Back in ye olde days, we had this thing called "radio". In wonderful FM quality, it would broadcast music. Over a week, just about ever bit of current music. We old folk also has a device known as a "tape cassette recorder". (look it up young people) Now, some naughty people worked out that you could take the output of the radio and connect it to the input of the tape recorder, and record what was playing on the radio. Wait for the weekly top 40 (or whatever) show, and 2hrs later, you've got the top 40 singles. With decent kit, we could get very good quality recordings, and with clever use of the record levels the DJ, etc could be eliminated. Now, some clever people came up with the idea of making a radio that also had a tape cassette recorder built in. This machine had one single use. It made recording off the radio trivial.
So, back to 2012, what is the difference between manufacturers making radio cassette recorders for the exclusive purpose of ripping audio from the radio, and what this site does? Youtube basically broadcasts like radio, all be it on demand, and this site is basically a cassette recorder. Also, does any one remember being hunted down by their local radio station for pirating?
There is no difference. The content distributors fought tooth and nail against new distribution mechanisms 50 years just like they fight tooth and nail against new distribution mechanisms today.
I don't think that analogy holds because the "recording" is being done by a third party service. I think a better analogy would be a business where you called and requested they record songs X, Y, and Z off of the radio and send you the cassette. I'm pretty sure a service like that would have been shut down in "ye olde days".
A tape recorder would be more like using clive and ffmpeg to strip the audio yourself. As far as I know, clive and similar tools have never been hassled by YouTube/Google.
Is watching a YouTube video like tuning into a public broadcast, or controlling a private performance? The licensing of these is very different, which, for example, explains much of the rigamarole around Pandora's UI.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." -- Jack Valenti
The thing hes leaving out is that this guy is almost definitely making mid 6 figures a month.
The issue comes down to Google hosts a users video for free, with the expecation that they can serve advertisements to people who watch said video. By using this service, it strips google of that right while still using its resources. Google has every right to block services it doesnt like and you have every right not to use youtube.
This is very similar to the craigslist/padmapper issue in some ways.
Seems like the smart thing to do on Google's part would be to detect when a service like this is accessing its site and serve and alternate version of the video with the original audio stream replaced with one that includes an audio advertisement spliced with a snippet is the original audio.
I've ran services with a lot more traffic which didn't make even close to that figure. I would think he makes significantly less than that, but still makes a nice living (on auto pilot).
Doesnt matter if you have a site with more traffic. What matters is the niche/market. You could have a site with a billion visits a day but if its about basket weaving you are going to have a harder time than a site like his with massive exit clicks. The number for ads is if anything, lower than it likely is.
I feel decently confident in my estimate due to my knowledge of the space and my own, current, experience in this space but feel free to retort if you have additional data.
Can you elaborate? What CPM do you think he's getting on these ads?
I'd expect that he doesn't have a particular niche beyond music or music video, and in my experience as you gain more traffic the CPM price that you can command actually goes down and not up.
500k a month in 30m pageviews implies he makes almost $17 per 1000 pageviews. I currently see two ads on his homepage, both large but for the same advertiser (an untargeted credit-card advert). I find it staggering people are selling ad-space at such a price unless it's highly targeted to a specific niche.
Also, multiple ads per page = multiple ad impressions.
So while he only has 1m uniques a day, that could be 1.5 visits per user (a unique could covert 10 videos and would only be counted once) so guesstimate 1.5 visits per unique
So now we are at 1.5m impressions a day.
Now, lets count in we assume 3-5 pageviews per visit. So, on the low end thats 4.5m impressions a day.
He has multiple ad units, you counted two. So now we are at 9m impressions per day / 270m per month
Makes things much more sane. Also, I went on the low end of numbers. Its more likely he does well over those numbers.
Kudos to him if he does. Shame we won't know for sure :) I would say it's <= 50k/month with that kind of site/traffic/ranking, but maybe you have more insight. The conversion will be horrible so his ad provider(s) will drop price over time.
