[HN Gopher] YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
___________________________________________________________________
YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
Author : phantop
Score : 1793 points
Date : 2020-10-23 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| _Github_ has received a takedown request for the youtube-dl repo
| and forks, _not_ youtube-dl itself, correct?
| fsociety2020 wrote:
| Should all just clone it and host it in every possible place and
| on servers outside the US and give them the big middle finger to
| go F themselves.
| getpolarized wrote:
| What I think is hilarious is how many takedown notices they've
| received!
|
| https://github.com/github/dmca
| jfax wrote:
| Won't disclouse which, but I'm among them!
| gurpreetsatwal wrote:
| This person's classmate copied and re-posted their exam as
| their own:
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
| danmg wrote:
| Youtube-dl (2020) would be an easier case to present to the
| public than DeCSS (2000).
|
| Everyone knows what Youtube is. It's easy to understand the
| utility of being able to download a video from Youtube to save it
| on your computer. If they didn't already know this was possible
| to do, they'd immediately want to start using it as soon as you
| explained it was possible.
|
| DeCSS was exploiting a weak encryption scheme's weak key
| distribution scheme. Where the only final explanation for why
| this matters is that it can be used to rip off DVDs.
| precommunicator wrote:
| I really hope the author will send a counter-notice.
| jonathan-neil wrote:
| They've learned absolutely nothing from two decades of failed
| wars vs torrenting.
| q3k wrote:
| Git mirror: https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl
|
| This is master on 4eda10499e8db831167062b0e0dbc7d10d34c1f9,
| retrieved from gitee.com, and is the last known hash from Google
| Webcache [1].
|
| Clone, verify and rehost.
|
| [1] -
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o7ilf8...
| neiman wrote:
| But it can also be sued for downloading uncopyrighted material.
| It's like submitting DCMA for Office Word because people can use
| it for creating pirate copies of Harry Potter.
| tertius wrote:
| To be fair, more like "Harry Potter Copier Word".
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| To be _fair_ , more like Microsoft(r) Office(r) OneNote(tm);
| it has a camera feature and an automatic OCR feature and a
| "copy text from image" convenience feature.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Also, using copying an entire Harry Potter book as the
| basic tutorial.
| [deleted]
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's not because Word doesn't:
|
| 1. Advertise that it is intended to aid in copyright
| infringement
|
| 2. Include some tools to circumvent DRM used in harry potter
| e-books.
| neiman wrote:
| I didn't notice that. Links?
| neiman wrote:
| Oh yeah, this paragraph:
|
| "For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code
| expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the
| following copyrighted works owned by our member companies"
|
| That's quite unwise to be honest. But these examples should
| be removed, not the code itself.
| kelnos wrote:
| The test suite uses YT URLs to copyrighted works to ensure
| it can download properly and that the metadata is accurate.
|
| Not quite the same as using downloading a copyrighted work
| as an example in the README, but still a very poor choice.
| sylvain_kerkour wrote:
| As a good internet citizen I have only one question: Where can I
| find a mirror to fork to preserve this piece of software?
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| git clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874660
| 3np wrote:
| It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying.
|
| It's not _that_ far from targeting wget or curl, were it not for
| the widespread use of them in industry.
| indigochill wrote:
| While the takedown request is outrageous, I'd probably respond
| the same in MS's shoes. Frankly defending it is not worth the
| corporate lawyering required from MS's perspective.
|
| That said, I think if Youtube-dl self-hosted on Gitlab or
| something and received a similar takedown, they could probably
| mount a successful defense.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _It 's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying._
|
| Not really. They're legally required to do so. The DMCA notice
| (despite what someone suggests downthread) is unfortunately
| quite properly served. Even if it is flat-out wrong, GH/MS has
| no reason (and likely no resources) to investigate whether or
| not that's the case. And if they did, and got it wrong, they'd
| lose their safe harbor status and be liable for damages.
|
| If the youtube-dl author believes it to be bullshit, they can
| send a counter-notice, and GH/MS will then put it back up. If
| the RIAA still has a bone to pick, they can file a lawsuit.
| Unfortunately, they very well may.
|
| > _It 's not that far from targeting wget or curl, were it not
| for the widespread use of them in industry._
|
| I get really confused when I hear things like this, because
| this makes no sense. Targeting a program called "YouTube
| Download", which has the main purpose of downloading clean
| copies of YT videos, against the wishes of the content creators
| is absolutely not the same thing as targeting a generic
| HTTP/FTP download tool.
|
| I think the DMCA is garbage, but it feels like willful
| ignorance to be at all surprised about things like this, and to
| compare this to something obviously non-infringing.
| progman32 wrote:
| > which has the main purpose of downloading clean copies of
| YT videos
|
| Among many other sites and services.
|
| > against the wishes of the content creators
|
| I'm a content creator on YouTube and I'd be honored if anyone
| chooses to save my videos on disk. The tool has its
| legitimate uses and abuses.
| gruez wrote:
| >It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying.
|
| Because there's no upside and only downside. If they refuse to
| comply and it turns out that youtube-dl did infringe, then they
| won't have DMCA safe harbor status and could be liable for
| damages.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| IANAL, but as far as I know GitHub _has_ to comply with DMCA
| requests. Otherwise, they would lose their safe harbor
| protection and become liable for _all_ distributions of
| copyrighted content through their service.
|
| However, GitHub is _also_ required to reinstate `youtube-dl` if
| the creator files a DMCA counter-notice.
| m11a wrote:
| "For _all_ distributions of copyrighted content through their
| service"
|
| I don't think that's true? I think that only extends to this
| particular DMCA. Obviously it wouldn't extend to eg me
| claiming Ruby on Rails is copyright infringement.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| You are correct, apparently YT itself sided with Lindsay
| Ellis when she received a completely bogus DMCA request.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3v5wFMQRqs
| mindslight wrote:
| This is not a valid DMCA takedown request, as the claimant
| has not asserted copyright ownership of anything in the
| repository.
|
| This notice is a conflation of two separate aspects of the
| DMCA, the copyright takedown process and technological
| circumvention devices. If the RIAA wishes to claim that
| youtube-dl is a circumvention device, the proper route is to
| sue the authors of youtube-dl. This notice is an abuse of
| process, and highlights the need for a penalty for fraudulent
| DMCA requests.
| murgindrag wrote:
| It seems like the right process is to mosey on over to
| gitlab. If gitlab properly defends the developer, that will
| continue the gradual github exodus to more open platforms.
| eli wrote:
| It's not a DMCA Takedown Request. It's just a letter.
| Making a request to take a repo down. Anyone can write a
| letter.
| vhold wrote:
| This is a good point, but I think ultimately Github has to
| comply with it to maintain their legal immunity, it's not
| their responsibility to determine if a copyright claim is
| valid.
|
| Similarly, youtube-dl can issue a counter-notice, and
| Github will have no responsibility to determine the
| validity of that either. They simply restore access unless
| they have been notified that a lawsuit is in progress.
| yebyen wrote:
| That's exactly how it works. The content carrier is on
| the hook to be responsive to DMCA takedown requests, and
| they are ~allowed~ (actually, also required) to be
| responsive to counter-notices as you describe.
|
| Their responsibility begins with removing the hosted data
| in question, where a valid DMCA notice is issued (and
| there is no incentive for them to make a judgement about
| whether the notice is valid or not.) If the authors of
| youtube-dl want to file a counter claim, that is their
| right, (which would put GitHub within their rights to
| restore the content too.)
|
| https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/responding-dmca-
| takedown-no...
|
| All of these declarations are made under penalty of
| perjury, both claims and counter-claims:
|
| > The DMCA requires that you swear to the facts in your
| copyright complaint under penalty of perjury. It is a
| federal crime to intentionally lie in a sworn
| declaration. (See U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1621.)
| Submitting false information could also result in civil
| liability--meaning you could incur a financial penalty.
|
| The civil liability here is a liability to the party who
| was damaged, (the author or copyright holder), so even if
| GitHub wanted to assert by themselves that the DMCA
| takedown claim was invalid, they would not have standing
| to sue anyone about it. So pretending even if you did
| believe youtube-dl authors are in the right and that the
| courts would be inclined to rule in their favor, and
| you're Microsoft, you have to honor the DMCA request and
| take down the content in order for there to be justice,
| since there can be no party with standing unless there
| are actual damages. (IANAL, you probably already figured
| that out by now, and I have no idea what the legal
| definition of "actual damages" is, but I do know what
| standing is.)
|
| Personally I agree that this does not represent a valid
| DMCA claim, but for GitHub to assert that and ignore the
| claim based on the way these laws are written, and those
| safe-harbor laws as well, I think any lawyer would say
| this is not possible.
| 15155 wrote:
| > DMCA takedown claim was invalid, they would not have
| standing to sue anyone about
|
| If this exact same logic were extended to YouTube: an
| invalid DMCA claim will absolutely reduce YouTube ad
| revenue causing measurable financial damage.
|
| Besides arguing: "they should have known it was invalid
| and refused to comply," how exactly would this not grant
| standing?
| yebyen wrote:
| That may be true, but this is not a claim on YouTube, (or
| the case of many frivolous claims made by these same RIAA
| folks on YouTube, that I know we're both thinking about.)
| There is no advertising sold on GitHub that I am aware
| of, and unless the youtube-dl authors are paying
| subscribers, I'm not sure how there could be any monetary
| damages to GitHub or Microsoft.
| 15155 wrote:
| YouTube was just an example as it's easier to show damage
| and remedy.
|
| GitHub?
|
| - How does this third-party unlawful request not
| constitute tortious interference between GitHub and all
| users (or just the paying member who owns this repo)?
| - If not directly tortious interference, this action
| could absolutely result in the loss of paying members and
| reputation damage. - The very fact we're
| discussing this means GitHub has suffered damage to their
| brand.
|
| - How does this resulting loss of source code not
| diminish the value of GitHub as a company?
| yebyen wrote:
| As I said, I am not a lawyer and you may have out-
| lawyered me here already, but I'll do my best to respond.
| The law prescribes this path for youtube-dl authors to
| respond to the claim, if youtube-dl authors want to put
| their names behind the project and make a legal case out
| of it. That severely limits the calculable damage that is
| possible, (especially if youtube-dl won't pursue the
| matter further.)
|
| The claim in the takedown notice that is required to be
| submitted under penalty of perjury is simply that the
| party submitting the claim actually represents [copyright
| holder] and that notice which RIAA submitted also does
| not make any demonstrably false claims. It does not
| entirely fit the format of a regular DMCA copyright
| takedown request for copyright enforcement, it has two
| sections (one is called "Anticircumvention Violation").
| It goes into detail about how the rights holders which
| RIAA lawyer represents are aggrieved, with language like:
|
| > we have a good faith belief that most of the youtube-dl
| forks are infringing to the same extent as the parent
| repository.
|
| # (This is probably the most dubious claim, and since the
| channel for takedown notices is for copyright
| enforcement, if your argument had a leg to stand on, I
| think it's this one. But is it calculable damage? And is
| the mention of Taylor Swift and other RIAA member artists
| in the README not plenty of evidence that there is actual
| infringement that is happening, or at least that it could
| have been asserted in good faith as it were that those
| rights holders believed there is a valid claim, as this
| infringement was happening?)
|
| and
|
| > the youtube-dl source code available on Github (which
| is the subject of this notice) circumvents YouTube's
| rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted
| audio files, in violation of YouTube's express terms of
| service
|
| I think for this to be tortious interference, you would
| have to demonstrate that there was any intentionally
| false information in these claims, and that's going to be
| tough. There is part of a DMCA takedown claim that must
| be asserted under penalty of perjury, and after re-
| reading the law and jogging my memory I understand again
| that for the party sending the takedown notice, that is
| very limited. (Unlike the counter-claim, which has to
| assert ownership under penalty of perjury, the claim must
| only assert that claimant represents an owner as
| identified in the claim and that the factual claims made
| in the notice are true, in good faith.) Otherwise it's
| hard to argue that this notice is anything but an effort
| to enforce multiple sections of the law as it is written,
| by asking nicely for a hand through the channels that
| GitHub has made available for enforcement.
|
| Whether or not it meets the definition of a valid DMCA
| takedown notice, it is a letter with many demonstrably
| true factual points, which GitHub has accepted through
| their channel for enforcement of claims. GitHub has
| "voluntarily" complied with their interpretation of the
| law here, in response, and there is an avenue for redress
| for the authors, if youtube-dl authors feel this is worth
| pursuing.
| 15155 wrote:
| You've almost seen the issue:
|
| The DMCA takedown request process is exclusively for
| content owners and their representatives to gain remedy
| for their own works. Youtube-DL is not their own work.
|
| The takedown request process is improper: they should
| have filed in an appropriate United States jurisdiction.
|
| As you've noticed: the format is strange because this is
| an illegal attempt that GitHub really should not have
| complied with.
| yebyen wrote:
| It makes both a copyright claim and a claim about
| circumvention devices. I don't agree, as you don't, that
| the copyright claim is valid, youtube-dl git repo clearly
| isn't hosting any copyrighted materials owned by the RIAA
| members represented in the letter. But the letter also
| never claims that it does.
|
| The law does not demand automated enforcement of claims
| or the establishment of a channel for automated
| enforcement. That is a compliance device invented by
| GitHub/YouTube/etc. for managing the substantial volume
| of requests they must receive with as much transparency
| as their customers demand and its operational
| characteristics are not covered by the law, it's simply a
| tool that GitHub uses to make themselves responsive and
| in compliance with as little overhead and manual
| intervention required as possible.
|
| The law does prescribe the "claim, counter-claim"
| process, which GitHub must respect if they are to
| maintain their compliance and safe harbor. If they were
| in the habit of reviewing every claim for validity
| (strictly not required by the law that insulates them),
| then I might agree with you, but I think that singling
| out this one claim and handling it specially would in
| fact open them up to a great big world of even criminal
| liability, that their straight compliance with the law
| insulates them from.
|
| The law prescribes almost exactly how GitHub should
| respond to claims and counter-claims, down to how many
| days the content may be removed for if a counter-claim is
| laid.
|
| > If you send a counter-notice, your online service
| provider is required to replace the disputed content
| unless the complaining party sues you within fourteen
| business days of your sending the counter-notice. (Your
| service provider may replace the disputed material after
| ten business days if the complaining party has not filed
| a lawsuit, but it is required to replace it within
| fourteen business days.)
|
| What must happen now, is youtube-dl either responds with
| a counter-claim or they don't. Then either a lawsuit is
| filed by RIAA within 10-14 days, or it isn't. Possibly
| one is filed later. (They don't waive any rights by not
| filing the lawsuit right away.)
|
| So, whether this was a valid claim by RIAA or an illegal
| attempt at tortious interference is surely a matter for
| the courts to decide, but suffice it to say I am far less
| confident than you are that GitHub would be safe from any
| kind of legal reprisal if they stood fast here, and tried
| to hold the position that you are arguing.
