RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites

> Generating the training data would be easy. Play audio files through a speaker and record the speaker with a microphone. Then you have the original and the analog recording. Train the machine to reverse the process. Now you can grab high quality audio from any source.

Machine learning isn't this magic thing that can defeat math. The digital to analog process is lossy, and you're asking machine learning to reverse that lossy process. This is very similar to saying "If I train my machine learning model that 10 + 10 = 20, and 3 * 40 = 120, if I ask it x + y = 42 it should be able to tell me x and y". It's obviously impossible, mathematically so.

You could train it to reduce some predictable sources of analog interference, sure, but you absolutely can't "grab high quality audio from any source".

Well, actually, there is an exception! For data you train on, assuming you train the neural net enough, it will eventually encode a fingerprint of input audio and an output of the original digital training data, at which point your neural net has encoded copyrighted training data... effectively it's a form of compression (or maybe just obfuscation) now, and contains copyrighted material. Oops.

Disregarding the fact that this process would be mathematically impossible, let's say you do produce this program. So, does it circumvent copyright law? Does it actually improve anything?

No, it turns out what you have is even more obviously a circumvention device than youtube-dl or anything else. Under the DMCAA, the neural network would be an illegal copyright circumvention device, and all the audio it produces would not be legal copies, and could not legally be owned. I'll reference "what color are your bits"[0], since it's an excellent description of one of the problems here. You're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem. Whether you torrent an album or whether you reverse an analog source through magic, either way the bits are colored with copyright infringement.

[0]: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Of course all this shit happens the same week I bought my first NAS.

I read an interview with Gottfrid Warg (pirate bay co-founder) some years back. Can't find it now...

What stuck with me was his disappointment that the wider torrent community simply relied on the pirate bay always making a return. There was no real effort to go beyond resilient hosting. No producing facts by superior technology. It was just a bunch of copy-cats playing whac-a-mole with the copyright industry. To paraphrase: "I went to jail for this stuff, and you don't even care enough about it to follow up on it in earnest?" At least that's how it read to me. As I said, it's been a while.

Hosting torrent platforms and such on namecheap, cloudflare (no really!) and all the other mainstream platforms seems like such an obviously, deeply stupid choice. There's only very few projects (that I know of) that are really addressing resilient, organized, curated content dissemination, and they're essentially divorced from the pirate scene. Too bad I guess.

Not in the real world where audio bandwidth is limited.

Great write-up.

>you're proposing a technical solution, but there is no technical solution here, it's a legal problem.

Yep. P2P community tried to play this game and lost every single time. The Bitcoin and crypto-currency are trying to play this game as well when the advocates propose that bitcoin is a technical workaround to things like AML regulations - and they will lose as well.