Wait, how does it matter how much he makes? If it's allowed, it should be allowed regardless of how much he makes. If it's not, we have all witnessed cases where people not earning a cent were shut down by copyrighters and sometimes assigned outrageous damage numbers.
Google has the right to refuse to talk to you, however if they operate in a broadcast manner, i.e serving anyone who comes, they are not entitled to use law's power to block people from doing what they don't like. They could make a filter on the site that would not serve specific calls, etc. - but C&D is quite a different matter I think. It's like saying "I'm not going to the movies with you" vs. restraining order. I don't think Google is entitled to the restraining order just because they don't like how somebody uses their broadcasts.
What's the point of these downloading-webservices, anyway? From my (perhaps naive) point of view, saving a media stream to disk is a better task much better suited for client software.
Nowadays, there are pretty good tools for many operating systems. In the future those might turn into browser extensions, or even become a commodity feature in the browsers.
I remember when some websites started to use JavaScript to prevent other from copying their text (by suppressing the right mouse key, catching Ctrl+C, etc.).
Today, this reappears as "DRM enforced via Flash" on YouTube and many other sites. These new types of DRM won't remain in an open web for long, either, for the same reasons that trying to block Ctrl+C is insane.
So I'm asking myself why this guy put himself into that very weak position in the first place, by providing a webservice rather than a tool or browser extension.
Here's an example that I encountered a few days ago:
I only had an iPad (something more and more common, keep in mind their growing popularity) and wanted to download the Song "Alfur ut ur hol" by Björk (which you can't buy in record stores or the iTunes store - it's a rarity recording she released when she was 11 - but it's available on Youtube).
While there are youtube-downloading-apps on iOS, none of them were able to convert the downloaded movies into audio-only files.
Then I found youtube-mp3.org. The site, together with the iCab iOS web browser (which can download files) did the trick.
Most people don't know how to install software. That might change now that the browser-extension install processes have been streamlined (except on IE, of course), but for the most part getting code running on a user's machine is a huge hurdle.
Google fought long and hard to be able to have music from large copyright holders on YouTube and not have to pay a billion dollars in damages. If you want to petition someone, you probably need to go to the RIAA, because Google does not want to lose the status quo and return to an era of illegitimacy for such a huge property.
When will they learn that they can't win these things.
Perhaps they'll even succeed to shut this one site down. Within weeks there will be two knockoffs to replace it. And that's not even mentioning the dozen desktop apps that do the exact same thing.
He may wouldn't be having problem if the data flow was owned by the User. Perhaps if he manage to make an website that automate the process of: The User get the video, extract the track and then the User, uploads to his site. While he's website touch the Youtube, he may have problem.
Don't be stupid Google, if this guy is doing something this popular, it's going to continue happening whether you take him down or not. Acquire the little bastard and then figure out how to make it legal.
"Matesanz and his lawyers argue that, since Youtube-mp3.org does not use YouTube’s application programming interface, it does not violate YouTube’s terms of service."
I don't know how exactly either YouTube or Youtube-mp3.org works, but I'm guessing that he's scraping YouTube (and not using their API), and I would expect that in doing so, he's ignoring robots.txt.
I'd be surprised if robots.txt had any legal force whatsoever, but IMO if someone has a robots.txt and you're ignoring it, you're in the wrong. And if you're ignoring it and profiting off of ignoring it (as opposed to, say, doing academic research of some kind and ignoring it for science), you're a bad person.
Robots.txt doesn't apply if your program is acting via user commands.
If I tell my browser to 'rip' Youtube.com, its just as fine as if I tell Youtube-mp3.org to rip a specific video for me. In both cases, technology is acting as a tool and not an automation.
So, back to 2012, what is the difference between manufacturers making radio cassette recorders for the exclusive purpose of ripping audio from the radio, and what this site does? Youtube basically broadcasts like radio, all be it on demand, and this site is basically a cassette recorder. Also, does any one remember being hunted down by their local radio station for pirating?