Is it legal to download music from YouTube ?

I can’t fathom it. As a Christian, and a musician, I’m not a fan of using technology to get music without the artist receiving compensation.

 

I can't help thinking if the musician voluntarily uploaded their work to a site specifically intended for sharing then it's reasonable to figure they don't expect a royalty from it. It gets a little thornier when someone goes to a gig, takes a video with their phone, and then uploads it.

 

U2 probably doesn’t care considering they gave everyone on iTunes their last album for free.

But stadium bands are largely a thing of the past. So many guys make ends meet by being in several bands at once. I don’t envy them. Glad I never “made it” and got a normal job. Probably make more than most of them and have a steady income. Those kind of guys probably care a whole lot more than U2.

 

Youtube already does that for uploads of illegal movies and music. People have been getting around it by messing with the aspect ratios, colour balance and what-not.

 

If you want a clear conscious then pay for YouTube Premium and you can download as much as you want, natively, without shady 3rd party tools. Also, no ads.

 

When I was a teenager (which was a few years ago, admittedly) I remember the law allowed people to record songs from the radio for personal use. Most of the time the radio station's DJ would start talking as the song faded into the next one so it was pretty obvious if you'd made a mixtape from the radio, but if you didn't mind that you could build quite a collection. Of course that was in the days when you'd record to a cassette and each time you copied it you lost a bit of sound quality. Now with digital media and the ability to copy enough music to last several days with the click of a mouse things are a bit different.

 

One problem with this, to continue with the analogy, is that a virus checker often matches against known patterns while also offering heuristic checks. The known patterns might say that "if you see this pattern, it's a known exploit so flag it". The heuristic checking looks for patterns that might represent an early warning. Sometimes they catch things ahead of time and sometimes they generate false positive. Until recently I used Kaspersky internet security and grew increasingly tired of the false positives it kept throwing and how tedious it could be to add files to its exclusion list. These were files I knew were safe because it was stuff I wrote myself. Just to be sure I recompiled it, just in case something had infected the executable, and got the exact same response.

In theory it should be possible to use that kind of checking with uploads but would also generate all sorts of false positives. You'd have to figure out how much of a song had to match before it was tagged, then deal with appeals and the like. You'd also have to figure out situations like a band that does cover versions and whether their uploads would cause problems if they sounded too much like the original.

This isn't my area of expertise but I can imagine that using software to differentiate between an illegal copy of an original, a bona fide derivative work, an original tweaked to try and disguise what it is, a mashup (the kind of thing popular in the house/hip-hop scene in the 80s and early 90s), or a free sample uploaded by the artist for publicity, could be intensely convoluted. And even if you could manage it you'd need staff on hand, possibly backed by lawyers, to process appeals. It's easy to see why a company doesn't want to get involved in a dispute between a cover band and a well known band over whether or not something is a bona fide derivative work or a copyright violation. Easier to just put some legalese in the terms and conditions that nobody reads before clicking "I agree" that you'll cover their legal costs if you upload something problematic.

It's really not all that different to the mass production of consumer goods. There's no need to do much quality control - the end customer can do that. If you ship out a defective one you just offer an easy returns policy rather than taking the time to check them before selling them.

 

YouTube actually has this kind of content filter, they've spent countless millions on it, and it's a horrific mess (cf. Article 13's looming idiocy). Tango's spot on.

 

I didn’t know mashup was a house hip hop thing.

 

It is https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6308116?hl=en-GB