You’re just spewing long-held notion that piracy can’t be defeated, when every day it’s being done.

odd move for a company that used to tout a mantra of "Don’t be evil."

A) That was sheerly PR slogan, never serious by their own statement, certainly never actually practiced.

2) As I’ve told you several times, a "mantra" is a Hindu prayer. Quit mis-appropriating to your own notions, you cultural white-devil. Just because think you’re "woke" doesn’t mean you are.

IIV) It’s not "odd". The CIA was involved in Google’s creation more than what’s-his-name and Brin. They’re just front men, academics; they were not just handed billions and told to go create a company, pick people based on your feelings without investigation, buy whatever space and hardware you think right, but had everything handed to them with management experts in place.

….) Youtube is not and never was Google, and less with both now under "Alphabet". You are simply trivially confounding them.

Hello, Mr Geigner. 🙂

It’s an odd one, innit? The thought occurs that YouTube may have intentions other than directly blocking these particular sites. I find the choice of sites most curious.

YouTube may simply be testing the waters – poking the anthill, as it were – just to see how these sites respond to blocking efforts on a technical level. They might have been chosen at random, or they may exhibit usefully distinct qualities in how they access YouTube. More comprehensive blocking efforts – potentially affecting more stream-ripping solutions – might follow later, if that’s the case.

Alternatively, the goal here might be litigative: a demonstration that such sites can easily route around such blocks. Being able to show later that sincere efforts were made, but all too easily defeated, seems like something that would limit future legal efforts to claim that YouTube could have prevented infringements by these sites, yet chose not to do so. Given the current general legal climate – and particularly considering recent changes to EU law – that seems to me to be a very plausible motive.

In any event, I’d be lying if I claimed to be too concerned for the fate of stream-ripping sites. I’m a pirate, I’m all in favour of most piratey things, generally speaking, but I find it difficult to consider that these kinds of sites might be especially worth fighting for.

Fundamentally, the only really plausible reason to keep these services on websites – as opposed to something installed on end-users’ machines, as seems to be the case for most such solutions – is to generate advertising revenue via those sites. With the bulk of that revenue allegedly produced by rips of music industry tracks, it honestly seems to me that they’re painting the target on their own backs. Stab a fat cat in the arse with a fork for long enough and – however gently you’ve done it – sooner or later, it’s going to try and eat your face off.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the merits of your example, I can see numerous other situations where these sites are of genuine social value, but none that don’t seem better served by other ripping solutions. Chugging everything through extra central servers, mainly for the benefit of some largely-unnecessary middlemen, seems wasteful at best. Given that, given also the high visibility of these operations and given also the risk of creating new, harmful legal precedents in any number of courts, I can’t help but feel they’re potentially doing the world of piracy far more harm than good.

One last thing: various pro-copyright organisations have claimed that the overwhelming usage of these sites is for music piracy. It seems plausible, but they sound a bit more sure of themselves than I’d expect from just pulling "facts" completely out of their rears again, like they did in the old days. Do they have some evidence from a study somewhere – another Carnegy Mellon hatchet-job, perhaps? I’d be quite interested in seeing what they actually have – and discovering whether their methodology stands up to scrutiny or once again falls apart at the slightest touch.

Many thanks for your time, Mr Geigner. 🙂

This doesn’t even do anything to prevent people from saving videos or converting videos to MP3s except make it slightly more inconvenient. You either use a video downloader plugin then convert the video to whatever format you want or, worse-case-scenario, you manually record the video off Youtube with capture software, edit out any ads (ugh), and then save it however you want.

Essentially shutting down the functionality of those websites basically just acts as a giant middle finger to its users without actually doing anything to stop those options. All it does is change how you have to do it.