconverter.com will continue to rip audio from other online video sites.

After all, the plethora of other stream-ripping operations which remain adamant that they’ll circumvent any future attempts by YouTube to block the rippers, will likely be a higher priority for the music industry’s anti-piracy teams.



READ MORE ABOUT: |