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| Wouldn't that mean that any wealthy competitor that wants
| to trash GitHub would just invest money in throwing DMCA
| takedowns at github.com/* ?
|
| How does that make me, a developer, want to keep up doing
| business with them?
| mindslight wrote:
| If the notice had claimed copyright ownership of youtube-
| dl, _then_ Github would have to act on it even though it
| was incorrect. But since it 's not an actual well formed
| takedown notice, legally Github does not _have to_ do
| anything with it - just as if it were missing contact
| information or were not signed. Unfortunately there is
| little downside for Github to act on it regardless.
| [deleted]
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They don't need immunity for an invalid takedown!
|
| To the extent that their core responsibility is hosting
| code, it is their responsibility to determine if some
| claims are valid.
| m11a wrote:
| That logic is all fine and well, but that requires GitHub
| to determine if a takedown is valid or not. And if they
| determine incorrectly in a case, they're open to damages
| in that case.
|
| So, is it worth it? Or is it worth just letting the
| parties figure it out?
|
| If the DMCA is truly invalid, a counter-claim can be
| filed. If the other party doesn't want to file one, I
| guess GitHub wonders why it should keep the content up
| when the creator doesn't have faith in it.
|
| Obviously I note the possible flaw in the above logic, in
| that there's a difference between an individual developer
| deciding it's worth starting a legal faff with a big
| company by filing a counter-claim, verses GitHub doing
| it, but their service would go broke dealing with legal
| requests otherwise.
|
| Correct way to deal with this is through your lawmakers,
| not saying Microsoft should foot the bill for a broken
| law.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Lesson learned: always use Creative Commons licensed data to demo
| your multimedia tools. Else people get the wrong idea.
|
| Some examples for youtube-dl might be:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ Big buck bunny
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ Sintel
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY Spring
|
| In fact, youtube actually allows you to filter by CC, so there's
| never a reason not to!
| nullc wrote:
| Hi Kim!
|
| They couldn't have done this. The 'infringing' links were in
| the test suite and were specifically tests for content from
| particular sources which had special links which required
| different techniques to download them.
|
| The test would not have been accomplished if they were pointed
| at links which didn't have the behaviour that was being tested.
| gforz wrote:
| Curious to know if it was not possible for YouTube-dl to
| create content which was 'similar' to the infringing ones &
| upload it on YouTube for their test cases?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Hi Nullc :-) And shoot, that _is_ annoying.
|
| It makes for really bad optics though. Gforz's suggestion to
| upload test video with similar parameters is probably a
| better plan. Definitely better than giving bad ideas to
| copyright lawyers!
| grishka wrote:
| In the case of youtube-dl, they couldn't do that. At least VEVO
| videos have an additional layer of "protection" -- the direct
| links to video files require a signature of some sort IIRC.
| Downloading a non-DRM-ed video is as easy as making a request
| to https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=aqz-KE-bpKQ
| and then following a link to the format you need, but with
| those music videos, that won't work. So the test cases were a
| necessity.
| defen wrote:
| The smart thing would have been to _always_ filter by CC. And
| then anyone who can type _#_ could just modify their source
| code a bit to adjust the filters.
| throwawaylolx wrote:
| I think to take your lessons from the pretexts is like judging
| a war by its casus belli.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Curious if anyone with legal expertise knows if this has legs?
| They say:
|
| > _The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the
| technological protection measures used by authorized streaming
| services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music
| videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without
| authorization for such use._
|
| But the "circumventing" is still accessing a stream the user can
| view anyways, and the "reproduce and distribute" feels like a
| stretch -- there's no inherent distribution. This isn't
| _anything_ like a pirating _or_ a torrenting tool.
|
| It feels more akin to when movie studios sued VCR manufacturers
| for being able to record TV back in 1984 -- and _lost_ [1].
|
| (Also, side note but I have never in my life seen a story upvoted
| so quickly on HN. 130 points in just 7 minutes so far.)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I feel like if they'd been more patient, they might have
| addressed the similarity to the "analog hole."
| ikeboy wrote:
| I'm NAL, but familiar with IP law.
|
| My analysis is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874277
| and I'm broadly skeptical of the legal viability under US law.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download
| feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?
|
| From the RIAA's point of view, it works to their benefit that a
| download link doesn't exist, and it may be something they like,
| but that doesn't mean that's why.
|
| It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn't
| exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their site
| if you want to rewatch a video.
|
| It would be one thing if some YouTube videos had a download
| button and others didn't. That would suggest that, on the ones
| where it's missing, it is missing for a reason, and that reason
| might be DRM. But as far as I know, YouTube doesn't have
| download for any videos.
|
| Software doesn't always have all the features that end users
| might want, and the mere absence of a feature doesn't
| necessarily tell you why it's missing. Also, it's not some
| weird, suspicious thing to write software which fills in a
| feature gap in some other software. (Google encourages add-on
| software on other products, too. For example, Chrome extensions
| and Gmail add-ons.)
|
| But, maybe there is some legal reason why this could make
| sense. Maybe some terms of service or licensing (for video
| uploaders or for regular end users) says not to download
| something, which would make it clear that the download feature
| is missing on purpose.
| eznzt wrote:
| >Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download
| feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?
|
| Yes, they have some sort of DRM, albeit a very weak one.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Hmm, so maybe it's legally enough if YouTube does have a
| protection mechanism and the material is copyrighted, even
| if the protection mechanism isn't necessarily intended to
| protect copyright?
| SahAssar wrote:
| Last I checked normal youtube videos are just a MPEG-
| DASH/HLS stream, with no DRM.
|
| What youtube-dl essentially does is reading the playlist
| and concatenating chunks together, there is no DRM
| circumvention here.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn't
| exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their
| site if you want to rewatch a video.
|
| Lets be clear though - the only reason copyrighted material
| is allowed on Youtube is because the owners then grant a
| license for the content in exchange for ad revenue. Offering
| a download link severly damages the "owners are paid for
| their content" part of the equation.
| warp wrote:
| There is a "Download" button in the mobile Youtube apps (if
| you're paying for Youtube Premium).
| grishka wrote:
| Except it doesn't give you the actual file, it's still only
| playable offline through the app (unless you have root I
| guess).
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I have YT premium and an android phone so I checked this
| out. It looks like they don't store a single mp4 or
| anything and instead store it in chunks. I am not sure
| though if they are actually encrypted and stored using
| some sort of copy protection or if you could assemble the
| pieces into a single video using some algorithm without a
| special key.
| freshhawk wrote:
| > Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download
| feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?
|
| My understanding is that basically anything at all, if it is
| in any way "technical" and shows intent, will be accepted as
| a "technical protection measure" if you go by what has worked
| so far.
|
| Much more absurd and blatantly bad faith arguments have been
| accepted, "conspicuously not supplying the feature" is a very
| strong case in the absurd world of the DMCA cases.
| williamscales wrote:
| You are able to download YouTube videos on your phone, if you
| subscribe to YouTube premium. I haven't made any deep
| investigation of this but I kinda assume the videos are
| protected by DRM.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| The fact that youtube wants people to come back to the site
| and use servers, miles of wires, electricity, network
| machinery instead of letting them download videos so they can
| watch them from thumbdrive just says to me this company is
| unethical and harms environment. Any business model that
| forces people to be on the network without any reason other
| than greed, should be illegal. If you can stream the file,
| download option should be mandatory by law.
| stormbeard wrote:
| People forget that Youtube is a _business_. The reason they
| maintain all of those servers and network machinery is to
| serve ads, otherwise why would they provide that service
| for free?
| intricatedetail wrote:
| No. But they shouldn't harm environment. If business is
| harmful then should be illegal.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| The button doesn't exist, but apparently they do have a link
| that lets you download the video, it is just obfuscated.
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874277>
| mig39 wrote:
| Youtube does have a "download" feature in YouTube studio.
| Where you can download a heavily compressed version of any
| video you've uploaded. But only videos you've uploaded.
| vongomben wrote:
| IANAL IANAT yet the video I am watching isn't being stored
| in my browser?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The data obviously must make it to your computer. A
| distinction that can be made is whether it is
| possible/easy to use it separately, outside of YouTube.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| They come as regular media files, the chunking would
| cause issues for most people but it's easy to view. I
| don't think difficulty is what is important though, what
| matters is if they were to need some kind of decrypter
| from the copyright holder.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The entire IP concept is really hard to make sense of with the
| web: a browser works by making a local copy of a remote
| resource and then making that local copy available to the user.
| I don't see why, from the server's perspective, the precise
| client matters: if I use curl + pandoc to read your webpage, is
| that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or
| Chrome?
| superkuh wrote:
| > is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or
| Chrome?
|
| In the USA legally it is because the vast majority of the
| judges that have ruled on these things think anything that
| isn't a browser is a hacking tool. Using wget is enough to
| get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web
| resources.
| ReaLNero wrote:
| > Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison
| for accessing public web resources.
|
| Example?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Aaron Swartz remains a prominent example. RIP
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-
| pro...
|
| His JSTOR code (below) calls wget: https://osf.io/bnd2h
| moonchild wrote:
| So, had he opened a browser and used the javascript
| console to download everything instead, he would have
| gotten off scot free?
| [deleted]
| wafflesraccoon wrote:
| Nitpick, on page three of the document you posted it
| states that his script used curl and not wget
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I was interpolating, the article implies wget but I
| didn't mean to imply I had verified that or anything.
| I'll admit I did make a stronger statement than intended
| and was relying on third party interpretations of the
| code. Thanks for the clarification!
|
| I think weev may have used wget in his AT&T work where he
| discovered links or interactions between customer data
| and iOS in an AT&T subsite?
|
| http://madisonian.net/2013/04/09/academics-go-to-jail-
| cfaa-e...
| nsgi wrote:
| Were those public resources, though?
| Thorentis wrote:
| Nope, you needed to be on the MIT network. He argued that
| they _should be_ public, which is very much NOT the same
| thing as actually being public in the eyes of the law.
| greensamuelm wrote:
| United States v. Swartz?
| [deleted]
| bo1024 wrote:
| weev?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach
| sakoht wrote:
| Setting aside the evils of the DMCA itself:
|
| Seems clearly that if youtube authorizes downloads, then people
| shouldn't put things on youtube they don't want downloaded?
|
| The takedown notices should be going to youtube. But of course
| they want to use youtube to promote themselves.
| cft wrote:
| This needs free legal assistance from EFF and needs to go to
| court if RIAA is actually ready to litigate this
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > This needs free legal assistance from EFF
|
| Legal assistance isn't free; it's just paid for by other
| donors: [0]
|
| [0] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/30for30--S
| jedberg wrote:
| I don't think Microsoft needs the EFFs help.
| cft wrote:
| Youtube-dl is not a Microsoft's project. If they send a
| counter-notice to GitHub (they should), per DMCA Youtube-dl
| is exposed for liability when GitHub restores the repository
| (but GitHub is shielded from liability after they restore)
| josteink wrote:
| Sounds like it's about time youtube-dl moves to IPFS.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| So if you did not fork youtube-dl but instead had cloned it,
| changed the repo to be the private nootube-dl and pushed it there
| - would github detect it was the same code and also take it down?
| Thaxll wrote:
| If the README stated that you can download free to use video such
| as:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/VideoLibraryNocopyrightFootage/vid...
|
| You're out of troubles?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Ironically, I've heard of video takedown service that this has
| broken.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I find this amazing, essentially Google has been scraping every
| piece of content they can get their hands on, when a few
| individuals decide to get data, that wasn't even created by
| YouTube, they get take down notices. The more I think about it
| hypocrisy should be a defence against these things.
| cphajduk wrote:
| On a technical side-note...
|
| Would it be possible to host a Git server on an IPFS distributed
| system?
| neonate wrote:
| Could you just make a fork, take out the offending samples, and
| call it youtube-ld?
| Shared404 wrote:
| I have Linux and Windows binaries.
|
| If anyone wants them, feel free to shoot me an email.
| aquova wrote:
| While its good to get a backup of the source code, youtube-dl is
| one of those projects that quickly becomes useless as Google
| mixes stuff around within YouTube, which they like to do. Without
| an active developer base, the project will quickly become less
| and less effective, which is one of the big concerns IMO about
| this lawsuit.
| yamrzou wrote:
| What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting,
| issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying
| on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer
| base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
| jaspergilley wrote:
| In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to
| exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a
| build as anything cryptographic actually
| drKarl wrote:
| Well, there's git over SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt) and got
| over IPF (Interplanetary Filesystem)... That should be
| distributed uncensorable git...
| paina wrote:
| Yes, we do need this. I feel that the first step would be
| to move ytdl to a self hosted repository. But even this has
| the potential for takedowns.
| actuator wrote:
| If we rename it and add some open license video as an
| example instead of music videos, can they still ask for a
| takedown?
| godshatter wrote:
| They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste
| warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be
| used to download copyrighted content, post it to github,
| and see what happens.
| weaksauce wrote:
| they could create a youtube channel and upload some
| test/example videos to that
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| > some open license video
|
| Perhaps 'Copying Is Not Theft'[1]?
|
| https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4
| rozab wrote:
| Git seems like a great candidate for hosting through TOR;
| it's super low bandwidth. I often find myself wondering why
| DMCA'd fan projects don't just switch to anonymous TOR
| hosting. Obviously it's not bulletproof, but if it's just
| copyright holders you have to worry about and not state
| actors then it seems like a great solution.
| junon wrote:
| > a great candidate
|
| Not just a candidate. Torsocks + Git works perfectly.
| There's no mainstream free Tor Git hosting I know of, so
| that's a market ripe for picking.
| DennisP wrote:
| Since git is already decentralized, this definitely seems
| doable.
| ttkciar wrote:
| My thought exactly. It even incorporates functionality for
| turning any local git repo into a shared git repo.
|
| Mainly what they need besides that is a place to co-
| ordinate, collaborate and track tickets. Solutions abound.
|
| The RIAA's actions are annoying but won't kill the project.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Git-on-the-Blockchain?
| [deleted]
| deepender99 wrote:
| keybase.io provide decentralized crypto solution, it's better
| to open source community to move on to such crypto soluion
| anoraca wrote:
| They got bought by Zoom. Hard pass.
| [deleted]
| rvense wrote:
| Keybase is extremely centralized, and they were bought by
| Zoom a few months ago.
|
| Stop using Keybase.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I too thought of this, but keybase is bulky, software-wise.
| I'm not a fan of having to run its service just to access
| public git repos.
| Asraelite wrote:
| Regarding this, does anyone know where the best place to hear
| from the main developers is?
|
| Youtube is bound to make a breaking change any day now, and as-
| is I have no idea where to look for updates to the project once
| this happens.
| aylmao wrote:
| I imagine someone can re-publish it on Github without it being
| taken down if they rename it, change the README and/or add some
| disclaimer saying this tool shouldn't be used to download
| copyrighted works.
|
| Collaboration to keep it up to date hopefully follows soon
| after.
| ehsankia wrote:
| This would definitely be a good time for a rebranding, the
| tool is now very far from its original "youtube-dl" purpose.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| They should rename it to 'please-ignore-this-letter-it-is-
| fake'.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Despite the project name, "youtube-dl" is a nearly universal
| video downloader. It contains hundreds of special cases for
| specific websites, which will gradually break without
| maintenance. It would be a huge loss.
| ikeboy wrote:
| Disclaimer: IANAL.
|
| The legal reasoning here is shaky. Notice that they cite a German
| court and assert that the law there is materially the same as
| that in the US.
|
| I did some research on this specific issue at one point, and I'm
| skeptical that Youtube's controls qualify under the law in
| question.
|
| RIAA cites two sections of the law: >the provision or trafficking
| of the source code violates 17 USC SSSS1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1).
|
| It almost certainly doesn't violate 1201(a)(2), which is for
| access controls. This is intended to be used by someone who
| already has access to Youtube, so no access controls are
| bypassed.
|
| R. CHRISTOPHER GOODWIN & ASSOCIATES, INC. v. SEARCH, INC., Dist.
| Court, ED Louisiana 2019:
|
| >While the user id/password combination required for access was
| surely a "technological measure" that controlled access to the
| works at issue, Pevny did not circumvent that measure. She
| validly accessed the system using her id/password combination
| while she was still an employee with Plaintiff. Even if the use
| that she made of that access is not something that Plaintiff
| would have authorized her to do, i.e., copy the materials at
| issue, it remains that Pevny's alleged abuse of her logon
| privileges does not rise to the level of descrambling,
| decrypting, or otherwise to avoiding, bypassing, removing,
| deactivating, or impairing anything. As the district court
| observed in Digital Drilling Data Systems, LLC v. Petrolink
| Services, Inc., No. 4:15-CV-02172, 2018 WL 2267139, at *14 (S.D.
| Tex. May 16, 2018), many different district courts have held that
| using the correct username and password to access a copyrighted
| work, even without authorization to do so, does not constitute
| circumvention under SS 1201(a) of the DMCA.
|
| Youtube-dl either involves access to files that don't require a
| login, or it uses your password / cookies to access the file, so
| it doesn't bypass access controls.
|
| The claim under 1201(b)(1), which is for copy controls, has more
| potential.
|
| There are the subsections:
|
| >(A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of
| circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that
| effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this
| title in a work or a portion thereof; >(B)has only limited
| commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent
| protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively
| protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work
| or a portion thereof; or >(C)is marketed by that person or
| another acting in concert with that person with that person's
| knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a
| technological measure that effectively protects a right of a
| copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof.
|
| A and B clearly don't apply. The primary purpose of youtube-dl
| isn't to download copyrighted content, but simply to download
| Youtube videos, whether they're copyrighted or not. There's
| clearly more than limited legitimate uses (such as downloaded
| public domain videos.) The question here is about C - there's an
| arguable case that the examples in the repo that this letter
| cites are "marketing" usage for infringing purposes. I'm somewhat
| skeptical that counts as "marketing", however, and it could be
| easily remedied by removing those examples or replacing with
| public domain examples.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| The concrete action they're accusing youtube-dl of is that it
| "circumvents YouTube's rolling cipher". The RIAA has used this
| same complaint to have other sites/tools taken down. I've
| looked into the implementation, and it turns out the Youtube is
| at most merely rearranging the characters of the CDN url of the
| video, and they send you JS code in the page to correctly
| arrange the characters of the URL so you can download it.
| Youtube-dl is using the Google-supplied JS and a JS interpreter
| to transform the Google supplied URL into the URL they need to
| download the videos. Youtube is asking Google what to do, and
| Google is saying "here's how you download the video".
|
| I explained the full RIAA complaint, with links to prior
| complaints and the youtube-dl source code, here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111
| 15155 wrote:
| Sounds like the next step should be: "embed a JS interpreter
| and use Google's own code."
| lelandbatey wrote:
| That is in fact, exactly what youtube-dl is doing. They
| download the JS code provided by Google, then use regexes
| to figure out which function is the function that Google
| provides for un-arranging the characters, then they load
| Google's JS into an interpreter and provide it with the
| Google supplied URL to get the original signature. See the
| code here:
|
| https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-
| dl/-/blob/master/youtub...
|
| So yeah, Youtube/Google is doing (basically) _nothing_ to
| protect the content, and for the absolutely token
| obfuscation they do use, they also provide you with the way
| to get right back to directly accessing the data without
| any protections.
|
| The RIAA is _lying_ in saying that Google is using
| technical protections, and they 're _lying_ in saying that
| youtube-dl is doing anything other than what Google tells
| them to do in order to access videos.
| 15155 wrote:
| Ah: I assumed this was something a la DeCSS - copyrighted
| numbers or a decryption algorithm or something.
|
| I don't see how this is technically different than
| implementing any other conforming User Agent. Legally...
