Up to this point, much of the music industry’s action against ‘stream-ripping’ websites has been taken by industry bodies taking those sites to court and getting them shut down. Now it seems the main site from which streams are being ripped, YouTube, is joining the battle in earnest.
“Several stream-ripping sites have been unable to download and convert files from YouTube starting a few hours ago. It appears that the video streaming platform is actively blocking requests from these sites,” reported TorrentFreak overnight. It includes some of the most popular stream-ripping sites – the ones that are still online, at least – with the news article noting that none of the sites were warned in advance.
YouTube has yet to comment. There are already signs of stream-ripping websites trying to get around the block by using proxy servers, though.
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