I read an interview with Gottfrid Warg (pirate bay co-founder) some years back. Can't find it now...
What stuck with me was his disappointment that the wider torrent community simply relied on the pirate bay always making a return. There was no real effort to go beyond resilient hosting. No producing facts by superior technology. It was just a bunch of copy-cats playing whac-a-mole with the copyright industry. To paraphrase: "I went to jail for this stuff, and you don't even care enough about it to follow up on it in earnest?" At least that's how it read to me. As I said, it's been a while.
Hosting torrent platforms and such on namecheap, cloudflare (no really!) and all the other mainstream platforms seems like such an obviously, deeply stupid choice. There's only very few projects (that I know of) that are really addressing resilient, organized, curated content dissemination, and they're essentially divorced from the pirate scene. Too bad I guess.
I prefer torrents inside I2P [0], because otherwise my IP will be shown to everyone. I wonder why there are so few people there. It's of course slow, but it's worth it. There are already quite a few torrent trackers.
What kind of speeds do you get? Because last time I tried it getting above a few megabits per second was a struggle. When we're talking about even an Ubuntu ISO, it's a couple gigs. It's too slow to want me to keep using it.
Maybe because people understand that it's security model is flawed: the peers in the mesh treat all the other peers as not trusted, that's okay; but the network design doesn't seem to take into account potential hostility of the physical medium itself.
Say, your ISP can tarpit packets or shape traffic, or shut down the power or cell tower in your block temporarily, and then measure how the mesh congestion changed. At the same time the mesh relies on building hop chains with TTL of 10 minutes iirc, which I think makes a peer a sitting duck. It is (was) all documented/leaked.
> There's only very few projects (that I know of) that are really addressing resilient, organized, curated content dissemination, and they're essentially divorced from the pirate scene. Too bad I guess.
Why would someone trying to build something like PeerTube Or IPFS want to explicitly support piracy? All that does is bring negative pressure down on them and we see in this very discussion, the MAFIAA is more than happy to abuse laws they wrote to bring pressure. Just because someone is interested in or supportive of peer to peer communication doesn't automatically mean they support piracy.
I'm not trying to say piracy is bad, it is just illegal. As shitty as those laws might be they're still on the books and people face penalties for breaking them.
In a strange twist of irony... This was what copyright was meant to do: promote a diverse body of works while protecting existing ones.
It should come to no surprise that notable torrenting sites have many low-effort imitators. If anyone could copy stuff already out there, why spend the extra effort to innovate?
I'm all for open-source, but I recognize the value of copyright (and how it protects FOSS-licensed material) and healthy competition and innovation.
"Copycat" in this context didn't mean literally copying TPB (although that did happen and was actually made possible by them dumping their DB at some point IIRC).
Most torrent sites do seem to have an own code base. It's not like they run the same software (or at least they have different themes, I never actually checked).
It is also neither surprising nor bad that the sites still have the same goals/design basics. They all solve the same problem, so they will end up looking similar overall. No problem with that.
What is being criticized here (by me, I don't wanna put words into Warg's mouth since it's an old, probably misremembered interview) is that the way that they deliver that "product" (in this context: the torrent website itself, not the hosted torrents' contents!) in an unimaginative way without taking into account the changing battlefield.
Fully i2p torrent sites? Niche.
Local DHT scraping with an overlay net of torrent index exchange à la yacy or magnetico? Niche.
And apparently: hosting anywhere that is not immediately susceptible to direct US influence, i.e. NOT on namecheap+cloudflare? Still kind of niche. Wtf?
I recently noticed that LibGen has started using Cloudflare as one of its download options. I was somewhat surprised that Cloudflare would allow use like this.
Let them subpoena, ultimately RIAA is a US entity pursuing civil suits under US laws, no one outside the US should really be worried. Within the US these sites and tools like YouTube-dl are arguably fair use and RIAA knows this, so they will be cautious when pursuing any litigation. It is like the trick the police use - carrying a knife for utility (cutting food, cutting wire, etc) is often not illegal, carrying a knife as a weapon often is, so police will often try to trick people into saying they have a knife for defense so they can treat it as a weapon instead of a tool.
RIAA does liaise with its counterparts in several other major countries. Ultimately IP owners in all countries want to extract the last drop of profit and more. It is a common human tendency and the US is merely a vanguard of what will eventually be a global reality.
