A music blog I visit every once in a while used to post up remixes of popular songs in mp3 format. They thought it was legal since they are remixes and not the original songs. Well, the record studios didn’t agree and told them to take the mp3s down, but said that streaming is ok. So, the site thought that they’d be smart and post up the songs in flash-player form.

Looks great right?

And if you try to right click all it comes up with is info about the flash player. No piracy possible right?

Wrong. All the flash player does is play an mp3 stored somewhere else. All I have to do to find that mp3 file is view the page’s source and search for “.mp3″ then just copy the full url to your address bar and you can download the song!

This is probably nothing breathtaking to most of you. What amazes me though is that save for Hulu and a few other sites, most streaming copywrited content can be pretty easily downloaded. Wouldn’t the RIAA, MPAA, etc. catch on?

Take YouTube for example. It is not as simple as viewing the page source, but it isn’t far off. All you need to do is save the following javascript (that I found somewhere on the interwebs) as a bookmark. Then whenever you want to download a YouTube video you are watching, just press the bookmark and it will start downloading the best quality version of the video in h.264 .mp4 format.

javascript:if(document.location.href.match(/http:\/\/[a-zA-Z\.]*youtube\.com\/watch/)){document.location.href='http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt='+(isHDAvailable?'22':'18')+'&video_id='+swfArgs['video_id']+'&t='+swfArgs['t']}