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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

No because that is not a loss-less copy. The quality is severely affect and that amount of damage you can potentially do to sales is minimal. EDIT: Completely forgot about the "tax" on blank media and tape records.

Anyway, if they didn't want people to be able to copy their stuff, then they shouldn't have put it on YouTube. The music industry is being as dumb as they ever where, it's fascinating that they've learned NOTHING in the past twenty years. How much money can they possibly lose on youtube-dl vs. how much money they continue the scam out of artists.

At this point who doesn't have a subscription to a streaming service? Those who don't where never going to pay anyway. They aren't losing money.

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The funny thing is they did this to themselves. Consumers were perfectly happy with their regular HiFi stuff and records. But the recording companies and the big hardware manufacturers (notably: Philips, Sony, both owners of enormous music catalogs) would love to sell everybody an upgraded HiFi system and get them to buy all their music again. In a format so dense that no computer would ever be able to store that much information on a writable medium so pushing large numbers of lossless copies of music into the world was a no brainer. We all know how that ended.

Everything available on Youtube is not a lossless copy. Especially music is lossy-compressed and loudness-optimized, so lossless vs lossy isn't a valid argument here.

My point was that it won't degree further as you make copies of the file you got with YouTube-dl

YouTube is just another streaming service, they make money by delivering their copyrighted material on it just like every other delivery method and people pirate via it just like every other delivery method. Choosing to put their content on YouTube isn't a dumb choice at all, it's one of the few sane things about the situation.

The music industry (in collusion with Congress) killed DAT with this same specious argument, when everyone knew that "perfect digital copies" were the LEAST-likely vector of attack on their industry.

The obvious and dominant form of music copying was with double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms and bedrooms around the world.

And in the end, the media publishers' lies about "perfect digital copies" were proven to be just that, as profoundly IMperfect MP3s became the real threat.

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