> It is a common human tendency and the US is merely a vanguard of what will eventually be a global reality.
No, it's not. The US is the one pushing other countries to implement US-like copyright laws, as it has a huge music and television entertainment industry and exports entertainment and propaganda to other countries. For most countries if they implement everything the US wants it will only hurt them economically, as they would have to pay more for disproportionally imported entertainment, and politically, as with that much control more propaganda will come from the US and generally forcing people to pay more for something is unpopular. Probably the only countries where local entertainment industries can potentially increase profits from such copyright laws are the countries that have huge music and tv entertainment industries to begin with, i.e. huge countries with large middle class. But those are few.
Fortunately such things eb and flow. We're in an era of copyright maximalism, but there are forces pushing strongly against that - from the balkanisation of the internet as authoritarianism spreads, to the ubiquitous prevalence of piracy online and off.
Only in the eyes of the law. The RIAA can no more stop people from downloading YouTube videos than the DVD CCA could stop people from cracking CSS. Pirates haven't lost yet, only ever been delayed, and rarely by all that much.
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.
No they're winning slowly. Fifteen years back everyone I know could easily download mp3 from various p2p applications. But now the present generation of youngsters seem to think it is Spotify/Amazon or nothing. They haven't even heard of p2p. Similarly Netflix is slowly eating away at torrenting.
The platform owners can and will tighten the noose gradually. End users and hackers have much less power than they like to imagine, especially the latter segment.
My growing sense is that this is less a straight-line progression and more a set of pendulum swings.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
But if the farmer actually sometimes got money out of legal action, I'd start to fear that the farmer's business model would BE legal action. Or at least the business model of the lawyer that gave the farmer legal advice.
My cousin lives in a place with shitty internet, and regularly creates a list of YT URLs for later downloading when they go in-town. This is going to devastate them. Especially when they need to repair something or do maintenance where a rando’s video is 100x better than the manufacturer’s instructions and they download all the videos.
I do the same thing before a flight or train ride (Canada has $5-$10/gb wireless pricing) so I can catch up with my favourite subs on-the-move.
Well, if you are counting overage charges I guess.
My (national) provider has an all-in, bring-your-own-device plan with 9GB of data (recently with a 2GB bonus, for a total of 11GB) for under $60/month. I'm sure the competitors are similar. So, while not perfect, it's not as onerous as you describe.
There is invidious which is an alternative front end for YouTube. It doesn't use the YouTube API or require a Google account. You can host your own instance or use one of the public ones[0]. It seems like the download button is broken but I was able to right click save a video.
I'm not aware of any, and any such platform that is comparably featured would be susceptible to the same problem. This isn't a platform problem, it's a law problem.
There's a few that are used, but Google's shrewd marketing combined with natural selection have done a very good job marking those as the "terrorists and crackpots" youtubes.
And like all self-fulfilling prophecies, those claims are now largely true.
Peertube comes to mind for discoverability. For ensuring content creators revenue, the best way would probably be to host their own website and put videos behind paywall or accept donations, as they see fit.
The RIAA behaves like the powerful in ancient times. But your gut feeling knows exactly when someone is wrong. Just because they refer to some law does not mean their actions are rigt. See „Ius primae noctis“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_du_seigneur
That is a myth (the Ius primae noctis) despite what Braveheart may say.
On the other hand, a little history shows how many things can be lawful (even "patriotic"!) and extremely inhuman (aberrant, whatever). Not so long ago.
Has anyone ever experimented with reversing the analog loop with machine learning?
Generating the training data would be easy. Play audio files through a speaker and record the speaker with a microphone. Then you have the original and the analog recording. Train the machine to reverse the process. Now you can grab high quality audio from any source. Same could be done for video, but would require a more elaborate setup.
Kind of off topic, but I hate the idea of not being able to own any actual copies of media in the future.
Also, I've made it part of my moral code, nearly a religion of mine, to see all advertisements as a reminder I maybe should be doing something else. Since this is my rant, I'll add that to the pile.
> Generating the training data would be easy. Play audio files through a speaker and record the speaker with a microphone. Then you have the original and the analog recording. Train the machine to reverse the process. Now you can grab high quality audio from any source.
