data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.

    There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.

    Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake1 and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.

    *Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.


  • I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:

    1. Before you hope on SoulSeek (with an application like Nicotine+), please study up on the etiquette - downloading someone’s shared files without sharing any files that they can choose to download for their collection is called leeching, and while some people don’t really care, a lot of SoulSeek users will get really angry if you do this because they’re giving you their internet bandwidth for nothing in return.
    2. To share files, you have to port-forward; be sure to check your ISP’s terms of service. I hear that as long as you’re not using a huge amount of bandwidth, even stricter ISPs can be pretty lax on enforcing their anti-p2p rules, so you may be able to get away with the risk of breaking the terms of service. However, to truly reduce the risk, you should probably use a VPN.

    Of course, there’s a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I’d rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).


  • Yes, but these are my two thoughts:

    1. That’s basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it’s ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it’s not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.1
    2. When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?

    *: if the media isn’t easily legally accessible, if it’s stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it’s much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it’s often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.

    1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.


  • Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don’t like Apple, but I’m unfortunately stuck on it right now), I’m a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I’m building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.

    For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.

    Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don’t have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.







  • If only Apple Music would give Linux users some way to access lossless…

    Though honestly, I’m only on Apple Music because my parents pay for it anyway (I’m a college kid), and I’ve already started accumulating a CD/digital audio file collection, which currently covers the first 6 studio albums plus albums 8 and 21 plus 1 B sides compilation, 1 single, half a live album, an album demos compilation, and 1 single.

    Although the 256kpbs limitation on the browser isn’t the worst (better than a lot of video streaming services forcing 480p on unapproved devices), it still irks me.