YouTube converter sites, better known as stream ripping, have become a real problem for the music industry over the years. The IFPI, the international federation of the phonographic industry, is sounding the alarm.
You may not be familiar with the IFPI. Behind this acronym hides the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Since its creation in 1933, it has been responsible for enforcing copyright in the recording industry worldwide.
The organization regularly publishes various and varied studies on the health of the music industry. In 2022, the IFPI looked into its report entitled “Engaging with Music” on stream ripping, i.e. those sites that allow convert YouTube videos and illegally download copyrighted music.
Thus, we learn that a third of those questioned have used illegal methods, including stream ripping, to download and listen to music. In the eyes of the federation, stream ripping remains the main threat to the market. As a reminder, this method consists of obtaining a downloadable file from content available online (mainly from YouTube).
The YouTube stream ripping, the number one enemy of the IFPI
According to the IFPI, this is the form of copyright infringement the most widespread in the field of online music. For good reason, just do a simple search on Google to see the staggering number of sites available dedicated to stream ripping. Result, visits to certain sites have exploded in recent years.
Y2mate, for example, recorded 117 million visits in April 2023. Savefrom can boast of having accumulated 113 million visits over the same period. And then there is above all this mastodon, ssyoutube.comwhich displays more one billion visitors in the first quarter of 2023 alone.
And apart from this disturbing attendance, the case of ssyoutube.com is intriguing for other reasons. Indeed, it would seem that ssyoutube escapes the majority of DMCA takedown notices. Unlike other similar sites, the domain was only targeted by seven queries, and records only 8 URL deletions since 2018.
YouTube should be held responsible
As reported by our colleagues on the site Torrent Freak, the stream ripping service voluntarily blocks access to visitors from certain countries (especially those from the United Kingdom), precisely to avoid attracting the attention of the strictest local authorities. The BPI (British Phonography Industry) did not fall into the trap and filed several anti-circumvention DMCA notices against the platform.
However, these measures are not enough to stem this phenomenon. According to Torrent Freak, the solution does not lie in the proliferation of DMCA requests and legal actions against DNS providers and hosts. Rather, we should point the finger at YouTube, which hosts almost all the songs in the world on a platform that has no effective anti-copy mechanism.
