30 sats \ 2 replies \ @eduardopro 1 Sep 2023 \ on: Google Removes 'Pirate' URLs from Users' Privately Saved Links * TorrentFreak tech
This doesn't solve anything for the industry they're trying to protect and shows Google's ass.
Google hasn't been neutral for ages, but they pretend to be. And naive people buy it.
The only thing that worked to fight "piracy" was building reasonably priced streaming services with a good catalog, but the industry shut that down also.
The industry drove retail people back to torrenting.
But anyway, this story and many, many others show just how insidious and evil Google really is.
reasonably priced streaming services with a good catalog, but the industry shut that down also.
For music, such a service exists now. It's free, but you have to use a command-line program to download music from it: YouTube + yt-dlp.
YouTube has 99% of the music I would ever want to listen to. And they don't charge you to listen to any music in their catalogue (yt-dlp skips ads by default).
The music industry has tried to shutdown yt-dlp, but they failed rather spectacularly. And YouTube hasn't managed to stop people from downloading videos/music.
It is a rather silly situation, but it's super convenient once you learn how to use yt-dlp.
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Personally I buy all my music. But unlike video content, for various reasons for the genres of music I like, it's easy to buy MP3's they you get to download and keep. Over the years I've probably spent hundreds, maybe low thousands, of dollars on music downloads.
If I could buy video downloads, I'd spend a lot more money buying the shows I watch. But since you don't get to keep streaming downloads, I don't.
For the most part, books can't be bought as unrestricted EPUBs either. So again, I rarely buy ebooks. But sometimes you can, and on occasion I've bought they way.
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