Are YouTube videos fucking free or not?

Philip Matesanz, my new hero, is standing up to Google, owner of YouTube.

Lately, Google has been going around threatening website administrators who offer to let users save off YouTube videos and audio, like Phil's site youtube-mp3.org.

Check it out, it's easy--you just paste the YouTube video URL into his page, and he gives you an mp3 of the audio you can save off.

Well, Phil got one of these nastygrams from Google and told them to go fuck themselves.  So this is good.

I am a little annoyed he has ads on his site, but I'm going to let that slide for now, as after all he isn't hosting any content until you point it out to him.  And he's not even supplying the files you converted to others...oh this is getting a little complicated. Lets come back to that another day.

Dude, if you google "save YouTube videos in Firefox" you will quickly find several free plugins that will enable you to do this yourself.

The important thing, to me, is the preposterousness of the situation, as usual.  Google apparently told him he violated their Terms of Service in doing this.

What.  The.  Fuck.  Ever.

Claiming that a user agrees to Terms of Service on a publicly accessible web site is precisely like me throwing a dead cat onto my front yard and then challenging my neighbors that, by looking  at the dead cat, they are agreeing to my Terms of Service that they may not look at the dead cat on my lawn.

So...whatever, right.

But here's the thing.  It is Google, via YouTube, making these precious copyrighted materials available to the world.  In some cases, quite obviously with the cooperation of the artists.  Take Nicki Minoj's adequate dance track "Starships".

So where is the small change collector on my computer to pay for the privilege of watching/listening to this dreck?  It's not there, right.  The shit is obviously free.

I have even created a derivative work, a remix, if you like, seeking to improve on Ms. Minoj's work, check it out!  I call it "Spishrat":

Spishrat remix by rasto

Now, you might have a keen ear and you might realize that if you were to download this and bring it into, say, the excellent free and open source Audacity audio editor, and use the Reverse transform, it might not sound too different from Ms. Minoj's original.

('course, what does it say about a piece of music that it literally sounds almost as good backwards as forwards? lol..check it out it's really freaky)

The point is this--Google is supplying this shit to the entire world, for free, without even a login necessary--it's all naked out there on the internet.

And now they're annoyed that someone is actually doing something with it?

I know a lot of folks say, "well, you're not supposed to save it", to which I reply--says who?  People are always making these crazy, self-limiting assumptions about good behavior that don't even really, when you examine them closely, make any sense.

I say Google threw a dead cat on their lawn, and I'm going to damn well look at it or make a copy of it or even god damn take it inside my house and eat it if I want to.

Good luck, Phil.