YouTube To MP3 Conversion Site Banned By Google

Google has announced that it has made the decision to ban a popular site which allows YouTube videos to be converted over to MP3.

The site, called YouTube-MP3.org, was notified by Google in a letter which stated that this practice violated YouTube’s terms of service.  In response, YouTube has blocked access to their videos to YouTube-MP3 servers.

Google has the right to make this call since they acquired YouTube back in 2006.

Conversions of this type are easy to achieve.  To do so, a user simply plugs in a YouTube URL that they are interested in into a tab field.  The conversion service then takes the video and transforms it into an MP3 file.

Over the past few months, YouTube has received increasing pressure from the top four recording companies to do more to stop the conversions.  These companies were recently represented by the Recording Industry Association of America, which complained to Google that they were not doing enough to protect copyrighted material.

While Google is one of the world’s biggest supporters of free culture and maintaining an Internet free from censorship, YouTube has spent a lot of money to license music videos and provide it for free to users.