<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/09/non-infringing-sites-as-collateral-damage-in-music-industrys-war-on-stream-ripping-sites/>
"The war on stream-ripping sites waged by the music industry continues. And, as
with any war, there is collateral damage. Now, as we’ve said for some time,
this is an entirely unnecessary war to begin with. There are a host of
absolutely legitimate uses for sites like this, none of which would be
infringing upon anyone’s copyright. And so we have an industry going after a
tool that can be used to infringe, rather than any actual infringement itself.
And when the plan is to essentially carpet-bomb a niche site category on the
internet, that plan is, of course, going to run into some mistakes. In fact,
that’s the problem with these attempts at broad-based delisting of site types.
One example of this would be when a music industry group in Spain got a host of
sites delisted from Google, most of which were indeed stream-ripping sites.
Most, but not all.
A few weeks ago, Spanish music industry group Promusicae flagged hundreds of
stream-ripper URLs in yet another anti-circumvention takedown notice.
Grouped in with popular stream-rippers such as flvto, Y2mate, and 2conv was
a clear outlier: MP3.to. It’s important to note that MP3.to is not a
stream-ripping tool. It cannot download content from third-party sites.
Instead, this online tool focuses solely on converting audio files between
MP3 and other formats.
File-conversion tools that convert MP3s, without built-in access controls
such as DRM, are unlikely to violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention
provision. However, that didn’t stop Google from honoring the request and
removing the URL from its search engine."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