Machine learning isn't this magic thing that can defeat math. The digital to analog process is lossy, and you're asking machine learning to reverse that lossy process. This is very similar to saying "If I train my machine learning model that 10 + 10 = 20, and 3 * 40 = 120, if I ask it x + y = 42 it should be able to tell me x and y". It's obviously impossible, mathematically so.
You could train it to reduce some predictable sources of analog interference, sure, but you absolutely can't "grab high quality audio from any source".
Well, actually, there is an exception! For data you train on, assuming you train the neural net enough, it will eventually encode a fingerprint of input audio and an output of the original digital training data, at which point your neural net has encoded copyrighted training data... effectively it's a form of compression (or maybe just obfuscation) now, and contains copyrighted material. Oops.
Disregarding the fact that this process would be mathematically impossible, let's say you do produce this program. So, does it circumvent copyright law? Does it actually improve anything?
No, it turns out what you have is even more obviously a circumvention device than youtube-dl or anything else. Under the DMCAA, the neural network would be an illegal copyright circumvention device, and all the audio it produces would not be legal copies, and could not legally be owned. I'll reference "what color are your bits"[0], since it's an excellent description of one of the problems here. You're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem. Whether you torrent an album or whether you reverse an analog source through magic, either way the bits are colored with copyright infringement.
>you're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem.
Yep. P2P community tried to play this game and lost every single time. The Bitcoin and crypto-currency are trying to play this game as well when the advocates propose that bitcoin is a technical workaround to things like AML regulations - and they will lose as well.
> what you have is even more obviously a circumvention device
The device itself is just an "audio enhancer" - it could just as easily be used to spruce up the sound on old vinyl (pre-vinyl even) as it could to defeat copyright law.
The real issue with using it as OP intends is it's wholly unnecessary: the value in tools like youtube-dl is being asynchronous - you get the audio file without listening to the entire song first. OP's suggestion involving a speaker and a microphone is intrinsically synchronous, and it's a lot more work for lower quality than e.g. using Audacity to record the lossless digital audio off your sound bus.
It makes far more sense to grab a line-out feed rather than using a speaker and a microphone. Otherwise the positioning of the microphone and the exact voice coils of the speaker and microphone would all have a dramatic effect on the EQ curve of the audio, to say nothing of stereo or the ensuing phase issues that crop up when recording audio in real life
Since the losses in the analog conversion process cannot be determined exactly, the model is bound to add some noise to the converted audio. Video has more spatial data to guess the color and motion so it's easier in practice.
The unconverted sound may be crisper and has more details but, there's no guarantee that they're the original details so, it won't be the original recording itself.
Light pollution adds noise to telescopes too. From a sky where you can barely see 4 stars you can pull detailed colored images of deep space objects.
Perhaps you have to play the media a few dozen times and do the media equivalent of frame stacking to see through the noise.
It's also quite possible no ML would be needed. I don't think frame stacking uses ML.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could play a song on repeat from the other side of your house and extract a very good copy of it, so long as you knew exactly when the song began and looped. You might only need to know the length of the song, not even when it began.
It might not be practical, but it would be a cool blog post.
For months now I have been using youtube-dl to preserve all the concerts and workout videos I like on YouTube because I don't expect this content to remain available and unencumbered. My original plan was to store just the IDs on GitHub so I could recreate the video libraries without backing up the video files, but already some of the concerts have been removed. I expect the exercise videos will be hidden behind a subscription at some point since they provide utility.
There is hope that one of the fresh billionaires takes an axe at the RIAA and other abusive organisations and brings hope to all artists that are being exploited by labels, lawyers and organisations like RIAA.
If tech billionaires were leaders, maybe. Instead they spend small fractions of their wealth on silly projects and charities that benefit their tax bills. The rest of the time they are collecting wine and antique furniture for house #6.
I think you gave it backwards; mere tens of millions is enough to collect wine and antiques for your sixth house, while almost all “billionaires” are in that category purely by virtue of their leading control of large corporations.
(I’m sure there are other examples, perhaps inheritances, but the only non-leadership billionaire I can think of in any field off the top of my head is Rowling).
>hope to all artists that are being exploited by labels
The article mentions targetted tracks by Beyonce and The Killers. Are these artists speaking out against the RIAA, or are they onboard? If it's the latter, it will be hard to fix.