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Ahem, your honor, please use the gavel to make it
| official.
| jaspergilley wrote:
| You can download the most recent version of the YouTube-DL code
| from Wayback Machine here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co...
|
| Fuck the RIAA
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I can still find youtube-dl on gitlab, so it's still out there.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I can still install it via pip: pip3 install
| --user --upgrade youtube-dl
|
| So I guess they haven't issued a take down to PyPy yet.
| moonchild wrote:
| *PyPi. PyPy is an alternate implementation of python.
| kzrdude wrote:
| youtube-dl is in every linux repo, so the source code is widely
| mirrored and is not going anywhere.
| muyuu wrote:
| they need to move development elsewhere though
|
| youtube-dl becomes obsolete very quickly as endpoints make
| changes on their settings and formats, notably youtube.com
| themselves
| Barrin92 wrote:
| just throw it up on Gitee good luck ever getting through
| the Chinese court system on a copyright issue
| fibers wrote:
| wow this straight up sounds like the best solution by far
| since who knows if microsoft or google is willing to put
| up a fight
| viro wrote:
| ok so I might just be stupid but how does that link let me
| clone the repo?.....
| [deleted]
| q3k wrote:
| Here's a git mirror of the entire repo history up the the
| latest commit hash that I'm aware of. Compare against the
| commit hash on Google Webcache [1] for safety:
| git clone https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl
|
| Clone, verify and rehost.
|
| [1] - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o
| 7ilf8...
| yamrzou wrote:
| As another comment pointed[0], there is a mirror on gitee:
| https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872999
| 29_29 wrote:
| click code, download zip
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload..
| .. is a ZIP containing the repo.
| dheera wrote:
| Wow I didn't think they'd host ZIP files of every commit of
| every repo.
|
| Where the hell do they have that much hard disk space, and
| who is funding them?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I give them money every month because their archives are
| essential to preserving our history. Not to mention, they
| have really saved my bacon before when I really needed to
| read some technical blog published a decade ago that has
| since been lost due to the website being reorganized or
| even being completely taken down.
|
| Even though it takes a lot of bandwidth, I think
| preserving the source code on GitHub is an invaluable
| service and hope they continue to do so. I didn't know
| they were saving the zip file of every release, but I can
| understand why. It gives you point in time snapshots more
| easily and who knows how easy it will be to use a git
| repo from today 100 years from now. ZIP is a much simpler
| format if it needs to be reimplemented and is used all
| over the place.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Archive.org
|
| https://archive.org/about/credits.php
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| We are funding them together: https://archive.org/donate/
| blitblitblit wrote:
| The copyright trolls are encircling Archive.org ever
| since they briefly offered the National Emergency
| Library. They need all the good vibes we can send them,
| please donate!
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Internet Archive seems to be heavily promoting Protocol
| Labs tech and File Coin specifically on their Twitter
| feed. I have donated small sums and ran a couple
| fundraisers via Facebook which benefited Internet
| Archive. The promo for File Coin is new. They pitch it as
| building a decentralized AWS, which I'm not sure if File
| Coin gets you 100% of the way there, but it's a start?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| In a large datacenter. People like you and me, some
| institutional grants here and there...
| arno1 wrote:
| It doesn't contain git commit history. Clone a fresh mirror
| off here https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git
| capableweb wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload..
| .. is a link to zip of master from commit
| 4eda10499e8db831167062b0e0dbc7d10d34c1f9, which was around
| 18/10/2020
| metahost wrote:
| You can use the download zip button instead of cloning.
| Udo wrote:
| That doesn't matter. As development stops, youtube-dl will stop
| being able to download videos in a matter of months (at best).
| This is an extremely brittle system that relies on youtube-dl
| being one step ahead of Youtube at all times. Without further
| development, the next update to Youtube's site will break the
| tool.
|
| It was really a matter of time. I'm sure most of us were
| already amazed it lasted this long - and it did because it
| remained a relatively obscure tool for years.
|
| It's also the case that the development of subversive/illegal
| tools requires a certain amount of subterfuge and sneakiness
| that the youtube-dl developers apparently weren't ready to
| engage in. While this is understandable, it also underscores
| the fact that such tools live on borrowed time (as does, I
| would argue, general-purpose computing itself).
| [deleted]
| thesimon wrote:
| I mostly see this video
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj", which should
| not be copyrighted.
|
| Does anyone see the video links in the README claimed by RIAA?
| oefrha wrote:
| Unfortunately, the claimed videos are in some tests in
| youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py, e.g. #
| JS player signature function name containing $ {
| 'url': 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM',
| 'info_dict': { 'id': 'nfWlot6h_JM',
| 'ext': 'm4a', 'title': 'Taylor Swift -
| Shake It Off', 'description':
| 'md5:307195cd21ff7fa352270fe884570ef0',
| 'duration': 242, 'uploader':
| 'TaylorSwiftVEVO', 'uploader_id':
| 'TaylorSwiftVEVO', 'upload_date':
| '20140818', }, 'params': {
| 'youtube_include_dash_manifest': True,
| 'format': '141/bestaudio[ext=m4a]', },
| },
| [deleted]
| oefrha wrote:
| You can only download a snapshot from that page. Here's a
| tarball with the entire git repo in case anyone's interested:
| https://transfer.sh/Hj9dD/youtube-dl-git.tar.gz (52MiB)
|
| Here's Debian's mirror btw, somewhat out of date and using the
| one-commit-per-upstream-release development model (in the
| upstream branch), so lacking a lot of history:
| https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl
| amatecha wrote:
| The gzipped tarball, was that as of latest commit? just
| curious if we can consider it the definitive final copy
| marc_abonce wrote:
| There's also that copy in the Arctic. I don't think that Github
| will remove that one.
|
| Edit: On a serious note, though. I just realised that Internet
| Archive apparently doesn't archive most PRs? (https://web.archi
| ve.org/web/20201018122643if_/https://github...) If so, that's a
| real shame, I had an open PR on youtube_dl and even though I
| still have the code locally, I would've liked to keep the PR
| conversation as it had some really helpful feedback and a bunch
| of people that were potentially interested in my feature.
| cuckgangster5 wrote:
| Fuck riaa, I'm going to open an offshore youtube-dl, and another
| one: a decentralised and blockchain hosted based youtube-dl. Good
| luck.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Your weekly reminder that
|
| 1. You should not have your development process on a centralized
| platform, at least not if you're doing anything that smells of
| copyright issues
|
| 2. If you do host on a centralized platform, have regular,
| decentralized backups of code and issue tracking.
|
| 3. Also, avoid US-centric hosting for this kind of thing. But
| really, refer to 1.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > at least not if you're doing anything that smells of
| copyright issues
|
| Or lets people communicate. Or broadcasts news. Or can filter
| messages or news. Or directly applies encryption to anything.
| Or is related to accounting. Or can be indirectly linked to
| health services. Or, well, you get the idea.
| Deely123123 wrote:
| Should we count country and government as 'centalized
| platform'?
| whatsmyusername wrote:
| This will do nothing. The tool will instantly be hosted outside
| the US. Even if the developer is American it's just going to get
| instantly scooped by someone else.
| grawprog wrote:
| So why does the Recording Industry Association of _America_ get
| to decide whether a tool for downloading content on a service
| that is produced by people around the world and released under
| many different licenses exists or not?
|
| The RIAA and America in general has no right to police the rest
| of the world.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Quite obviously, because the developers decided to host their
| code there.
|
| If they hosted it somewhere else, there would be different laws
| restricting how people all over the world use it.
| grawprog wrote:
| What is the percentage of content hosted on youtube actually
| under control of the RIAA vs other content? If less than the
| majority of content on youtube is theirs, what gives them the
| right to have a tool removed for downloading content from a
| service that's not theirs and which they don't own the
| majority of the hosted content?
|
| Why does the tool being hosted on an American website make
| any difference?
|
| YouTube's content doesn't all belong to them, they don't even
| own the majority of the content on there and a huge number of
| users and creators on youtube do not live in or fall under
| American jurisdiction which means neither does the content
| they create, so again, why should the RIAA have the ability
| to do this?
| fireattack wrote:
| Because GitHub is also American?
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Time to upload youtube-dl-legal a computer program created for
| the express purpose of downloading _only_ videos with permissible
| licenses. The readme shall note that any use of youtube-dl-legal
| to download illegal videos is expressly forbidden and even
| thinking about using it in this way is thoughtcrime of the most
| serious degree.
| dang wrote:
| All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this
| thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or
| click here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| This is the first time I've read a DMCA notice that also
| references EU Directives and German law too (admittedly it's a
| thin note saying it's materially equivalent to U.S.C.). Is that
| even meaningful in a DMCA takedown notice?
| varispeed wrote:
| It is like your abusive partner brings up all the things they
| think you did wrong when they don't have any logical argument.
| ferdek wrote:
| I believe the way you put it describes this part in the DMCA
| takedown notice the best way possible. Bringing up European
| laws on intellectual property and mixing it with US
| "copyright" is comical to me, especially after reading this
| [0] article on French law recently:
|
| > France doesn't have copyright. Sorry for US readers, your
| "copyright" is nonsense that doesn't apply here, though the
| word "copyright" can be seen misused verbatim once in a
| while.
|
| I believe this interpretation of "copyright" is all similar
| around Europe. US copyright law is all about "right to make
| copies", be it software or music/video and it just doesn't
| make any sense on the other side of the globe.
|
| In the country where I live I can purchase a music or video
| file and legally make unlimited copies for my personal use.
| It is also legal to download it from any other source as long
| as I can prove that I paid for it some time ago in the past.
| Torrents are illegal as the protocol forces me to share the
| file, and sharing part is illegal. Downloading is fine xD.
|
| [0] https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-
| lice...
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Torrents are illegal
|
| I assume this only applies to "copyrighted" content? Is it
| illegal to torrent a Linux distro or some such thing?
|
| Either way, this seems much more reasonable than the US's
| current system.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The youtube cipher has probably not been tested in US courts as
| an "effective measure" so they are demonstrating that other
| reasonable courts, interpreting a materially equivalent statute
| have agreed it was an effective measure.
|
| You see similar things with state laws. If say Wisconsin and
| California have a very similar statute, and Wisconsin has
| precedent but California does not, the Wisconsin precedent is
| not binding, but is persuasive for a judge in California.
| varispeed wrote:
| What if I remember the song I listened to on YouTube and I can
| remember any copyrighted material? Are they going to serve me
| with DMCA to disable part of my brain? These organisations are
| ridiculous.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's pretty stupid. You don't takedown technologies that could
| be used maliciously or we wouldn't have anything.
|
| I'm worried about Newpipe now, it's been a life changer.
| ohyash wrote:
| Not just users, this is a good nightmare for a lot of projects
| that were relying on yt-dl (maybe for other features than
| downloading)
|
| And even a lot of unofficial libraries that allowed easier yt
| access. Dead in a go.
|
| Do we have a cli alternative that does everything of yt-dl except
| the video download part?
| mikece wrote:
| Perhaps it's time to take a closer look at projects like Fossil
| that combine distributed version control with wiki and issues
| tracker built in. If the devs behind youtube-dl were using Fossil
| then picking up right where the DMCA leaves them is no sweat.
|
| https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
| m4rtink wrote:
| Pagure is a git forge you can self host, where every repo
| contains not just project source code but also all related
| metadata (wiki, issues, etc.): https://pagure.io/pagure
|
| This makes it very easy to backup and move all project data as
| needed. In comparison most other forges hold project metadata
| in an instance wide database, making it much harder to extract
| & import when needed.
| ddavis wrote:
| This is really dumb. By the logic of the letter all that needs to
| be done is change the README file.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| Have they countered the claim per DMCA? So much ink spilled on
| this but there's a process to fight erroneous removals like this.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Is there still no safe alternative to GitHub?
| Aeolun wrote:
| I don't follow, the argument seems to be along the lines of:
|
| Guns can be used to shoot people, they're explicitly advertised
| as being for shooting people, shooting people is a crime. We
| request you stop selling guns.
|
| It's all just a tad misplaced.
| krob wrote:
| I think that they should update the readme and rebase the history
| and eliminate any references to the original copyrighted material
| of the readme file. possibly even making a request of GitHub to
| help them clean the repo or evidence of any logging information
| with regard to the copyrighted content. I think it would be
| relatively easy to argue that a web browser would be guilty of
| every single little thing that can be done through YouTube DL
| binary in the right hands. The only copyrightable information
| that YouTube - DL offers is an instruction set or a direct
| correlation to the fact that they can use this tool to do some
| things that are implicitly prohibited.
| jaspergilley wrote:
| Ok, so who's building a distributed, cryptographic, uncensorable
| version of GitHub?
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| IMO, Git+blockchain is a pretty good match on paper.
| jitendrac wrote:
| +1, This was the first thing came in mind after reading the
| article.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Keybase, outside of the distributed bit along with the question
| of their future, provides zero-knowledge git repositories
| (they've literally got no idea what is in your repositories,
| including metadata).
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I doubt any of Keybase's features from flailing around to see
| what will stick will last much longer now that they've been
| bought by Zoom.
| Avamander wrote:
| It's on life-support, yes.
|
| Incredibly sad, it did IM very well and on top of it all,
| it had a bunch of very innovative features. And no, nothing
| really competes with it.
| rektide wrote:
| https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent/ was building a p2p git.
|
| https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed is a github alike that is
| federated via ActivityPub. this distributes content to a bunch
| of servers, but it is not cryptographic, not meant to be
| censorship-resistant. i think this could be layered in to
| ActivityPub, particularly by making use of Signed HTTP
| Exchanges to verify content origin, & then you'd still need a
| way to find alive hosts.
| dakron wrote:
| +1
| erk__ wrote:
| This is not a new thing, DMCA was also used to take down specific
| plugins on Streamlink (tool to download livestreams)
|
| https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/1493
| vernie wrote:
| Ha I'd nearly forgotten about the RIAA, thanks for reminding me
| to re-up my EFF donation.
| shiado wrote:
| The "under penalty of perjury" part of DMCA has always been
| fascinating to me. Has there ever been a single case of this
| being enforced against inappropriate DMCA takedowns? What's next?
| DMCA against Intel for making a chip that can facilitate
| copyright infringement? Maybe a power company for providing power
| to the machine that could do it?
| keyme wrote:
| How is this not perjury again? They need to be punished for this
| harshly.
| larrik wrote:
| What about this is perjury? The readme actually did encourage
| downloading copyrighted material...
| 15155 wrote:
| Great! Then they should have sued the responsible party.
| Circumvention devices are not something the quintessential
| "DMCA takedown" process allows for or covers: these claims
| need to go to court where an injunction may be granted.
| chrisshroba wrote:
| How is this perjury? No one's under oath.
| xxpor wrote:
| the DMCA makes false notices punishable by perjury iirc
| chjj wrote:
| DMCA takedowns are filed under penalty of perjury:
|
| "Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is
| authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on
| matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings,
| audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their
| copyrights and common law rights on the Internet."
| djsumdog wrote:
| I think you'd need to find evidence they intentionally
| launched this complaint with bad faith, which would require
| a discovery process.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Perjury may or may not be the right term here, but it's
| definitely bad faith. EU and German legal definitions hold no
| weight on a US law. The repo contains no copyrighted
| material.
| 15155 wrote:
| More importantly: they are not the copyright owners of the
| content being removed.
|
| The DMCA doesn't magically give you the right to file
| "takedown requests" for circumvention devices: as stated
| elsewhere in this thread, they must sue in an appropriate
| United States venue.
|
| This filing is absolutely in bad faith and the preparing
| attorney should actually face professional censure.
|
| Perjury?
|
| > Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is
| authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on
| matters involving the infringement of their sound
| recordings, audiovisual works and images, including
| enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the
| Internet.
|
| Absolutely none of these things are applicable to this
| case.
| [deleted]
| vermooten wrote:
| To misquote Richard E Grant: Let the forking begin!
| rgovostes wrote:
| YouTube-dl is a great tool that I've found use for a dozen times,
| and not once to download music or music videos. (Note that it
| works on sites beyond YouTube.) This takedown interferes with a
| number of legitimate uses that are completely independent of the
| RIAA's objectives.
| snuxoll wrote:
| It's also a valuable tool for making fair use of content from
| YouTube without further degrading quality with an additional
| re-encoding further ruining quality. Of course, little surprise
| the RIAA would ever admit these tools could be used for
| anything but piracy.
| FactCore wrote:
| I think a rebrand would and a healthy amount of not-
| with-a-10-foot-pole-itis in their attitude towards any mention
| of youtube or music downloading would be helpful. Like a secret
| menu item at a resturaunt you _could_ use <generic>-dl to
| download youtube videos, but don't specifically endorse it.
| mikece wrote:
| Agreed. Once I discovered that "it also works outside of
| YouTube" when I want to archive something I'll just point it at
| a page and set it loose. It's also handy for archiving an
| entire podcast by feeding it only the RSS feed URL and turning
| it loose.
| musicale wrote:
| Why do I always find out about cool and useful things as soon as
| they are about to be shut down? ;-(
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| Isn't there a 1st-amendment exception for code? The code isn't
| violating any copyright.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I remember books (with the code inside) being used as a
| workaround for cryptography export controls.
|
| I wonder if the same could apply here ( _if_ this notice holds
| up to begin with), either as a book with code, or as a book
| with _instructions_ in English language that are equivalent to
| what the code does.
| _underfl0w_ wrote:
| This is a very underrated workaround. I had no idea this was
| used.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| A book. Or any other medium of expression protected by 1st
| amendment, such as t-shirt [1], poetry [2], music [3]. And
| more broadly, any way of encoding a number in an artform
| via steganography [4].
