The story of Roger Wallis is an absolute fantastic one. If you’ve ever downloaded a movie off the Pirate Bay or any other torrent tracker for that matter, Wallis is one of the men to thank as the Pirate Bay moved one giant step towards ‘freedom’. Wallis is a professor and media researcher that appeared in court as an expert witness – he was primarily there to be asked about the decline of album sales and its relation to filesharing. When Wallis was asked just this, he simply answered that his research has shown that there is no relation between the two.
After being attacked by the industry lawyers, who did everything possible to discredit his reputation, he was asked whether he wanted to be reimbursed for his travel expenses. The answer was down to earth and ‘Swedish’:
Send some flowers to my wife
Immediately after Wallis left court the flowers kept on coming, you can check out other ‘thank you notes’ and gifts that Wallis received over at “We who thanked Wallis“, quite astonishing. It seems that at least his wife was happy while Pontén probably wasn’t.
Check out the full story reported by TorrentFreak.com.
There are numerous “download streaming videos” resources online, most of them are aimed at downloading YouTube videos where perhaps KeepVid is the most famous one. In the case of YouTube, KeepVid simply lets you input a URL of a video and then kickbacks two download links, one for normal quality and one for high quality. Easy enough and serves the purpose. Users have also written Firefox add-ons for this, such as Magic’s Video Downloader and Fast Video Download.
However, the other day I had a different agenda, I found a song on YouTube, a live performance of a song that I only wanted the sound from to be able to use it on my iPod. What then? There are of course sources for this as well, where ListenToYouTube is probably the best and most user-friendly. It works the same way as KeepVid, letting you input a URL to a YouTube video, and then extracts the sound; leaving behind only a download link for the sound in MP3 format.
The reason this is okayish and not great is that the MP3 it creates is in poor quality compared to what you’d be used to. The audio bitrate is 64 kbps whereas most MP3 song you would be used to listening to are in either 128 or 160 kbps. It’s a great service, but for me – it’s not good enough for my iPod.
The solution to this is downloading AoA Audio Extractor, we’ll then use a combination of the KeepVid solution to grab the video, and use AoA Audio Extractor to extract the sound from it. This way, we’ll be able to choose the audio bitrate, sample rate, as well as output type (MP3, WAV, AC3).
Save it where you like, and import it to your iPod – voila!
I hope that there are still a couple of readers and friends that followed me to the new URL. It’s never easy changing server, and probably not something you’d want to do every day. The change of URL is always messy even though you should be able to keep feeds and other important factors intact.
I’ve migrated the feed into my Google-account, so the old one should hopefully re-direct to the new one: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/OscarAndFriends (seems to be working fine at the moment).
Akismet stats will be lost in the fire, it seems to be the only thing I can’t save. As I’d like to keep track of it for future reference, I can safely say that Akismet has done a fantastic job so far:
Akismet has protected your site from 8,490 spam comments already, but there’s nothing in your spam queue at the moment.
Keep on trying.
In the background of the court case and preceedings against The Pirate Bay, one of the largest sports streaming forums in the world, MyP2P has been up against C More Entertainment AB. C More Entertainment AB is the Swedish company owned by TV4 Gruppen that is behind (among other things) the Canal+ brand in the Scandinavian countries.
So why is this important or even remotely related? MyP2P is according to themselves the best online Live Sports schedule site, something I would be willing to agree with. I’ve used it many times to stream football which I “should not be able to see” because I don’t have the right channel, the right package, the right digital box, or the right subscription. It’s a simple work around so to speak. How else would I be able to watch the Swedish national team play if I live in Ireland or Australia? Taking my own previous experience with this as an example.
So back to the related part. MyP2P also happens to have one of the most active forums in the world, where users post links to streams from channels around the world. These links can be seen as “copyright infringement” as media corporations lose out on money in subscription and advertising revenue. In the same way as The Pirate Bay connects user A and user B via their tracker, MyP2P connects user A and user B via their forum and TV-schedule.
MyP2P recently won the court case against C More Entertainment, and the question I have is; is this perhaps a peak of what will happen in the Pirate Bay case? All charges dropped? It wouldn’t surprise me.
This is the ruling the Dutch court came with, posted by an Admin in the MyP2P forum:
The Dutch court ruled that C More mistakenly initiated injunction proceedings because the case was to complicated, both factually as well as legally. C More was ordered to repay us all our legal costs. We know it has been a long wait so we would like to thank you for all the support in the past weeks. It was worth it.
