What the Hell is THAT?! - my whole soundcloud page & uploaded music cloned in a strange site!.. >:-(

[sbj]

you can disable "enable app playback" and "Display embed code". that will prevent other sites using your tracks.

using the new badge edit on the tracks page makes it easier.

Thanks for the tip

[Frantz]

you can disable "enable app playback" and "Display embed code". that will prevent other sites using your tracks.

This won't prevent illegal sites from leeching content.

[federu]

have you tried it?

other sites will maybely show your content though, but it won't be available to download. or if, the result is 0 bytes.

at least this is my experience. and sooner or later they won't want your stuff.

another way to prevent others to steal your music is to make only horrible stuff.

[Frantz]

Looks like some sort of action has been taken, everything is 404'd

I can still reach the site but it's empty, like a ghost website.

This is great. SoundCloud must have blocked them.

It illustrates the point that they were not cloning all of your content. It would be nearly impossible given the huge amount of data on SoundCloud. I suspect it was a teenager or a small time operator who did this. They may try to resurrect the site with a new domain name and IP address.

[Frantz]

have you tried it?

other sites will maybely show your content though, but it won't be available to download. or if, the result is 0 bytes.

I didn't test it but I have seen code samples on the web for ripping streams from SoundCloud or YouTube. Any music or video that can be streamed can also be ripped. It's similar to taping music off the radio in the old days. You can't prevent it.

[DrGonzo]

Anyone got a reply from Soundcloud? Would be interesting to hear what they said.

/C

[Sampleconstruct]

Anyone got a reply from Soundcloud? Would be interesting to hear what they said.

/C

Yes, this is what they have to say - basically they can't do anything about it.

Thanks for writing to tell us about this service (http://www.cvuy.com), we certainly share your concerns. We’ll do our best to explain why it is currently possible for these sites to exist (and why we are not able to shut down these sites) and how we hope to improve the security of content hosted with us at SoundCloud.

SoundCloud uses the most widely supported streaming protocol to ensure your sounds can be played everywhere, by everyone, across the web. When someone hits play on a track, the technology behind this streaming protocol is put into action to make sure your track can be played. By using a streaming technology which is widely supported, we can make sure that your content is playable on all devices, and browsers.

Websites, like the one you reported, are exploiting vulnerabilities which are inherent in this streaming technology, which allows them to rip the stream and provide it for download elsewhere. This means that they are not downloading the original file you have uploaded with us, but instead the streamed audio (which is 128 kbps). This is the downside to using a system which allows you to be heard by everyone, everywhere.

There are other streaming protocols which are considered to be more secure, but sadly, they are not as widely supported. By switching the streaming protocol we use, your content would not be playable on certain browsers or devices, preventing people from being able to play your tracks. We are researching alternative streaming technologies to understand how secure they are, how well supported they are, and whether they can reliably stream content. We hope the work being done in this area will allow us to provide the most reliable, widely supported and secure means of streaming content. Once these technologies are more widely supported, we will be in a better position to change the streaming technologies we use.

While we are doing all we can to improve this situation, there are a number of measures you may want to consider to prevent unauthorized downloads of your content. While we cannot guarantee that this will stop these sites from accessing your content without your permission, it will put you in the best position possible to prevent people from downloading content without your consent.

- If you have not done so already, disable downloads on your tracks
- Disable app playback, so that your track will not be playable outside of the SoundCloud platform and our own apps (i.e. the official SoundCloud iOS and Android apps)

As the website you reported is not hosted or controlled by us, we technically do not have any means to take it down. What we would normally do is try and contact the owner of such a website (if they provide any contact information) and/or the company hosting the website and request they shut down the service/website. That being said, we unfortunately cannot guarantee that the third party will comply with our request.

[Sampleconstruct]

Looks like some sort of action has been taken, everything is 404'd

I can still reach the site but it's empty, like a ghost website.

This is great. SoundCloud must have blocked them.