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-
| shirt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku [3]
| https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/138581-decss-midi/ [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
| dfsegoat wrote:
| Funny this happens right as everyone is scrambling to save JRE
| episodes, before he goes to Spotify.
| baldfat wrote:
| I warned everyone The Fight Club Rule needed to be in effect.
| There is no Youtube-dl
| SoylentYellow wrote:
| The only way to fight DMCA abuse is through a lawsuit. Hopefully
| they setup a legal fund, because I would certainly donate.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Who is the defendant here? Do they have resources to take this to
| court? If not, is there any movement on raising a legal defense
| fund and finding competent counsel? Anyone from the ACLU team
| here, and interested in weighing in or at least bringing this to
| your leadership for consideration?
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I would be willing to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to
| support any defence effort. Is the EFF involved?
| codecamper wrote:
| fork
| bonsi wrote:
| Its quite irrelevant - seems like "forbidding knifes because they
| can be used as a weapon" or "banning port scanners because of
| security reasons".
| boogies wrote:
| Hope this motivates a few more free software devs to move away to
| a free host, at least apart from GH mirrors for exposure.
|
| IUUC importing this to GitLab would have taken ~1/2dozen clicks
| and saved the open issues, etc.?
| topkai22 wrote:
| GitLab also has to comply with DMCA complaints. A quick search
| brought up their procedure:
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/opera...
|
| They'll still take down a repo and block the user if it is
| hosted. And self hosting something isn't free, plus quite
| possibly puts more legal exposure on the team.
|
| This isn't a problem with technologies or the platform. There
| fundamentally needs to be a narrowing of DMCA, a presumption of
| innocence rather than guilt, and penalties for issuing
| unjustified takedowns.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| What about https://sr.ht?
| jefftk wrote:
| In general, general purpose hosts are going to want you to
| fight your own legal battles.
| boogies wrote:
| But ~anyone can host it.
|
| Re: your edits, yes, DMCA reform is also important, and quite
| arguably more so. But decentralizing from GitHub would still
| slow takedowns down, and have other benefits.
| weyland wrote:
| So, are they going to also issue a takedown for YouTube Premium
| next? Premium allows you to watch/listen without ads and also
| allows you to download videos for offline use. If I pay for
| YouTube Premium, there should be no problem with me using
| youtube-dl to timeshift the content I've already paid for. It's
| no different than using a DVR to record a show off a cable
| channel I pay to subscribe to.
| weyland wrote:
| Really, the RIAA should be going after YouTube for better
| remuneration, rather than going after youtube-dl. Unless I'm
| missing something, they get paid no matter whether the view
| comes from a browser user-agent or youtube-dl user-agent. How
| is this any different than recording a song off the radio,
| which is, AFAIK, legal under fair use?
| reggieband wrote:
| It is a bit of a tough question. How would I feel about someone
| borrowing a book from a library and then photocopying it to keep
| a local copy? If the intent was to re-distribute then I would not
| feel comfortable allowing it. However, if the proposed remedy was
| to ban personal ownership of photocopiers I would not even
| consider that a valid approach. But would I expect I could keep
| my own photocopied version instead of paying retail price for the
| book? And what if a purpose built photocopier was designed and
| marketed for the express purpose of photocopying books from the
| library?
|
| My personal feeling, and obviously not a legal opinion or even
| morally infallible in any sense, is that storing a local copy of
| digital content that has been consumed should be allowed. Where
| it becomes grey (or my feeling tends towards disallowing) is if I
| share or re-broadcast that content in any form.
|
| That is, I feel the DMCA is in the wrong here. Unless they can
| prove intent to re-distribute it feels wrong that they can ban my
| ability to maintain a copy for myself. I believe it ought to be a
| right to store such content locally.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Aren't books kinda a special case ? Given all the past (and
| even current!) cases of censorship and book burning, shouldn't
| we strive to never allow that ever again and to protects books
| for future generations ?
|
| Finally we have a way to preserve books in perfect form forever
| digitally yet people somehow try to shackle this new technology
| with paper book technology limitations. The same limitations
| that coat us so much ideas, knowledge and stories as books
| would burn, rot or turn to dust.
|
| Frankly any form of technology trying to prevent digital book
| distribution and archiving really is a digital equivalent of
| the inquisition book burning (or helping make that happen
| again).
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > Aren't books kinda a special case ?
|
| What is the fundamental difference between a book and a video
| that would make books a special case? Yes, they were around
| earlier, and yes, that history has shown what can happen if
| we start censoring expression. But that's not unique to
| books, and the exact same reasoning applies to video in the
| current world.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I agree with your moral analysis here, and that the prohibited
| thing should be the distribution of protected IP, not simply
| retaining a copy of something you already had rights to view
| (which I think there is substantial precedent for).
|
| This is the big problem with the DMCA. It shortcuts the messy
| dirty work of dealing with IP violations, to the benefit of
| large corporations and the detriment of individuals. The former
| engage in rampant abuse of their powers under the DMCA,
| apparently without any fear of significant consequences. It's
| just another example of the degree to which large corporations
| own America.
| vaccinator wrote:
| Mix tapes of copyright content are legal... not sure why
| youtube-dl you be illegal even if only used to copy copyright
| content
| Thorentis wrote:
| While photocopying books for distribution is against the law, I
| disagree that it should be against the law.
|
| If 3 people all borrow the same book sequentially then it's
| fine. If one person borrow it, photocopies it twice to share
| with two others, then they've broken the law. And yet nobody in
| either case has made more or less money.
|
| I am in favor of copyright law that prevents _profiting_ from
| another person 's work, but not against copying. Once your idea
| is public knowledge, there is no reason for it not to spread
| freely given how easy it is to transmit information now.
| reggieband wrote:
| > Once your idea is public knowledge, there is no reason for
| it not to spread freely given how easy it is to transmit
| information now.
|
| This treads into territory I feel is grey. I imagine the
| complex case where I sell some creative content (e.g. a pdf,
| audio file or video). You pay me for access to this content
| and download it. I grant that you ought to be able to retain
| a local copy of that content for so long as you wish.
|
| Then you create freecontent.com and publish it. You don't put
| ads on it, you don't sell it - you simply make it available
| for free at some URL without my express permission. In a
| world where that is legal, I feel it would materially harm my
| ability to earn from content I create. I have a hard time
| supporting that even though I am sympathetic to the idea that
| information ought to spread freely.
| Thorentis wrote:
| > I feel it would materially harm my ability to earn from
| content I create
|
| Got any data to back up this feeling? I've seen plenty of
| cases when content creators have had big breaks due to
| their content being made freely available. If people love
| the work, they'll support the creator. This modern trend of
| needing to pay before you even know if you love the work is
| an inversion of what has happened in history, to our
| detriment.
| reggieband wrote:
| > This modern trend of needing to pay before you even
| know if you love the work
|
| How modern do you mean? It seems to me that I pay for a
| movie ticket before I sit down in the theatre and watch
| it (trailer not withstanding). Same is true for plays and
| operas which preceded that. I would pay for a book before
| reading it (cover excerpt not withstanding). In fact, I'm
| trying to think of any media that I would consume before
| I paid.
|
| > Got any data to back up this feeling?
|
| Meh, we're only going to throw anecdotes back and forth.
| I recall bands like Radiohead and comedians like Luis
| C.K. experimenting with "pay what you want" ideas. I
| would suppose the fact that didn't catch on (outside of
| humble bundle charity type things) would be evidence that
| it didn't work for a large enough segment of creators.
|
| Also, it isn't like RIAA members are allergic to money. I
| mean, if there was any reasonable evidence that free
| sharing of content resulted in profits that are equal or
| greater (or even viable) rationality suggests that they
| would embrace it.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I mean it's not the best setup, but what else do you suggest?
| This was meant for protecting income of authors while not
| being too inconvenient for most users. Netflix primary model
| is this and it is working great for them and users. Many
| people do share the account but it does add some
| inconvenience that only some maximum number of people can
| watch at the same time, making people get subscription.
| jdashg wrote:
| Your example is a case where piracy had no profit impact, but
| it's not the general case.
|
| The books are priced in part based on assumptions about how
| many people can read them over time. A book at a library can
| probably only be read by ~20 people a year. If 200 people a
| year want to read it, the library needs ten books. But, if we
| were free to post the scans online, the price per book would
| need to be astronomically higher.
|
| While the usual naive extrapolations of MSRP-times-pirated-
| copies is _also_ wrong, allowing people to freely and at-will
| render others ' work unprofitable is a subversion of the
| purpose of copyright: To ensure that the creation of works is
| be profitable enough to pursue.
|
| If someone wanted their work to be in the public domain, they
| could so choose.
| Thorentis wrote:
| > render others' work unprofitable
|
| Can you support the claim that creative work becomes
| unprofitable when copies are made freely available, but the
| option to support the creator still exists?
| tlburke wrote:
| I don't think anybody really disagrees that redistribution is a
| copyright violation and the youtube-dl software doesn't provide
| any facilities for uploading or re-broadcasting content. This
| takedown is completely frivilous.
| 02020202 wrote:
| in other words, the data that you download from the network
| called internet does not belong to you. THE DATA ITSELF.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I feared this day for a long time. Yet I am still disappointed
| that it had come.
|
| I wonder if the project can defend itself?
| maxo133 wrote:
| Isn't DMCA working the way that if you disagree with dmca
| takedown and fill certain form, the side asking to take down
| content (RIAA) needs to get court order?
|
| That's the way how it works with google search.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Made a torrent of the latest version from pypi. Hope it works. ma
| gnet:?xt=urn:btih:da76788b4d05583f8a3a7ed60f136c5647daa113&dn=you
| tube%5Fdl-2020.9.20.tar.gz&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bittorrent.am%
| 2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fopen.acgtracker.com%3A1096%2Fannounce&
| tr=http%3A%2F%2Fretracker.krs-
| ix.ru%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.com%3A2710%2Fannounce
|
| Edit: NVM. Getting nowhere with setting that up.
| CivBase wrote:
| Is there anything stopping someone from creating a new youtube-
| dl repo on GitHub with the README examples in question removed?
|
| On that note... how do you actually remove copyrighted content
| from a git repo? Even if you fixed the problem on the HEAD of
| the master branch, it would still exist in the version history.
| Drdrdrq wrote:
| It can be done, the search keywords are "git rewrite
| history".
| alias_neo wrote:
| Git history, just like human history, can be rewritten, if
| you only know how.
|
| (It gets a bit harder of it's cryptographically signed)
|
| EDIT: To whomever is downvoting, I'm not making a remark
| about some specific event, is a tongue in cheek poke at
| "history is written by the Victor". Chill.
| tgbugs wrote:
| This should serve as an example to people who want (for example)
| the GNU project to relax their contributor copyright assignment
| practices. It only takes a single moment of complacency and the
| vultures will swoop in. In this case it was because of sloppiness
| around which urls were used in a demo. Yeah, all urls are the
| same to the guy who is building a url slurping service (which is
| why the take down will likely be defeated), but there is an
| entire profession dedicated to nothing but nit picking, loophole
| hunting, and general levels of pedantry that we have just come to
| call it lawyering. Layers are like cliffs or handguns. Stay as
| far away from them as possible, they are facts of life, but you
| really don't want to have anything to do with them unless you
| have no other option.
| lousken wrote:
| anyone hosting mirror?
| nguyenkien wrote:
| https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
|
| Or download from
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co...
| codecamper wrote:
| gitlab ftw
| trhway wrote:
| can RIAA be hit back? - to me it looks like the RIAA actions to
| take down software intimidate the authors of the software and
| obstructs the authors from exercising and enjoying of the
| copyright of their software.
| [deleted]
| aestetix wrote:
| https://www.cryptocats.me is now uploading the source code of
| youtube-dl to the gpg keyservers.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| RIAA should take example from hip hop artists. Instead of
| worrying about people copying their songs they just talk over the
| entire piece
| kazinator wrote:
| Can someone PM me the location of a repo that still has this up
| somewhere? I might be able to clone it and host it.
| openfuture wrote:
| It would be interesting to see who added the testcase that has
| the copyrighted video. Maybe honest mistake, maybe it was
| intentional to kill the project.
| brink wrote:
| Is there a decentralized version control system solution out
| there to host projects like this?
| fenwick67 wrote:
| Yes, it's called Git.
| sschueller wrote:
| This is such a snark reply, you know exact that git and
| github are not the same thing.
|
| Discovery and issue management is important and is not part
| of git.
| jackbravo wrote:
| That would be https://www.fossil-
| scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki a decentralized
| version control, issue management and wiki software.
|
| Discovery is not there though.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I suspect that the parent comment might have been a joke.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| how git is decentralized?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| When you clone a repo from Github, you now have locally an
| equally as valid and complete repository as Github. If you
| expose access to it over the Internet, I could clone that
| repo _from you_ , work on it, and send patches _to you_.
| Etc.
|
| Git was designed to facilitate a network of repos. For
| better or worse, most use cases naturally gravitate towards
| a single clone as the "canonical version", and
| unfortunately we've all got too comfortable in having that
| version be owned by a third party service provider.
| canofbars wrote:
| >valid and complete repository as Github.
|
| No you don't because its missing the issue tracker which
| is one of the most important bits of data.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's not a part of the repo, though. It's a value-add
| service of some git hosting platforms, and it's entirely
| orthogonal to the repository itself.
| josteink wrote:
| For real? It's decentralized just like http, ash and email
| is decentralized.
|
| It's a protocol. You can use it against any target you
| like.
| lucb1e wrote:
| When people say decentralized they mean something like
| bittorrent or ipfs, often as opposed to http. Saying http
| is decentralized is... stretching the definition. With
| this logic a USB cable is decentralized because "you can
| use it against any target you like". USB mass storage
| dead drop devices can be connected to by anyone. And USB
| "is a protocol", just like the examples you mentioned.
| But I doubt anyone would claim USB is decentralized.
|
| Though git is also not really what people would usually
| mean by decentralized (as it doesn't, by itself, try to
| connect to a pool of servers, DHT network, or something
| like that), it's definitely closer to it than http.
|
| I'm also not sure "for real?" helps the conversation.
| fenwick67 wrote:
| You are conflating decentralized and distributed.
| BitTorrent is distributed, HTTP is decentralized.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Distributed:
|
| > having at least some of the processing done by the
| individual workstations and having information shared by
| and often stored at the workstations
|
| Decentralized:
|
| > the dispersion or distribution of functions and powers
|
| (Both from Merriam Webster)
|
| BitTorrent definitely fits the distributed definition (as
| you said), but whether HTTP is decentralized depends on
| how you view it. Yes, there can be more than one HTTP
| server, but again, there is more than one USB cable and I
| wouldn't call that decentralized. HTTP doesn't distribute
| the functions and powers between the client and the
| server (the two parties in any HTTP request): the client
| can hardly serve the response and the server can hardly
| issue a request. But it does distribute functions and
| powers between multiple servers because there isn't one
| global HTTP server or party that serves the Internet (now
| that would be a scary thought--looking at you,
| CloudFlare).
|
| So it depends a bit on the explanation of that
| definition.
|
| I think what I said before might be right: it's
| "stretching" the definition (interpreting it in a way
| that includes this). I can certainly see where you're
| coming from (anyone can host their own HTTP server just
| like anyone can host their own email or git server or
| bittorrent node) but it's not really how the word is
| usually used. But perhaps we use it wrong, because it
| does seem like a useful distinction to make (a
| centralized (proprietary) game server vs. a decentralized
| protocol like HTTP vs. a distributed protocol like
| BitTorrent).
| lucb1e wrote:
| Legitimate question, as most people see this as hosted on a
| server somewhere and your client doesn't sync with other
| clients... usually!
|
| You do, in fact, have a client capable of working without a
| central server. It's tedious but sending patches over email
| is definitely one way to make it work without relying on a
| single system. You can also have and push to or fetch from
| multiple servers with your client, which can be other
| developer's own servers, or a server reachable over Tor as
| a hidden service, etc. It's very flexible if you want to go
| that path.
| Apes wrote:
| git was designed to be used decentrally. Every clone of a
| git repo is technically an equally valid source of truth
| for the repository. In practice though, pretty much every
| project has a single git repo that is used to synchronize
| all the other copies of the repo, because it's much easier
| to coordinate.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Git is kind of the archetypal DVCS:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control
| [deleted]
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| I know of two such projects from HN: GitTorrent and Radicle.
| The former seems abandoned but the latter is still being
| developed.
|
| Radicle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916
|
| Gittorrent:
| https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I frequently use YouTube-dl, and have never once used it to
| download music videos and sound recordings owned by member
| companies of the RIAA.
| mikece wrote:
| This is like issuing a DMCA takedown on Microsoft Word because
| it's _possible_ to use it as a means to defame someone.
| bkmeneguello wrote:
| I think a better analogy is to forbid an OCR software because
| they COULD be used to reproduce a book.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, anyone using it to save books for future generations
| instead having them rot to nothing should burn in hell!
| (sarcasm)
| Avamander wrote:
| I have kept an eye on a massive amount of content and it's
| truly horrifying how much content is lost each month. It's
| not even clear violation of copyright, it's just that
| nobody small has the energy to fight for fair use.
|
| There should be no DMCA, all ligitation should cost the
| person suing a percent of income. The tyranny big players
| have is disgusting.
| amatecha wrote:
| Web browsers download the video too. Take down web browsers!
| Heck, outlaw operating systems! Hard drives are infringing on our
| right to profit!
|
| ... Actually, I should stop giving them ideas for their next
| takedown notices...