A lot of artists are totally in favour of internet censorship if it means they will make more money.
See the recent "surprise" when a FlwMac song became "viral" again on Tiktok since they had been doing all they could to keep it off youtube even when they had the choice of being paid for it Well no crap Sherlock
20 years of losing the battle and RIAA makes a point of reminding people how petty they are
Readit News
What stuck with me was his disappointment that the wider torrent community simply relied on the pirate bay always making a return. There was no real effort to go beyond resilient hosting. No producing facts by superior technology. It was just a bunch of copy-cats playing whac-a-mole with the copyright industry. To paraphrase: "I went to jail for this stuff, and you don't even care enough about it to follow up on it in earnest?" At least that's how it read to me. As I said, it's been a while.
Hosting torrent platforms and such on namecheap, cloudflare (no really!) and all the other mainstream platforms seems like such an obviously, deeply stupid choice. There's only very few projects (that I know of) that are really addressing resilient, organized, curated content dissemination, and they're essentially divorced from the pirate scene. Too bad I guess.
[0] https://geti2p.net
Maybe because people understand that it's security model is flawed: the peers in the mesh treat all the other peers as not trusted, that's okay; but the network design doesn't seem to take into account potential hostility of the physical medium itself.
Say, your ISP can tarpit packets or shape traffic, or shut down the power or cell tower in your block temporarily, and then measure how the mesh congestion changed. At the same time the mesh relies on building hop chains with TTL of 10 minutes iirc, which I think makes a peer a sitting duck. It is (was) all documented/leaked.
Why would someone trying to build something like PeerTube Or IPFS want to explicitly support piracy? All that does is bring negative pressure down on them and we see in this very discussion, the MAFIAA is more than happy to abuse laws they wrote to bring pressure. Just because someone is interested in or supportive of peer to peer communication doesn't automatically mean they support piracy.
I'm not trying to say piracy is bad, it is just illegal. As shitty as those laws might be they're still on the books and people face penalties for breaking them.
It should come to no surprise that notable torrenting sites have many low-effort imitators. If anyone could copy stuff already out there, why spend the extra effort to innovate?
I'm all for open-source, but I recognize the value of copyright (and how it protects FOSS-licensed material) and healthy competition and innovation.
Most torrent sites do seem to have an own code base. It's not like they run the same software (or at least they have different themes, I never actually checked).
It is also neither surprising nor bad that the sites still have the same goals/design basics. They all solve the same problem, so they will end up looking similar overall. No problem with that.
What is being criticized here (by me, I don't wanna put words into Warg's mouth since it's an old, probably misremembered interview) is that the way that they deliver that "product" (in this context: the torrent website itself, not the hosted torrents' contents!) in an unimaginative way without taking into account the changing battlefield.
Fully i2p torrent sites? Niche.
Local DHT scraping with an overlay net of torrent index exchange à la yacy or magnetico? Niche.
And apparently: hosting anywhere that is not immediately susceptible to direct US influence, i.e. NOT on namecheap+cloudflare? Still kind of niche. Wtf?
No, it's not. The US is the one pushing other countries to implement US-like copyright laws, as it has a huge music and television entertainment industry and exports entertainment and propaganda to other countries. For most countries if they implement everything the US wants it will only hurt them economically, as they would have to pay more for disproportionally imported entertainment, and politically, as with that much control more propaganda will come from the US and generally forcing people to pay more for something is unpopular. Probably the only countries where local entertainment industries can potentially increase profits from such copyright laws are the countries that have huge music and tv entertainment industries to begin with, i.e. huge countries with large middle class. But those are few.
Deleted Comment
Well, I guess it's a good thing : now we'll have to campaign to let content creators know how terrible their choice of platform is.
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.
The platform owners can and will tighten the noose gradually. End users and hackers have much less power than they like to imagine, especially the latter segment.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated. Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
I do the same thing before a flight or train ride (Canada has $5-$10/gb wireless pricing) so I can catch up with my favourite subs on-the-move.
Well, if you are counting overage charges I guess.
My (national) provider has an all-in, bring-your-own-device plan with 9GB of data (recently with a 2GB bonus, for a total of 11GB) for under $60/month. I'm sure the competitors are similar. So, while not perfect, it's not as onerous as you describe.
