On one hand, I can see the popularity of sites like these since they require no additional software beyond a browser. On the other hand, since they have to themselves download the video and then you download it from them, there is quite a lot of bandwidth waste and they're centralised easily targeted single-points-of-failure.
Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the RIAA
I wonder if people like him live in constant fear of being targeted by pranksters, or worse...
> On the other hand, since they have to themselves download the video and then you download it from them
On the other other hand, if you ever watch that ripped video again on more than one separate occasion, you've already saved bandwidth / electricity on unnecessary transferring the data again. More than that, if you're interested only in the song, not the underlying video, you're saving even more bandwidth because - as far as I understand - those sites hit the audio channel directly, skipping the video download.
Also, I love them; they were godsent when I wanted to listen to something at work while being in China.
If nobody even TP'ed Jack Valenti's house for saying that the VCR was as dangerous to his industry as the Boston Strangler, I doubt Cary Sherman has much to worry about.
It depends. There are some sites that simply provide a direct link to a file on Google's CDN. That still wouldn't get rid of most of the charges against YouTube-MP3 though, such as circumvention and the like.
Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the RIAA
I wonder if people like him live in constant fear of being targeted by pranksters, or worse...