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/github.com-ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-...
|
| if nothing else, today i finally actually _used_ a bundle file:
| git clone ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-_2020-09-28_19-41-32.bundle
| youtube-dl
| fivre wrote:
| Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to
| address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general)
| copyright and licensing in the US?
|
| The DMCA is over 2 decades old, and seemingly nothing useful has
| come up since. The current system seems to do not much other than
| provide a big stick for the RIAA and MPAA to wield whenever they
| get bored and try to extract rent using law that still seems
| stuck in some mire of player piano era logic. The last sane
| system I encountered was when I was doing college radio, where
| you had a license to play music, were required to log what music
| you played, and were assured that some clearinghouse would sort
| out the royalties that needed paying out of the aggregate license
| fees.
|
| There seems to be mass confusion over what's legal on modern
| services like Twitch, where music is used in the same spirit as
| radio (background music chosen at the whim of the DJ/streamer),
| but isn't legal because it runs up against licensing schemes
| designed for including music in TV and film productions with
| massive budgets.
|
| There doesn't seem to be any clear way to handle shit as any sort
| of small content creator, as the rightsholders seem to want to
| preserve some weird fantasy land where they're both entitled to
| complex negotiated rights deals (which make sense if you're say,
| some massive entity a la NBC, and want to include music in a new
| big budget show) while also not providing anything for the rest
| of society (if you're not NBC- or CBS-sized, the people who
| negotiate rights contracts won't give you the time of day). If
| you're not one of the mammoth-class media conglomerates, your
| options appear to be "do not use music ever" or "use music
| casually, and then be on the receiving end of a massive legal
| bludgeon". You can't get the time (or music) of day, but if you
| do somehow manage to get it, then you _do_ get the time of day,
| but in the form of massive retroactive fees or whatever that you
| "should" have paid had the licensing cthulu been willing to
| engage with you before you determined that the rightsholders
| weren't interested in dealing with you.
|
| Right ol' kafkaesque nightmare, it is.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| The DMCA was _intended_ to give large content publishers a big
| stick to extract rent from third parties without needing to do
| any work. It is functioning as intended and is very unlikely to
| be reformed to favor the public interest.
|
| If anything, the next DMCA will be tilted even further towards
| publisher interests. The latest EU publisher payout copyright
| 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of
| buildings and skylines -- is the most likely model for the next
| US copyright 'reform' measure.
|
| Congress only passes laws that large piles of money pay for[0],
| so the only prospect of copyright _reform_ is if someone puts
| up a billion dollars in campaign contributions (bribes).
| Further money may be needed to re-stack the judiciary to ensure
| a reform will survive the wide-eyed fanatics on the USSC. This
| scenario is deeply unlikely as piles of money large enough to
| afford to spend a billion dollars purchasing legislation are
| very happy with the law as it stands.
|
| [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
| core/c...
| int_10h wrote:
| I'm not saying anything but there's a gitlab source clone of this
| on debian's repo :) https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl
| cute_boi wrote:
| Even Meme will be DMCAed in future. Future is dark :(
| lelandbatey wrote:
| The actual content of the legal argument being made by the RIAA
| in this and associated documents is lying by omission at best,
| and arguably is straight up perjury.
|
| The only _concrete_ circumvention they level at youtube-dl is
| that it "circumvents YouTube's rolling cipher". I looked into
| this more, and before I go into how totally bulshit it is that
| they've apparently conned judges into believing this, you should
| read their full accusation (or just read the full DMCA letter
| from the RIAA): For further context, please see
| the attached court decision from the Hamburg Regional
| Court that describes the technological measure at issue (known as
| YouTube's "rolling cipher"), and the court's determination that
| the technology employed by YouTube is an effective
| technical measure within the meaning of EU 1 See
| https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
| dl/blob/master/README.md#readme. and German law,
| which is materially identical to Title 17 U.S.C. SS1201 of the
| United States Code. The court further determined that the service
| at issue in that case unlawfully circumvented YouTube's
| rolling cipher technical protection measure.2 The
| youtube-dl source code functions in a manner essentially
| identical to the service at issue in the Hamburg Regional Court
| decision. As there, the youtube-dl source code available on
| Github (which is the subject of this notice) circumvents
| YouTube's rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to
| copyrighted audio files, in violation of YouTube's
| express terms of service,3 and in plain violation of Section 1201
| of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.
| SS1201.
|
| So that's what the RIAA is saying that youtube-dl is doing.
| However, they're referencing a document that I _presume_ was
| attached to their original email, the document from the Hamburg
| Regional Court, but we don't have that email, as Github didn't
| publish that document for us to see.
|
| So I went looking, and it turns out that the RIAA has used this
| exact same excuse to go after some other people, their documents
| are available, and we can see more of what they wrote. I'm
| referencing this[1] document which I found through this[0] blog
| post about a 2016 case where the RIAA went after an online
| service called TYMP3. Here are the links, and here's what the
| RIAA said:
|
| [0] -
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160927/17062135646/can-s...
|
| [1] -
| https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3114545/YTMP3-Com...
| < The following is found on page 8 of the PDF linked above >
| 39. Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on that basis allege
| as follows: YouTube has adopted and implemented
| technological measures to control access to content
| maintained on its site and to prevent or inhibit downloading,
| copying, or illicit distribution of that content.
| YouTube maintains two separate URLs for any given video
| file: one URL, which is visible to the user, is for the
| webpage where the video playback occurs, and one URL, which is
| not visible to the user, is for the video file itself.
| The second URL is generated using a complex (and
| periodically changing) algorithm - known as a "rolling cipher" -
| that is intended to inhibit direct access to the underlying
| YouTube video files, thereby preventing or inhibiting the
| downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files.
| < further down, on page 12, they lay out their accusation >
| Among other things, Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on
| that basis allege, that YTMP3 employs a means to
| circumvent the YouTube rolling cipher technology
| described above, and other technological means that YouTube
| employs to protect content on its site.
|
| So, let's go see what the Youtube-dl source code actually is
| doing. The tl;dr version is that youtube does some slight
| rearranging of the characters in the URL of the remote resource,
| but they also supply you with the JS code to un-arrange that code
| into the actual working "signature" which you can use to request
| the video from youtube. So youtube-dl downloads the rearranged
| URL, and the JS that youtube provides, and uses a Python
| implementation of the JS interpreter to run YOUTUBE'S OWN JS THAT
| YOUTUBE SENT US IN CLEARTEXT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE
| VIDEO. See the source code (hosted on gitlab for now, hopefully
| that stays up):
|
| https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub...
|
| So to summarize, youtube creates two URLs: one that's a public
| video URL, and one that's the URL to the actual video content.
| The URL to the video content changes on a rolling basis, and is
| slightly rearranged. All that's true. However, what the RIAA is
| avoiding saying, and which completely changes the context of this
| discussion is:
|
| YOUTUBE SENDS YOU BOTH URLS IN CLEARTEXT, AND INCLUDES THE CODE
| FOR HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO, SO YOU AND YOUR WEB BROWSER CAN
| DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS WITHOUT USING ANY ENCRYPTION/DECODING.
|
| So when a judge asks "how is it that you're getting around this
| 'rolling cipher' to access the video?" all you have to say is _"
| Youtube told me where to download the video, so I followed
| Youtube's instructions and downloaded it from the URL that
| Youtube gave me."_
|
| Frankly, I'm amazed that any judge, or any lawyer, would ever lay
| out or _believe_ such _bare faced lies_ as is being spouted by
| the RIAA in this document.
|
| FUCK THE RIAA
| White_Wolf wrote:
| It's still up on gitee
|
| Warning: do a diff against the last archive.org copy to make sure
| it's clean.
| pengaru wrote:
| Considering youtube-dl isn't doing anything a web browser
| accessing these sites can't do, essentially serving as a headless
| web browser with a convenient CLI, I don't see how this could
| possibly have a leg to stand on.
|
| It's like serving Mozilla a DMCA takedown for FireFox.
|
| I however welcome the highly visible reminder that github should
| only be used as a mirror at most.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| Someone should issue DMCAs for the Chromium and Firefox repos.
| Fight fire with fire.
| Raymonf wrote:
| That is extremely illegal.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Apparently not, since people get away with sending
| fraudulent takedown requests all of the time. Now that I
| think of it, has anyone _ever_ been punished for abusing
| the DMCA?
| fenwick67 wrote:
| How is it illegal to file a DMCA takedown request if you
| believe you have legal standing to do so?
|
| EDIT: The DMCA doesn't require that you have a law degree
| to submit a takedown request, it just requires that you
| truly believe it is infringing.
| NegativeK wrote:
| There's an obvious difference between a browser that, in normal
| use, doesn't allow storing of streaming video, and a tool that
| does and isn't supported by Google at all.
|
| Yes, you can download the full video with a browser. Yes, you
| can use wget or curl to do that. But youtube-dl's community was
| dumb enough to give clear cut examples of downloading
| copywritten material, which is obviously not what the RIAA or
| probably even YouTube's lawyers want.
|
| Courts care about intent, and it's a straw man to argue that
| technical similarities mean they're half-assing their
| enforcement.
| [deleted]
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Is there a law that says https protocol has to be consumed by
| a browser?
| theobr wrote:
| This is a really sad moment for open source, especially for
| content creators and devs in media/content spaces. I've shipped
| youtube-dl for a user-facing (production) experience before. This
| sucks.
| AkumaNoTsubasa wrote:
| >Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN
| be used to download copyrighted music and videos
|
| Well, then please also Block all Browsers, SSH, Tunnel, etc. too,
| because you can use those too to easily download copyrighted
| material.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| this is honestly the first Hacker News article in a few years
| that made me yell at my computer. pure insanity.
| skottk wrote:
| Not a lawyer, software guy working in licensing & copyright for
| 20+ years. Was paid for a few years to talk about this stuff with
| tech and publishing people.
|
| They're requesting the takedown under 17 U.S. Code SS 1201 -
| Circumvention of copyright protection systems.
| [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201] It's a few
| paragraphs of the actual law at stake here. There's no much to
| it.
|
| Essentially, they're arguing that Youtube's normal stream
| distribution technology is "effectively control[ling] access to a
| work." Given 3A & B from the link above, that will take a fair
| amount of arguing - there's no encryption, there's nothing that
| requires information under the authority of the copyright holder
| (like a key) to descramble the information.
|
| Unless the repo has code that's breaking browser-based DRM, in
| which all bets are off - breaking DRM is by definition
| circumventing a technical protection. Doesn't matter if it was
| easy to break-- you break encryption, there's no more argument
| over whether you're circumventing. Decryption is right there in
| the text of the law.
|
| Github agreed to the takedown because they don't want to be
| distributing a circumvention tool, and they don't feel like going
| to court over whether this is a circumvention tool or not. There
| are a lot of repos out there, you can't go to court over every
| single one. I'd be surprised if it stayed up on GitLab for much
| more than a New York minute, either.
|
| The EFF might fight this, because there's a pretty good argument
| around the noninfringing uses; however, they also might not,
| because there's not much of an argument around whether it
| violates the Google Terms.
|
| Some us are mentioning that there are use cases for this software
| that don't infringe copyright. That goes back to Sony v
| Universal, the VCR/Betamax case, which permitted the production
| and sale of technologies with "substantial noninfringing uses."
| In the case of the VCR, the particular noninfringing use was
| time-shifting of broadcast television, taping shows to watch
| later. The noninfringing uses here are around downloading works
| that are in the public domain or Creative Commons, and definitely
| around offline use. Easily a colorable argument.
|
| The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some lines
| around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and
| Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses.
| However, both products promoted their products as offering free
| access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice
| of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may
| have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing use
| outside the trial.
|
| IOW, if you're providing a dual-use technology for noninfringing
| use that is also capable of infringing use, you absolutely cannot
| promote the infringing uses to the exclusion of others. Not only
| do you draw unwanted attention to yourself, you may actually (as
| in Napster and Grokster) invalidate the most important defense
| that you have for your activities.
| jncraton wrote:
| > The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some
| lines around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and
| Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses.
| However, both products promoted their products as offering free
| access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice
| of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may
| have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing
| use outside the trial.
|
| That's an excellent point. It seems like youtube-dl may have
| started as a tool primarily used for ripping music off YouTube,
| but it has grown into a tool that is used for so much more than
| that today (offline viewing of content, backups of freely
| licensed material, fair use such as extracting clips from
| videos, etc).
|
| Given that no one is getting sued over this, at least not yet,
| perhaps it makes sense to not fight this and simply allow
| youtube-dl as it stands to be pulled and re-imagined as a new
| piece of software that is explicitly focused on the positive
| and legal use cases. If RIAA still wants to go after that
| software, the case against it would be far weaker than the
| current product that has "YouTube" in the name and explicitly
| references ripping copyrighted music in its source code.
| dylan604 wrote:
| hold on... brew update && brew upgrade
|
| phew. i'm all good.
| olliej wrote:
| They literally recommended downloading copyrighted material,
| which seems like a beacon of "this is primarily for copyright
| infringement"
| jijji wrote:
| why would youtube-dl reference copyrighted material as examples
| in their documentation/website.... doh!
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Youtube itself should be taken down because it may be used to
| upload copyrighted content
| fandroid wrote:
| As it turns out, a few days ago, I was reminiscing with an old
| school DJ about sample-based music production. My argument was
| that all one needs is a DAW and youtube-dl. It seems that the
| timing of my argument was rather inauspicious.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Is there an alternative to github that is resistant to denial of
| service attacks^1 like this?
|
| 1: At this time this is just a baseless accusation and there are
| no repercussions to the RIAA for blatant abuse. Why wouldn't they
| simply send a takedown for anything they don't like no matter
| whether it is legal or not?
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| IANAL, but DMCA takedowns do not have "no repercussions" for
| false claims. If the DMCA takedown was actually baseless, they
| would be opening themselves up to damage liabilities, as
| specified under 17 U.S. Code SS 512 under section f[1]. This is
| different than YouTube copyright claims, which as far as I'm
| aware don't actually have any repercussions for false claims
| unless YouTube decides to take action[2], since copyright
| claims on YouTube are not DMCA takedown requests.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
|
| [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-
| lawsuit-s...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > DMCA takedowns do not have "no repercussions" for false
| claims.
|
| They mostly do.
|
| > If the DMCA takedown was actually baseless, they would be
| opening themselves up to damage liabilities, as specified
| under 17 U.S. Code SS 512 under section f[1].
|
| The basis for liability there is _knowing misrepresentation
| of infringement_. So as long as RIAA believed (and that
| belief _need not be reasonable_ ) the legal theory of
| infringement that they advanced, there's not a liability
| problem.
|
| SUre, if they misrepresented their right to act on behalf of
| the legal owners of the works they claimed were infringed by
| it, or that would be an issue, but no one even suspects that
| they are doing that.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| While this is true, I was responding to a post about
| abusing DMCA takedowns, which have the assumption that
| they're using it to knowingly misrepresent infringement.
| And even though most abusive DMCA takedowns end up without
| any counter action, the law does provide a way to fight
| them, which is the disincentive from "simply send a
| takedown for anything they don't like no matter whether it
| is legal or not"
| ohazi wrote:
| > opening themselves up to damage liabilities
|
| Courts calculate damages for fucking with an open source
| software project as basically zilch. For all intents and
| purposes, that _is_ "no repercussions" for a pile of lawyers
| like the RIAA.
|
| The damages need to be punitive.
