The ‘Proxy War’ Between YouTube and Stream Rippers ⇥ torrentfreak.com

Ernesto Van der Sar, TorrentFreak:

It’s no secret that the music industry sees stream-ripping as today’s single biggest piracy threat.

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Last summer, [YouTube] started taking active and aggressive countermeasures to block IP-addresses that are frequently used by stream-ripping services to download content. Our source describes these blocks as ‘purges’.

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In addition to these purges, Google also removes URLs from search results when they are reported by copyright holders, as we alluded to earlier. This is a frustrating experience for bigger site operators, who have to switch to fresh URLs frequently.

In a world where Google did not own YouTube — and would, therefore, not have legal accountability for the misuse of licensed materials — would it be so keen to comply with copyright-based requests to remove stream rippers from search listings? I wonder.

In related news, the RIAA today demanded that GitHub remove the repository and forks of youtube-dl, a popular command line tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other sources.