It illustrates the point that they were not cloning all of your content. It would be nearly impossible given the huge amount of data on SoundCloud. I suspect it was a teenager or a small time operator who did this. They may try to resurrect the site with a new domain name and IP address.

No, SC did not block them, as they can't - see the reply I quoted above.

[highkoo]

There are many of these sites...
There was a thread just like this a bit ago.
It will definitely never be stopped.
I have no doubt that url 404'd just as another came online...

I hate it. But I would only really waste energy on it if somehow my music was a big part of them generating income.

[Frantz]

No, SC did not block them, as they can't - see the reply I quoted above.

They are not saying much about cvuy.com specifically. They are giving a general answer, which I agree with, about why ripping streams can't be prevented.

There is an identical SoundCloud downloader site running called http://search4song.com/ which I can examine. Using my own music as an example, when I click the Download button, it serves an ad from http://adf.ly/ and runs a server-side PHP script called search4song.com/download.php.

Since search4song.com is ripping MP3s using server-side PHP scripts, I think SoundCloud can block downloads from this site by specifically blocking the IP addresses of search4song.com and adf.ly.

If this site were ripping MP3s via client-side Javascript, it would be much more difficult to block. So while there is not a general solution for blocking this, each illegal site can be handled on a case by case basis if SoundCloud is willing to spend the time. Feel free to refer SoundCloud support to this post.

[Axis1~SL61]

...and no one of you knew?...

we dont google ourselves often

LOL, you should! you don't imagine what people can be doing or saying about you on the internet "behind your back". If you never did it, prepare to be surprised and eventually even annoyed the 1st time you do it!
I must confess I searched my own real name on the internet for the 1st time back in 1998 or so because I was bored and had already searched everything of interest I could possibly think of that night...

[Axis1~SL61]

Looks like some sort of action has been taken, everything is 404'd

That's right, just checked. Well, that's good to know!
-- Most of us don't make a cent out of it, but I think we must at least have some control about which sites we decide to put our creations on.
Of course we never have 100% control (not even close), but what annoyed me even more was seeing my photo being displayed in a dubious site without my knowledge. Glad it wasn't mixed with porn, as someone said before, because of the wrong negative image that could give to someone that knows me and were eventually searching for me or my music and ended up there instead of on my legitimate sites.
Thanks to everyone who participated and complained to SC.

[crimsonwarlock]

So while there is not a general solution for blocking this, each illegal site can be handled on a case by case basis if SoundCloud is willing to spend the time. Feel free to refer SoundCloud support to this post.

This won't work, because the leeching site can (and probably does) use several proxy servers to hide it's own IP-number. It can rotate those proxies or even randomly choose them constantly, so it is impossible for Soundcloud to determine which IP-numbers to block. They are unable to discern between proxy IP-numbers and 'valid' users IP-numbers. Legitimate users might even use those proxies (like the Tor network) as well.

[Sampleconstruct]

Since today it seems, that the "Enable app playback" function on all of my tracks has been reset, so now they're all available in external apps again. This sucks, as you can't batch-edit more than 20 tracks at once and it took me many hours to disable that function on my 2300+ tracks. I wrote toe the "Premium Support" and hope to get some premium support asap. So if any of you have disabled this to somewhat protect your tracks against ripping and pirating, check them out.

[planetearth]

Since today it seems, that the "Enable app playback" function on all of my tracks has been reset, so now they're all available in external apps again. This sucks, as you can't batch-edit more than 20 tracks at once and it took me many hours to disable that function on my 2300+ tracks. I wrote toe the "Premium Support" and hope to get some premium support asap. So if any of you have disabled this to somewhat protect your tracks against ripping and pirating, check them out.

If you hear anything back from "premium" support, please let us know. When I wrote to the same "premium" support people, it took more than a week to hear back...and they didn't offer anything I hadn't already tried myself, other than an excuse that there's nothing much they can do.

Steve