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| Damages include legal fees in the case of DMCA.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| This is lousy! I depend on youtube-dl to archive videos for later
| use. Nothing MAFIAA would be interested in; just stuff from
| topical channels that I want to have around for personal use in
| case they get deleted.
|
| I really hope this doesn't stand, because what it's basically
| saying is that you can't even _tell_ someone how to download
| something that _might_ be copyrighted. Not only that, but this
| was brought forth by a murky technicality.
|
| Pray to god this never happens to NewPipe.
| jordigh wrote:
| I'm very scared by this. youtube-dl needs somewhat frequent
| updates as Google moves the youtube codebase around. I'm worried
| that the RIAA's next move, now that it's starting to get
| inconvenient to get youtube-dl, will be to make Youtube change in
| some way to make existing copies of youtube-dl no longer work.
|
| youtube-dl has been my primary way of getting videos since I
| learned about it. If the RIAA manages to kill it, my ability to
| partake in culture will be severely limited.
| nsgi wrote:
| Do you have some sort of RMS-style setup? If so, I'm curious
| about your reasons for that and why mainstream browsers aren't
| an option for you
| pengaru wrote:
| Not OP, but I personally use youtube-dl to retrieve videos on
| a remote server accessed via ssh, which then get downloaded
| slowly over a low bandwidth link for offline viewing at a
| later time. They may or may not get reencoded using the
| ffmpeg integration before retrieving as well.
|
| YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a slow
| link, not to mention it's incredibly obnoxious with all its
| recommendations and other unmanagable propaganda delivery.
|
| Youtube-dl's ability to retrieve titles and descriptions
| without showing me anything else and before retrieving any
| video content alone make youtube's opaque hashed URLs usable
| for me.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| > YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a
| slow link
|
| I've never used youtube-dl. How do you find the videos to
| download?
| pengaru wrote:
| Youtube links are shared everywhere, including here on
| HN.
|
| I also have a small collection of youtube channels
| bookmarked at their /videos URL, which at least doesn't
| try play any video and just gives a grid of thumbnails.
| Occasionally I'll visit those to discover new videos from
| the creators I'm interested in.
|
| This already consumes more time watching youtube content
| than I care to admit.
| agency wrote:
| Not the OP but I'm a heavy youtube-dl user. I live in a rural
| area where my only internet option is satellite (HughesNet)
| which is basically unusable for any kind of streaming media.
| I rent an office in town to do software work and use youtube-
| dl to download videos for later viewing at home.
| falsaberN1 wrote:
| This is similar to my use case as well. I just cannot watch
| a video from Youtube itself, the connection would be lost
| so many times it'd stop trying after 1% or less. The only
| solution is to painfully and slowly download it to my
| system, over time, and hope there aren't cases that destroy
| the 60% you downloaded over the last 2 days.
|
| If nothing happens to replace or reinstate youtube-dl, a
| lot of people like you and me are simply cut off from video
| content. This is pretty much terrible.
| elorant wrote:
| Comments like this in here seem out of place. We're a community
| of hackers. Just read the source and figure out how it
| downloads the videos. Next time YT changes something it'd
| probably be some query string in the url. It's not rocket
| science to download stuff from video sites.
| aeyes wrote:
| To restore your ability to partake in culture, you can use
| JDownloader.
|
| It is universal and can download from almost any media site.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Can it download from Youtube over the command line?
| Drdrdrq wrote:
| I think you have it backwards. Google is very much on the same
| side as RIAA in this case. Youtube-dl is simply too convenient
| for avoiding the ads.
| jdashg wrote:
| Does your ad blocker not already remove the ads?
| iameli wrote:
| I dunno. Every Youtuber I know makes use of Youtube-dl (or
| related projects) extensively because many of them don't
| maintain archives of their own content and Youtube's built-in
| tools for downloading stuff back from them are terrible.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| You do subject request under GDPR and they have to give you
| all your data.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| All the better for Youtube to control their content
| creators more.
| [deleted]
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm actually curious, when you run "youtube-dl --update" where
| does it update from? What domain?
|
| Trying it now results in: ERROR: can't find the
| current version. Please try again later.
|
| I'm unclear if it had always updated itself from GitHub or
| elsewhere.
| oefrha wrote:
| $ rg 'UPDATE_URL|VERSION_URL' youtube_dl/update.py
| 35: UPDATE_URL = 'https://yt-dl.org/update/' 36:
| VERSION_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'LATEST_VERSION' 37:
| JSON_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'versions.json' 46:
| newversion =
| opener.open(VERSION_URL).read().decode('utf-8').strip()
| $ curl -IL https://yt-dl.org/update/LATEST_VERSION
| HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT
| Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Location: https://ytdl-
| org.github.io/youtube-dl/update/LATEST_VERSION
| Connection: close Content-Type: text/html;
| charset=iso-8859-1 HTTP/2 404 content-type:
| text/html; charset=utf-8 server: GitHub.com etag:
| "5f777b31-239b" content-security-policy: default-src
| 'none'; style-src 'unsafe-inline'; img-src data:; connect-src
| 'self' x-github-request-id:
| 170E:2B71:1A0B5DC:1B8177E:5F933973 accept-ranges: bytes
| date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT via: 1.1 varnish
| age: 85 x-served-by: cache-hnd18722-HND x-cache:
| HIT x-cache-hits: 1 x-timer:
| S1603484104.479172,VS0,VE0 vary: Accept-Encoding
| x-fastly-request-id: a7128dab84232184052e51f07eb6263f5c88ab7e
| content-length: 9115
| crazygringo wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Well at least _if_ they can hold onto their domain, and
| then host development somewhere, they 'll maintain the
| ability to redirect updates to a new location without
| people having to manually reinstall.
| ss64 wrote:
| https://ytdl-org.github.io is currently 404
| junon wrote:
| What is `rg`? I like its output better than grep's.
| gobogobohey wrote:
| I'm a lurker, made this account just to say this:
|
| I am not using NewPipe or youtube-dl or other tools like them to
| by-pass the DRM/whatever the fuck you call this shit on "content"
| from RIAA/SuckADICKIA etc, because, let's be honest, it's
| garbage. Yeah, there you go, I said it, hate me if you want but
| be honest, it's just fucking garbage. On and on and on with
| shitty super-hero movies, that fucking tribal dance music with
| some skimpy women twerking their asses, hip-hop from mega-rich
| "stars" barely able to connect two words together but seemingly
| able to sing a whole tear-jerker about how bad they have it,
| yeah, all of that and more, GARBAGE.
|
| no. I download original content which Youtube and the rest of the
| American leeches, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on and on
| pray upon to make their money cause let's face it, that's about
| the only thing these American companies are good at doing. Making
| money. Not generating original content, not original ideas, heck,
| most of the shit they use nowadays are stuff they stole when they
| pushed other companies off the market and bought them for
| nothing. But I digress.
|
| I download them just because of retards like you RIAA, and like
| you Google/Youtube. Remember when you were threatening to ban
| hacking content because you don't like the fact that knowledge is
| the great equalizer and then you went "ha ha we were kidding"?
| Ha, ha fuck you, we have retroshares and full i2P archives of
| those videos now, thanks to you, so go fuck yourselves, yeah?
|
| I still watch them on youtube, not because I care about you
| fucking leeches, but to give some pennies to the poor fucks which
| create the content you leech on like the fucking cancer you
| people and your corporations are, but if you ever decide to take
| videos down I will have a backup and there's nothing you can do,
| so again:
|
| fuck riaa, fuck youtoube and facebook and hollywood and twerking
| garbage and pretty much 99% that comes nowadays from the country
| of the fat entitled boomers.
|
| Thank you American original content creators, software creators,
| scientists, engineers, EFF and everyone else that is trying to
| make the world a better place in spite of these worms.
| rla3rd wrote:
| and yet the code is still in pypi for any developer to use...
| fabiomaia wrote:
| Wow even release downloads were taken down $ brew
| install youtube-dl ... ==> Downloading
| https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
| dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz
| ... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 451
| Unavailable for Legal Reasons Error: Failed to download
| resource "youtube-dl" Download failed:
| https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
| dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz
| dvt wrote:
| Oh the irony of cloning a banned repo from a Chinese git
| mirror... c:\Users\david\dev\git l git
| clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git
| Cloning into 'youtube-downloader'... remote: Enumerating
| objects: 98560, done. remote: Counting objects: 100%
| (98560/98560), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100%
| (30542/30542), done. remote: Total 98560 (delta 73037),
| reused 90045 (delta 66441), pack-reused 0 Receiving
| objects: 100% (98560/98560), 49.86 MiB | 9.58 MiB/s, done.
| Resolving deltas: 100% (73037/73037), done.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| Were the developers in the habit of signing commits, or do we
| just have to assume that the gitee mirror is 100% legit?
| __s wrote:
| Cross check commit hashes:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953
| mimi89999 wrote:
| Maybe you would prefer https://github.com/rbrito/pkg-
| youtube-dl ?
| hexo wrote:
| As we can see again having github as a sole distribution
| mechanism was a bad idea. I hope they have backups and will be
| back online soon.
| toyg wrote:
| YouTube-dl is actually in pypi and other places, GitHub is not
| the sole distributor. However, it _is_ their sole development
| hub, as far as I can see, and that should change. After all,
| Git is distributed by nature. I suspect they'll have to
| investigate a bunch of those new tools that try to do issue-
| tracking on top of pure git, and the main developers will have
| to go underground. It's DeCSS all over again.
| ddingus wrote:
| Seems to me this is leading to contested cases that can be routed
| to a more corporatist friendly Supreme Court.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Also note that forking a repository on github is not enough to
| make it _your_ code.
|
| All the connected forks have also been disabled. Better to clone
| and re-push if you ask me.
| JdeBP wrote:
| RealPlayer next?
|
| "Download Web Videos" "Keep your favorite web videos safe on your
| PC by downloading them. You can save videos from popular sites in
| one click - including YouTube."
|
| * https://www.real.com/uk/realplayer
| Kenji wrote:
| This is an example of why you shouldn't use a bug tracker that
| does not store its data on machines you control.
| tbabej wrote:
| The removal of youtube-dl is a loss to the open source community.
| I hope this does not set a precedence going forward and that
| authors re-establish themselves (and the bug tracker, which had
| immense amount of information).
|
| At the same time, this lead me to browse the Github's DMCA repo,
| which has some real gems. For example, this DMCA takedown of repo
| with copied course assignment of a different student and did not
| comply with the Apache 2.0 Licence [1].
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I remember back in 2008 I read a research paper on what to
| _not_ do when publishing /advertising peer-to-peer networks in
| order to avoid stuff such as RIAA. Showing copyright-protected
| work in your website/screenshots/etc was a big thing. Sadly I
| cannot find the paper anymore and I don't remember all the
| advice :(
|
| If someone here with a good research-paper-search-fu can find
| the paper, it would help help our community a lot. All I
| remember is that it was from some peer-to-peer conference, and
| I read it in 2008.
| tbabej wrote:
| Removal of repositories like youtube-dl seems to have been
| happening for a while though, here are couple of examples:
|
| Removal of Udemy-dl (2015,2017):
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015/2015-08-12-U...
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-11-13-U...
|
| Removal of linuxacademy-dl (2018):
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2018/2018-09-24-l...
|
| Removal of Instagram-API (2020):
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-2...
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| py-kms (https://github.com/SystemRage/py-kms) was taken down
| briefly but remains up, so there is hope.
|
| These projects are just instructions, it's like selling a kit
| for a radio that is illegal to put together and use. The kit
| itself isn't illegal.
| rozab wrote:
| Seems like that student has admitted in the most public and
| irreversible way possible that they have distributed their
| coursework online, almost certainly in contravention of
| academic policy.
| kevinwang wrote:
| insane that nintendo is so litigious that they send lawyers to
| take down fan-made games meant to be patched on Ocarina of
| Time. What, is this fan game gonna detract from the valuable
| income you're making on a 22 year old game for the Nintendo
| 64?? It's at their own detriment...
|
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-0...
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/the-missing-link-is-an-impressive-an...
| umvi wrote:
| Lawyers have no sense of humor. They are like the opposite of
| hackers.
| krapp wrote:
| >Lawyers have no sense of humor. They are like the opposite
| of hackers.
|
| Although you're posting this on a forum for hackers where
| humor is considered a mortal sin.
| junon wrote:
| > I hope this does not set a precedence
|
| Psst, precedent* :) Precedence is the order of importance in
| which something occurs (e.g. operator precedence). Precedent is
| a level of standard to which a secondary action is compared.
|
| ---
|
| Also that dude's a fucking legend, DMCA takedown-ing his
| classmate.
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| How quickly does Microsoft usually HTTP Response Code 451
| (#rfc77525 [1]) sites that get DMCA notices?
|
| They acted very fast on this one.
|
| [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| This should be about impossible to enforce? Every developer and
| everyone who has ever cloned the repo has the complete source
| tree with commits. I can think of a list of countries where
| United States laws are not a concern, I imagine that shortly this
| will be one of the most distributed repositories ever.
|
| It also shows again that while free services like Github are
| convenient, and truthfully their interface is the one to beat, it
| is better to use them as a mirror of something you self host then
| the primary.
|
| Some options: (I prefer gitea - easiest to install and maintain,
| very active development community, single binary, written in Go)
|
| https://gitea.com/
|
| https://gogs.io/
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/install/
|
| https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb
| tux1968 wrote:
| It's not access to the current program that is at stake, it's
| the ongoing public updates to handle changes made by the
| Youtube site.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| Understood, just waiting to see where the devs pop up. I
| imagine that someone will help them with a DMCA counterclaim
| also. RIAA has been beaten many times, they have a long
| history of creative interpretation that the courts do not
| always agree with, and US law is only valid in the United
| States and Australia (thats a joke, but do hope they get on
| the brick and road plan or stop acting like a US colony at
| some point).
| [deleted]
| CivBase wrote:
| > this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client
| would be
|
| Why stop there? I can use my browser to illegally download
| content, so I guess we better issue a DMCA takedown that too. But
| who even needs a browser? Let's issue a takedown for the GNU
| Project while we're at it because I could use wget to do the same
| thing. In fact, I could write my own program to illegally
| download content, so we better just get rid of computers
| altogether.
|
| Stop attacking useful tools just because they can be used to do
| bad things! Youtube-dl should obviously change their README to
| get rid of the copyright-infringing example, but this DMCA
| takedown is otherwise rotten from the core.
| dang wrote:
| (This subthread was originally a reply to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872940)
| cesarb wrote:
| > Let's issue a takedown for the GNU Project while we're at it
| because I could use wget to do the same thing. In fact, I could
| write my own program to illegally download content, so we
| better just get rid of computers altogether.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (1997)
| ev1 wrote:
| I think the argument here is that explicitly, you can't with
| wget. youtube-dl specifically has circumventions for access
| controls for things like encrypted HLS, YouTube's ciphered
| player, etc.
| [deleted]
| mmaunder wrote:
| This logic could have been used to outright ban dual cassette
| tape decks in the 80s.
|
| Why not ban the pen, since it can be used to hand copy books.
| RIAA needs to stay in their lane.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Honestly we need to start hosting community repos outside of
| the United States.
