Is streamstripping legal?

Is streamripping legal?

Is stream stripping of the internet broadcast technically legal? Can streamrippers be traced somehow? I guess, if streamripping cannot be traced, I do not really care about its legality.

 

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What country are you speaking of?

p.s. the process can not be traced or seen

 

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USA

 

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I have doubts about that. I use relay stream. One of the scroll box options says: Pretend to be: "FreeAmp/2.x". I assume that my winamp or a relay server send some info to the internet radiostations. Sent info may identify what kind of program has access to their stream, and what that program does to the stream (it's my layman's fears). Could that info be deciphered somehow to find out about the streamripping?

 

hmmm I have no experience with that particular software. I was speaking from a theoretical point of view.
anyways, why do you bother with streamripping?

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it's usually far from a cd quality

 

It sounds pretty well, maybe not a CD quality but it's pretty good. It's free too. One can pick up what one really likes to listen without wasting tonnes of time on the mp3 downloads. If I really like stuff, I buy a CD. And lastly, an "ethnic" music, I am looking for, is not sold in Wal-Marts, etc.

 

ethnic like armenian, georgian, hungarian, romanian, japanese, irish, celtic, indian, islamic, scottish, siberian, azerbaian, chinese, pict, khmer, lithuanian, latvian, ande indian, moldovian, transilvanian, oltenian, egyptian, greek, arabian?

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//was just going through my ethnic folder

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//hate african ethnic music

 

I would guess that if the Streaming is in a particular format (Say RealAudio for instance) and it has been encoded specifically based upon a particular companies "software paten" then the likelihood is that breaking their encoding thats suppose to be "Streamed" to generate a cached file would be illegal if the program doesn't generate the cache intensionally.

However whether such companies would suddenly start hunting you down for breach of their TOC is another matter.

 

as for legality, it technically depends on the purposes for your ripping.

If you are ripping to add it to your music collection, then no, that is copyright violation.
If you are ripping in order to listen to the publically broadcast program at a more convinient time, then this is considered to be "Time shifting", and qualifies a as legal under fair-use laws (just like taping a TV show to watch later in the day).

However, if it is a private subscription stream that you pay for, TOS of the subscription most likely prohibits ripping. While it would still be legal, your contract will be voided if you are caught. Most ripping software, however, simply recieves the stream to a file, instead of the speakers. As such, the sender has no knowledge that you are ripping the data, instead of just playing it.