[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/wiki/Invidious-Instances
And like all self-fulfilling prophecies, those claims are now largely true.
On the other hand, a little history shows how many things can be lawful (even "patriotic"!) and extremely inhuman (aberrant, whatever). Not so long ago.
How about right now? See Guantanamo Bay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Generating the training data would be easy. Play audio files through a speaker and record the speaker with a microphone. Then you have the original and the analog recording. Train the machine to reverse the process. Now you can grab high quality audio from any source. Same could be done for video, but would require a more elaborate setup.
Kind of off topic, but I hate the idea of not being able to own any actual copies of media in the future.
Also, I've made it part of my moral code, nearly a religion of mine, to see all advertisements as a reminder I maybe should be doing something else. Since this is my rant, I'll add that to the pile.
Machine learning isn't this magic thing that can defeat math. The digital to analog process is lossy, and you're asking machine learning to reverse that lossy process. This is very similar to saying "If I train my machine learning model that 10 + 10 = 20, and 3 * 40 = 120, if I ask it x + y = 42 it should be able to tell me x and y". It's obviously impossible, mathematically so.
You could train it to reduce some predictable sources of analog interference, sure, but you absolutely can't "grab high quality audio from any source".
Well, actually, there is an exception! For data you train on, assuming you train the neural net enough, it will eventually encode a fingerprint of input audio and an output of the original digital training data, at which point your neural net has encoded copyrighted training data... effectively it's a form of compression (or maybe just obfuscation) now, and contains copyrighted material. Oops.
Disregarding the fact that this process would be mathematically impossible, let's say you do produce this program. So, does it circumvent copyright law? Does it actually improve anything?
No, it turns out what you have is even more obviously a circumvention device than youtube-dl or anything else. Under the DMCAA, the neural network would be an illegal copyright circumvention device, and all the audio it produces would not be legal copies, and could not legally be owned. I'll reference "what color are your bits"[0], since it's an excellent description of one of the problems here. You're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem. Whether you torrent an album or whether you reverse an analog source through magic, either way the bits are colored with copyright infringement.
[0]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
>you're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem.
Yep. P2P community tried to play this game and lost every single time. The Bitcoin and crypto-currency are trying to play this game as well when the advocates propose that bitcoin is a technical workaround to things like AML regulations - and they will lose as well.
The device itself is just an "audio enhancer" - it could just as easily be used to spruce up the sound on old vinyl (pre-vinyl even) as it could to defeat copyright law.
The real issue with using it as OP intends is it's wholly unnecessary: the value in tools like youtube-dl is being asynchronous - you get the audio file without listening to the entire song first. OP's suggestion involving a speaker and a microphone is intrinsically synchronous, and it's a lot more work for lower quality than e.g. using Audacity to record the lossless digital audio off your sound bus.
Video is harder, mostly because of the bandwidth.
I suggest to also click on all possible advertisements then not purchase anything (just ignore whatever tab was opened by your click).
If millions of people did this daily, it would break the web advertising model very fast since advertisers pay per click.
I don’t know what would replace it, but maybe something better than what we have now. Maybe not.
The unconverted sound may be crisper and has more details but, there's no guarantee that they're the original details so, it won't be the original recording itself.
Perhaps you have to play the media a few dozen times and do the media equivalent of frame stacking to see through the noise.
It's also quite possible no ML would be needed. I don't think frame stacking uses ML.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could play a song on repeat from the other side of your house and extract a very good copy of it, so long as you knew exactly when the song began and looped. You might only need to know the length of the song, not even when it began.
It might not be practical, but it would be a cool blog post.
Deleted Comment
(I’m sure there are other examples, perhaps inheritances, but the only non-leadership billionaire I can think of in any field off the top of my head is Rowling).
The article mentions targetted tracks by Beyonce and The Killers. Are these artists speaking out against the RIAA, or are they onboard? If it's the latter, it will be hard to fix.
A lot of artists are totally in favour of internet censorship if it means they will make more money.
See the recent "surprise" when a FlwMac song became "viral" again on Tiktok since they had been doing all they could to keep it off youtube even when they had the choice of being paid for it Well no crap Sherlock
20 years of losing the battle and RIAA makes a point of reminding people how petty they are