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| Can't find a better source, but something like this tried to
| happen, indeed:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
|
| Upd: In another thread, the "Betamax case" was cited.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Digital Audio Tape DAT -- they tried REALLY hard to keep
| this technology out of the US market. Eventually they got a
| the authorities to impose a surcharge per blank DAT tape
| for 'lost income'.
|
| Writable CDs came soon after which was probably going to
| kill DAT market no matter what.
| ddingus wrote:
| Trivia: SGI DAT drives will read and write audio DAT.
|
| The CD drives offered "Save Track As" in the default OS.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| Since the original version of DDS tape is basically just
| DAT tapes being used to store computer data, many of the
| commercially-available DDS drives could be re-flashed to
| allow them to read DAT as well. (Re-flashing was
| necessary to remove the software restriction that
| otherwise recognised DAT tapes and refused to read them).
|
| I'm not going to post any links, but there's plenty of
| info online.
| ddingus wrote:
| Indeed. Really, I was speaking to nice, open computers.
| Did what people expected out of the box.
| lukifer wrote:
| It's kind of amazing that computing in general, and the
| internet in particular, is as open and free as it is (contrast
| with the closed end-to-end "appliance" model of gaming
| consoles, or to some extent iOS). Cory Doctorow has been
| ringing alarm bells for over a decade about both technical and
| legal efforts to end general purpose computation itself, or at
| least to make it more the exception than the norm:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
|
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
| dmos62 wrote:
| > end general purpose computation itself, or at least to make
| it more the exception than the norm
|
| I'd argue, cautiously, that general computation is already an
| exception. That's why I prefer Linux to Windows. On Linux I
| can issue a command from a general command interface (the
| CLI) to just play a video. If I only want audio, it's an
| option away. I can script things together. Most of my tools
| are interoperable. That's because I use FOSS, free protocols,
| free formats, free tech in general. Everything works together
| and everything augments each other. Windows, the popular
| workstation, is no that. It's a system of systems, where
| everything is a monolithic closed box that you can't get
| inside. It's inside your computer, you use it, but it's not
| yours. It's on loan from someone else. Interoperability is
| virtually non-existent, and there isn't such a thing as a
| usable CLI (an environment that would connect everything
| together). That's not general computing, I argue. General
| computing involves ther power to generalize, use the
| computing technology in arbitrary ways. Closed software,
| customer lock-in and all that other corporate bs is the anti-
| thesis of that.
|
| Longer rant than expected. I find it a frustrating issue.
| Mostly because I intimately feel like we're paying a very
| high price for the greed of the few.
| jrockway wrote:
| > On Linux I can issue a command from a general command
| interface (the CLI) to just play a video. If I only want
| audio, it's an option away. I can script things
| together...Windows, the popular workstation, is not that.
|
| I use the same video player on Windows that you use on
| Linux, mpv. And I have a ton of scripts I use to navigate
| my video library. Windows doesn't put any burden on apps to
| not be interoperable. Plenty of apps interoperate just
| fine.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| One thing that might be coming up is CPUs reducing the user
| capability to fully control the system (regardless of
| whether you run Linux or Windows).
|
| One such example is Intel ME. In the future, if the compute
| paradigm shifts towards something cloud-like, we might all
| be "stuck" inside an isolated Intel SGX container (or vice
| versa).
| rmrfstar wrote:
| Anyone who doesn't know much about ME should read [1].
|
| [1] https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/
| ddingus wrote:
| Licenses required for homebrew/legacy general purpose
| computers to join the network.
| eli wrote:
| DMCA is a bad law, but you'd have a harder time arguing a
| general purpose web browser meets any of the following
| conditions:
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
|
| (2)No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public,
| provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product,
| service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
|
| (A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of
| circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls
| access to a work protected under this title;
|
| (B)has only limited commercially significant purpose or use
| other than to circumvent a technological measure that
| effectively controls access to a work protected under this
| title; or
|
| (C)is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with
| that person with that person's knowledge for use in
| circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls
| access to a work protected under this title.
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's some definitions that are also relevant:
|
| (A) to "circumvent protection afforded by a technological
| measure" means avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating,
| or otherwise impairing a technological measure; and
|
| (B) a technological measure "effectively protects a right of
| a copyright owner under this title" if the measure, in the
| ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or
| otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner
| under this title.
|
| I don't believe the protections that youtube-dl works around
| qualify under the definition 1201(b)(2)(B) here, but I would
| definitely want to confer with a lawyer before posting a DMCA
| counterclaim.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're not even quoting the right section. Section 1201 is
| about circumvention tools, takedowns are Section 512.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Can you argue that youtube-dl meets any of those conditions?
|
| You can argue that youtube-dl facilitates making copies of
| copyrighted works; that's easy. But the items A, B, and C
| that you quote all require circumventing a technological
| measure that controls access to a protected work. And youtube
| videos, in the general case, have completely uncontrolled
| access. You can't circumvent measures that don't exist.
| eli wrote:
| Unfortunately the law defines access control VERY broadly.
| If they take any steps at all to make it difficult to
| download the source video then that is a technological
| measure to control access. There is no requirement that it
| be effective.
| kevinpet wrote:
| It's literally right there in the law that it needs to be
| effective.
| eli wrote:
| Ah, sorry, that was a confusing choice of words. In the
| law they are using "effective" to mean "has the effect
| of" not "works well."
|
| In any event the entire phrase "effectively controls
| access to a work" is defined in the law so what the words
| mean in english is irrelevant.
|
| Here it means anything that "requires the application of
| information, or a process or a treatment, with the
| authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the
| work." Which I think we can all agree is very broad.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| The referenced german court ruling, which is probably
| "Schutzgesetzverletzung: Umgehung von wirksamen technischen
| Massnahmen auf Streaming-Portalen zum Schutz
| urheberrechtlich geschutzter Musikwerke durch
| Konvertierungssoftware" found that the signature cipher
| used by YouTube counts an effective TPM. The code in
| youtube-dl that bypasses this is
| `YoutubeIE._decrypt_signature` in youtube.py
| jonas21 wrote:
| If there weren't any technological measures preventing you
| from downloading and saving YouTube videos, then youtube-dl
| wouldn't exist. You would just download the video from
| YouTube yourself.
| MereInterest wrote:
| "Preventing" is not the same as failing to enable. As far
| as I know, there's nothing that youtube has implemented
| that prevents downloading. It is simply inconvenient as a
| result of not being the primary goal.
| jonas21 wrote:
| There's an encrypted signature in the response from
| YouTube that youtube_dl decrypts in order to request the
| video content.
|
| Perhaps it's not a super-sophisticated technical measure
| if youtube-dl was able to defeat it -- but it's a
| technical measure nonetheless.
| corobo wrote:
| YouTube videos don't have a right click option to download
| the video (a browser builtin) therefore there's a technical
| measure that controls the downloading of the video
|
| You don't have to be technically correct, you have to be
| legally correct. It's like technically correct only it's
| way more pedantic
| e12e wrote:
| Youtube-dl works with many more services than YouTube,
| FYI.
| [deleted]
| mulmen wrote:
| Youtube is literally in the name. This isn't a compelling
| argument.
| e12e wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200930093107/https://github
| .co...
| smsm42 wrote:
| Absence of button not a "technological measure".
| Otherwise any browser having "view source" is a copyright
| violation tool - no site has "view source" button, and
| site code is certainly copyrightable material, so any
| browser - and in fact any text-mode HTTP client - that
| allows to view source is a "circumvention" tool.
| [deleted]
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >Absence of button not a "technological measure"
|
| No, but the various technological measures that Google
| uses to make it difficult to download a user copy of the
| video file, to the point where the compilation and use of
| an external tool is the easiest option, definitely are.
|
| Seriously, youtube makes it more of a pain in the ass to
| download a plain video file than basically any other site
| on the web. You can't just view-source and get it, and
| you can't even nab the file from the event timeline like
| you can most sites that obfuscate _that_.
|
| Like it or not, youtube-dl is popular in part because it
| _does_ circumvent a lot of measures that youtube
| intentionally puts in place.
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| This is correct; the most common commit to the youtube-dl
| repo is fixing the js decoding that YT changes regularly
| to prevent eaxctly this type of access.
|
| Obfuscation is clearly an accepted technological approach
| to security and control, if not always a good or
| effective one.
| [deleted]
| wegs wrote:
| > You don't have to be technically correct, you have to
| be legally correct. It's like technically correct only
| it's way more pedantic
|
| That's not how the law works. Legally correct is much
| less pedantic than technically correct. The difference is
| that legally correct often takes millions of dollars to
| ascertain.
|
| I use youtube-dl all the time, and never illegally. Most
| of the content is CC-licensed educational content, and
| the major use is working in contexts without guaranteed
| bandwidth.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| romanoderoma wrote:
| The browser saves the video in the cache on your HD
| automatically
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| There are a lot of arguments against this counter
| example, including the fact that the browser does not
| facilitate you getting access in any other way than
| originally intended (legal) and it honors the caching
| policy defined for the resource (technical)
| salawat wrote:
| Browsers are not the only user agent out there, and
| that's not an active measure to prevent downloading,
| that's a decision not to implement a particular
| functionality.
|
| There are also reasons that aren't infringing to grab
| your own uploaded YouTube content. Maybe you switched to
| another computer and left your portable drive at home.
| You have the right to access copies for personal use.
|
| That they had the nerve to go for the tool is yet another
| extension of the war on first sale, and buyer freedom.
| Also, the people who made youtube-dl are not committing
| copyright infringement.
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Legally correct isn't a more (or less) pedantic version
| of technically correct. Legally correct means primarily
| correct with respect to the colour[0] of a thing.
| Technical correctness disregards colour entirely.
|
| Absence of "Download" button on a site, or in a context
| menu, is not technically a technical measure,
| particularly when you can press F12 and poke around the
| Network tab to get to the same resource, all entirely a
| browser built-in process. But it legally is a technical
| measure, because the little obstacle carries a colour of
| "intended to prevent downloads". That's usually enough.
|
| --
|
| [0] - See https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 for detailed
| explanation of what "colour" is. In a rough tl;dr, colour
| as a concept is a blend of provenance and intent. Bits
| don't really have colour, but the chain of events that
| made particular bits be what they are does have it. Law
| is in a large part an exercise of dealing with colour,
| but the concept lies entirely outside of computer
| science, so it fundamentally can't enter it, and is thus
| usually ignored by the tech crowd. Colour is not data,
| and not metadata: it's the causal context.
| corobo wrote:
| Thanks for the response and interesting site to have a
| browse of rather than just dropping a "That's not how law
| works."! Pedantic was the wrong word to hinge my comment
| on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That article the most enlightening things about law in
| general, and IP laws in particular, that I've ever read,
| so I'm always eager to remind HN about it :).
|
| I've seen lots of words being wasted here and elsewhere
| in debates around piracy, copyright and patents, that
| essentially boil down to not understanding that, from the
| point of view of the law, bits have colour, and that
| colour is of paramount importance.
| eli wrote:
| Agreed and here the law actually defines this term:
|
| > _a technological measure "effectively controls access
| to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its
| operation, requires the application of information, or a
| process or a treatment, with the authority of the
| copyright owner, to gain access to the work._
|
| In the ordinary course of using YouTube you cannot save
| copyrighted videos. This isn't so much the RIAA
| overreaching as it is them taking full advantage of a bad
| law.
|
| (Also, Google actually did go out of their way to make it
| hard to save the files. Go hit F12 yourself and try.
| There's a reason a whole project exists to make it
| easier.)
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| Unfortunately it's well established that accessing
| resources that, even if not protected what so ever, without
| permission is illegal. YT's policy T&S on how and when you
| can consume it satisfies this.
|
| I believe in the youtube-dl case allowing you to consume
| videos outside of the T&S is the crime and the automated
| scale is the punative factor.
|
| IANAL and I don't agree with this; just responding to the
| parent statement of "You can't circumvent measures that
| don't exist"
| wlerin wrote:
| The RIAA had a hard time too until the EU wrote the shitty
| laws their entire argument is based on (though what relevance
| those have to the DMCA is anyone's guess).
| CivBase wrote:
| I think youtube-dl failed 1201(a)(2)(C) and 1201(a)(2)(C)
| because of that README. Like I said, they should fix the
| README. However, I still consider it rotten that they would
| forcibly take down a project as big as youtube-dl because of
| something so innocuous.
|
| A simple "cease and desist" against the youtube-dl project
| regarding their README examples almost certainly would have
| been sufficient. Instead, the RIAA took needlessly drastic
| measures with a DMCA takedown that paints RIAA as a poor
| defenseless victim from start to finish. This was not an
| attempt to right a minor copyright infringement, this was a
| public declaration from RIAA that they are aware of and
| object to the youtube-dl project.
|
| This part of the DMCA takedown document is particularly
| rotten:
|
| > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent
| the technological protection measures used by authorized
| streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and
| distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our
| member companies without authorization for such use.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Lawyers are not engineers. Corporate lawyers are mercenary
| thugs with assistants, expensive suits, and very very very
| high daily rates.
|
| This is the kind of thing is that lawyers do, because this
| is what they're paid to do.
|
| You cannot win this by simply saying "Hands off our code -
| this is outrageous" because that's not how the law works.
|
| If you want to make an argument agains this you literally
| have to make it stand up in court, and that is _not easy._
|
| While lawyers are sometimes foul and shameless creatures,
| the engineering community does not seem to understand that
| it is not playing on its own turf here.
|
| If you do not take the time to understand the rules of the
| game _you will lose hard._ In this case the RIAA could
| easily have sued for damages and loss of earnings - and it
| would probably win that case if it came to court, although
| someone in counsel probably argued (wisely) that it wouldn
| 't be worth the Streisand Effect damage.
| rhino369 wrote:
| A huge percent of software engineers work on (directly or
| indirectly) advertising and spying on users. I wouldn't
| throw stones.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Reading (A) and (B), I cannot help but notice that it doesn't
| matter whether the primary purpose of the circumvention is to
| infringe copyright. It is enough that the software/service is
| primarily about circumventing the "technological measure".
|
| The technological measure itself doesn't even have to be
| primarily about preventing copyright infringement. It
| suffices that it effectively controls access to relevant
| works, even if it's not its primary purpose.
|
| We could even argue that YouTube's restriction are primarily
| a means of getting people back to YouTube, with copyright
| enforcement being only a secondary concern. Sadly, this
| argument would be irrelevant with respect to (A) and (B).
| mulmen wrote:
| Right, it gives creators freedom to build what they want.
| In this case, YouTube. The sword cuts both ways.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| You could probably scratch out A and B by emphasizing how
| useful youtube-dl is for grabbing local copies of MIT
| licensed university lectures.
|
| C is harder, given the README.md examples.
| nitrogen wrote:
| But what DRM "technological measure" is being circumvented?
| prutschman wrote:
| As I understand it, there are two definitions of
| technological measure in the DMCA. One is in the anti-
| circumvention portion, the other in the anti-
| cirvumvention-tool portion. In the latter case:
|
| 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201 (b)(2) (B):
|
| a technological measure "effectively protects a right of
| a copyright owner under this title" if the measure, in
| the ordinary course of its operation, prevents,
| restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of
| a copyright owner under this title.
| [deleted]
| contravariant wrote:
| You're right! Apparently you can download all of youtube just
| by going to youtube.com! Guess those guys will be next.
| davidjnelson wrote:
| Lol that's awesome. Law is complicated.
| nogabebop23 wrote:
| Even if we restrict the target set to "tools with a high
| likelyhood of being used for an illegal purpose" which I
| believe youtube-dl belongs in, when is the RIAA going after
| "guns"?
| mohamez wrote:
| Or let's remove knives from all together from this world
| because someone is using the to kill other people.
| mulmen wrote:
| If you sell a "murderizer 3000" and explain in the owner's
| manual how to inflict a fatal wound and maybe also not leave
| any evidence behind it doesn't take a genius to argue you're
| selling a murder weapon, to murderers.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Have you seen gun ads? Firearm manufacturers basically _do_
| market their products as murder weapons.
| mulmen wrote:
| Right, that's my point. You can't make a tool called
| Youtube-dl with source controlled test cases that
| download copywritten material from Youtube and then claim
| it's not for downloading copywritten material from
| Youtube.
| perardi wrote:
| cURL could be used to download pornography. Think of the
| children!
| awakener62 wrote:
| No wait lets go one more layer down. Lets attack the net and
| socket c/c++ libraries as they can also be used to download a
| little bit of pron.
| boogies wrote:
| It could download instructions and coordinating communication
| for drug manufacturing, money laundering, and terrorism! Add
| them to paedo porn and you have the Four Horsemen of the
| Infopocalypse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of
| _the_Infocalyp...
| nmlnn wrote:
| And people could use human brains to store that
| information. We need read/write access to your mind just to
| be safe!
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Think of the children!
|
| Suggesting people "think of the children" as they download
| porn is perhaps not the best advice.
| deelowe wrote:
| Why stop there? Telnet can be used. Or what about wireshark?
| Let's ban those too. While we're at it, C++ can be used and
| other programming languages as well. We could keep going.
|
| This whole thing is silly.
| mseidl wrote:
| If a kid can use curl, then they deserve the porn.
| boogies wrote:
| Not everyone considers porn a reward, and not everyone
| who's curious about it is guaranteed not to regret it
| later.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's about primary purpose.
| teej wrote:
| You could make a case that the primary purpose of the
| internet is to download porn.
| marv3lls wrote:
| Avenue Q already has! https://youtu.be/kV7ou6pl5wU
| fche wrote:
| "purpose"
|
| this is the "inverse teleological fallacy", q.v.
| korijn wrote:
| In that case, let's see what we can do with a gun...
| mulmen wrote:
| Does cURL feature "here's how to download porn" anywhere in
| the code base or documentation?
| RobRivera wrote:
| Please don't give them any ideas
| mulmen wrote:
| Firefox isn't advertised as a tool to download content
| illegally nor does it feature doing so in any documentation or
| code AFAIK.
|
| The chosen example gave RIAA the ammo it needed to attack this
| tool.
| [deleted]
| blitblitblit wrote:
| Time to revive GitTorrent? https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Radicle[1] can't come soon enough. Git already works over I2P[2]
| (TOR alternative) btw ;)
|
| The more often this happens, the more we'll learn about
| reproducible builds, decentralized (and/or anonymous) code
| hosting, and setup tools and software that uses this more. I'm
| sure the distributed tar.gz is next on the list for this DMCA and
| we can't rely on things hosted on the clear web anymore.
|
| [1]: https://radicle.xyz/
|
| [2]: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git
| blumomo wrote:
| Many (thousands, if not tens of thousands) YouTube videos are
| being deleted right now, crazy censorship taking place. If tools
| like those get banned then it gets harder to keep copies of
| videos before they will be banned from YouTube.
| rochak wrote:
| That's what we get for unrestricted proliferation of a platform
| offered by a big company. Is it even surprising anymore? Just
| saddens me but we can't do anything.
| camnora wrote:
| How about we serve the DMCA to the original media source.
| Attacking the tools does not make any sense. Which tool is going
| to be next?
| johnnyapol wrote:
| We're going to need another flag
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
| bob1029 wrote:
| Assuming youtube-dl is dead and the web APIs become hopelessly
| obfuscated, how hard would it be to talk to youtube as if I were
| a samsung smart tv?
|
| Perhaps the next iteration of this project can leverage google's
| own insatiable greed against them. Embedding youtube into every
| "smart" device on the face of the planet probably requires that
| google maintain a fairly consistent private API which all of
| these devices can communicate with. If someone were to reverse
| engineer one of these devices or just throw wireshark on the
| WLAN, it probably wouldn't take long to emulate the same
| approach...
|
| What is stopping someone from using these types of internal
| interfaces instead of the public ones?
| GlitchMr wrote:
| YouTube TV is a web page, albeit one you can't simply open with
| a web browser. Google could easily obfuscate it too.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm not sure with the RIAA hopes to accomplish here.
|
| I suspect this will be fixed in a day, and just be hosted
| elsewhere.
|
| And also, isn't this like when the studios sued the makers of
| VCRs?
| ordo_inf wrote:
| Everybody, go to PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files
| Download the whl. Download the tar.gz. ???? Profit.
|
| Also, a recommendation for the youtube_dl crew is to use a self-
| hosted solution (if GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge wont do). Find a
| cheap Linux hosting provider and run Gitea on it:
| https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea
|
| It's the best tips I can give for now.
| benn_88 wrote:
| I wonder if a) PyPI will get a DMCA notice and b) PyPI honours
| such notices.
| bArray wrote:
| I would like to add to the discussion that there are many
| perfectly legal uses of YoutubeDL:
|
| * Downloading a video you uploaded and no longer have stored
| locally.
|
| * Downloading a video to create a fair-use response video.
|
| * Downloading video/music that is free commons (or some other
| non-restrictive license).
|
| * (Gray) Downloading content to archive it.
|
| * Downloading content you have already purchased and have in your
| possession.
|
| * (Dark gray) Downloading content you have a paid subscription to
| view, but don't have reliable internet.
|
| All of these anti-piracy measures need to answer one simple
| question - what stops somebody from just screen recording your
| material? At the point in which somebody can view your material
| on another device, you've lost a lot of control.
|
| P.S. This clone seems legit:
|
| `git clone https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git`
| Dahoon wrote:
| Yet another reason you should host outside the US no matter the
| legality.
| [deleted]
| avodonosov wrote:
| What is the simplest way to store source code repos in some
| decentralized file system? Like store git repo in IPFS folder,
| would others be able to clone it and submit pull requests?
| slim wrote:
| it's already decentralized. now developers just need to setup a
| different remote. as in git remote add whatever. the problem is
| how to publish the software.
| proffan wrote:
| Maybe someone send an email to https://github.com/jessephus to
| get more information?
| resfirestar wrote:
| Worth noting the MPA already tried doing this to Popcorn Time, a
| BitTorrent client designed to provide a Netflix-like UX.[1] The
| Popcorn Time devs put in a counter-notice and the repository was
| back up a few weeks later when the period for the MPA to respond
| expired.
|
| The same thing will probably happen here because this is not one
| of the purposes of DMCA takedown letters, period. Even if there
| are inappropriate test cases or something in the repo, or if
| they're correct that youtube-dl bypasses DRM in violation of a
| different part of the DMCA, it's still not a valid takedown
| because GitHub isn't hosting anything the RIAA/those it
| represents own the copyright to. The correct way to do this is to
| go after the lead youtube-dl developer(s) and/or GitHub for
| facilitating infringement or whatever, but I don't think RIAA
| wants to do that because they probably don't have much/any
| legitimate grounds for legal claims against them, so they abuse
| the DMCA to look like they're doing something.
|
| [1] https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-
| code...
| blazespin wrote:
| I just used windows-g to record upside down music video. Seems
| to work fine. mp4 file is in my captures video. Sound is great.
| How is that acceptable and this isn't?
|
| btw, Popcorn time is a bit different situation. I would say bit
| torrent is more the problem, or at least the people who upload
| pirated content.
|
| What is odd though is that it's the RIAA filing suit here and
| not google. Google has a real complaint, RIAA certainly does
| not.
|
| It would be like if NYT went after a web client for saving news
| articles for offline reading.
|
| Bizarre.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Can you use the DMCA for a TOS breech? I'm not so clear
| Google would have a claim.
| resfirestar wrote:
| What's the difference? The main one I can see is that the
| RIAA is accusing ytdl of being a DRM circumvention tool while
| Popcorn Time is just a straightforward P2P infringement tool.
| That doesn't make the DMCA notice any more valid.
|
| I guess I'm nitpicking but it's important that they're not
| "filing suit", possibly because they don't care enough or
| don't think they have a case. DMCA takedown is a sort of
| dispute resolution process mandated by law, it's not a
| substitute for an actual lawsuit.
| nexuist wrote:
| > How is that acceptable and this isn't?
|
| Because Microsoft can afford lawyers to fight this, and
| random GitHub projects can't. It's an intimidation tactic.
| quotemstr wrote:
| It's interesting how many Github counternotices (e.g., [1] [2])
| seem completely justified yet link to repositories that are no
| longer on GitHub. I wonder what happened.
|
| [1] in
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-0...
| someone forked a permissively-licensed project; the original
| author made the project-closed source, then issued a DMCA
| takedown against the fork. That's clearly bogus: you can't
| revoke an open source license.
|
| [2] in
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/11/2019-11-2...
| Microsoft DMCAd a project that did something with Windows local
| licensing keys. I can see how Microsoft would prefer that this
| project not exist, but I see no infringement. Not everything
| that a big company dislikes is an infringement of copyright.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Jetbrains is also constantly taking down cracks/piracy
| license servers/etc - see [0,1,2].
|
| 0: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10
| -0...
|
| 1: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01
| -1...
|
| 2: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/09/2019-09
| -0...
| junon wrote:
| WTF this isn't copyright infringement. This is breach of
| TOS, technically. They have no grounds to use DMCA
| takedowns for this.
|
| How in the world is Github allowing this?
| ls612 wrote:
| Well I for one hope you are correct. The fact that popcorn time
| is still up gives me hope that ytdl will also return soon.
| [deleted]
| google234123 wrote:
| This tool literally recommendeds downloading copyrighted
| material. This is a good take down.
| Avamander wrote:
| It literally doesn't. It isn't a good takedown.
| okareaman wrote:
| I had a youtube-dl repository to fix a bug in Twitter video
| downloads, but I just checked and it's been removed.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I don't understand exactly how this works.
|
| Github receives a letter from a private organisation RIAA and
| then takes down the repository.
|
| How does Github know that this request is proper and youtube-dl
| is illegal? Just because it comes from RIAA?
|
| Did Github give the repository owners a chance to migrate to
| another service willing to host their content?
| qw3rty01 wrote:
| From the DMCA repository:
|
| > It only means that we received the notice on the indicated
| date. It does not mean that the content was unlawful or wrong.
| It does not mean that the user identified in the notice has
| done anything wrong. We don't make or imply any judgment about
| the merit of the claims they make. We post these notices and
| requests only for informational purposes.
|
| (IANAL) Github follows US copyright law (and probably other
| countries' copyright laws too), so they're required to take it
| down upon receiving a DMCA takedown request. If it's not a
| proper request, the repository owner can file a counterclaim,
| but that would open the repository owner to lawsuits.
| karmasimida wrote:
| I am not buying this.
|
| Does this mean bittorrent client can be taken down as well?
|
| Who is drawing the line here?
| proffan wrote:
| IMHO the biggest problem here is the US government is policing
| the world with DMCA: you have to comply even you are not with
| physical US jurisdiction. Like the world's biggest cyber-troll,
| just dressed in business suits.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Copyright lobby has been pushing the line tighter every year,
| every decade.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| It's much dumber even than. A youtube web page contains
| everything necessary to view a youtube video. The concrete
| action the RIAA is accusing youtube-dl of is that it
| "circumvents YouTube's rolling cipher". The RIAA has used this
| same complaint to have other sites/tools taken down. I've
| looked into the youtube-dl implementation, and it turns out the
| Youtube's "rolling cipher" is at most merely rearranging the
| characters of the CDN url of the video, and they send you JS
| code in the page to correctly arrange the characters of the URL
| so you can download it. Youtube-dl is using the Google-supplied
| JS and a JS interpreter to transform the Google supplied URL
| into the URL they need to download the videos. Youtube is
| asking Google what to do, and Google is saying "here's how you
| download the video".
|
| I explained the full RIAA complaint, with links to prior
| complaints and the youtube-dl source code, here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111
| nullc wrote:
| Because of how github works these moves are much more damaging
| than you might expect: In addition to revoking your access to the
| supposed "infringing" work, you also lose access to all your pull
| request comment traffic and issues -- which, unlike the source
| code, aren't continually replicated to the systems of all
| developers.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Looks like fossil does replicate them ? https://www.fossil-
| scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Those things are however exposed via their API, so anybody
| who's worried about a similar situation may perhaps do well to
| utilize it and take regular backups.
| andrey_utkin wrote:
| Who needs Peertube when there's Youtube, some people asked
| yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183
| yoz-y wrote:
| If peertube instances started to host RIAA affiliated content
| they might get a DMCA notice as well.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| So the RIAA has tech folks just like any other organization. Some
| of those tech folks likely read HN. Question for you folks (use
| throwaways if you feel it could jeopardize your job): how do you
| ethically justify working for such an organization?
| microcolonel wrote:
| Can we pool funds to turn this into a lawsuit?
| ffpip wrote:
| I'm surprised they haven't gone after browsers. They would surely
| have asked Google to display certain messages when a user visits
| known piracy sites
|
| This website is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice.
| The website you are trying to access hosts copyrighted content.
| Please contact support, or seek the copyright holder's permission
| to access the content.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Don't they ? It might not be really obvious, but take a Walled
| garden platform like iOS for example. Already third party
| developers can't build their own browsers and all are
| efectively a skin over the Safari web engine.
|
| What this means is that iOS is effectively one lawsuit (ore
| even major bribe) away from RIAA or other similar unscrupulous
| group dictating what sites you can access and what you do with
| the browser. And you can't just sideload another browser due to
| the walled garden!
|
| And it's not just iOS as there are unfortunately many Walled
| garden platforms these days - smart TVs, game consoles, browser
| extensions for some browsers, etc.
|
| Even Android limits what you can do with a ROM that is not
| rooted - and some high profile apps will refuse to run on a
| rooted one!
| resynth1943 wrote:
| There are some mirrors here FYI ::
| https://resynth1943.net/articles/youtube-dl-takedown/
|
| Self-plug, I know. But I'll update it if anything new comes in.
| arno1 wrote:
| Seems like a fresh mirror here
| https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl to fork and start it
| over somewhere else. Gitea is a great project. Now we need
| someone to fork and publish it over Tor or something.
| Decentralized solution would be a next step.
|
| Diff between that mirror and the one from the web.archive.com
| looks good. I.e. no hidden/evil things inside. Looks safe to
| start over.
|
| ```
|
| $ git log --oneline -3 48c5663c5 (HEAD -> master, origin/master,
| origin/HEAD) [afreecatv] Fix typo (#26970) <===
| https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl
|
| 7d740e7dc [23video] Relax _VALID_URL (#26870) <===
| https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl
|
| 4eda10499 [utils] Don't attempt to coerce JS strings to numbers
| in js_to_json (#26851) <===
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703if_/https://github...
|
| ```
|
| https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/4855/is-it-possible-...
| LockAndLol wrote:
| I would like to add that Git works over I2P which will render
| it anonymous https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git
| iameli wrote:
| Do you think GitHub automatically enforces these against forks? I
| wonder how long this will stay up.
| https://github.com/iameli/youtube-dl
| esalman wrote:
| FWIW, I'm forking youtube-dl right now.
| [deleted]
| tanseydavid wrote:
| Any links to a repo that is still standing would be appreciated
| -- I would also like to clone the source.
| esalman wrote:
| Source available on PyPl:
| https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872959
| alexfromapex wrote:
| Just so you know, they expressly mention that's not a good idea
| in the notice.
|
| Also, I'm just the messenger so please don't shoot/downvote me
| 3np wrote:
| And I hereby expressly mention that it is, so there you have
| it.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Still a better idea than DRM
| icandoit wrote:
| They didn't like people buying VCRs either.
| jaspergilley wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be? Does this claim have any substance?
| esalman wrote:
| A claim like this is also a threat to the open-source
| software ecosystem.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Stating the obvious: but hopefully to a place other than
| Github, since forks would automatically be removed as well.
| nudpiedo wrote:
| It was clear that youtube-dl has always been used for its
| utility. And the deeper problem here is why aren't we allowed to
| do whatever want to whatever is streamed onto our screens? TV
| shows could be vhs taped without issue as long as not
| redistributed. For sure we cannot take this fight against google
| with the American laws, but I think the software was morally
| correct and should be legally permitted.
| Lammy wrote:
| > 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
| dl/blob/master/README.md....
|
| > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.
|
| How, exactly? This is why I dislike GitHub's "Fork" button, since
| a takedown of the original takes yours too.
| nickjj wrote:
| Things like this make no sense from the notice:
|
| > _The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the
| technological protection measures used by authorized streaming
| services such as YouTube_
|
| Using this logic then OBS or any desktop recording tool is also
| violating the same measures because you could press record while
| a Youtube video is playing and wind up with your own locally
| recorded copy of the video.
|
| Since we're here, let's also say any smart phone is also in
| violation since they could technically record a Youtube video
| playing on another device.
| varispeed wrote:
| What about your brain when you remembered the copyrighted song
| that you listened to on YouTube and then you just listen to it
| in your head instead of playing a video? It's just ridiculous.
| These greedy organisations should be made illegal.
| kelnos wrote:
| It makes perfect sense to the people who design these twisted
| legal machinations.
|
| A tool like OBS is designed for generic desktop recordings,
| while youtube-dl is designed specifically to enable the copying
| of copyrighted works. Or at least that's what the RIAA will
| say, and unfortunately a judge will likely be very sympathetic
| to that claim.
| nickjj wrote:
| Yep.
|
| I wonder where this will go defensively in court if it gets
| there.
|
| I guess what the RIAA is really saying is that murder is
| legal depending on what was used to kill someone.
|
| A hunting knife could be used to kill someone but it could
| also be used to slice a pizza pie. A pizza cutter was
| designed to slice pizza but it could also kill someone
| without too much effort.
|
| If it's not ok for youtube-dl to create an mp3 of a music
| video but it is ok for OBS to do the same then it must also
| be ok to decapitate someone with a pizza cutter[0].
|
| [0]: Do not try this. I'm not a lawyer.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's not because OBS does not contain any code specific to
| circumventing streaming services protection measures. youtube-
| dl does contain code specific to such circumvention.
| 15155 wrote:
| There's no statute and _zero_ precedent in case law in the
| aforementioned venue that comes to this conclusion.
| jchw wrote:
| Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN
| be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses
| examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an
| example of that:
|
| > We also note that the source code prominently includes as
| sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our
| members' copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted
| in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the
| source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute
| the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:
|
| They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been
| changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but
| this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client
| would be. This doesn't circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don't
| understand what leg they have to stand on here.
|
| This feels like DeCSS all over again.
|
| P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it's not
| listed.
|
| [1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn't in the readme, but in the
| _test cases_. See extractor /youtube.py. To me this seems even
| more tenuous, but IANAL.
| alexfromapex wrote:
| It's probably a case of fair use but it'll have to go to court
| to decide that
| jchw wrote:
| IANAL but I don't even think DMCA applies. It's not like
| YouTube-dl is breaking _copy protection_ schemes, at most it
| is handling anti-abuse schemes. After all, it 's not like you
| can go and bypass Widevine with youtube-dl.
| rmrfstar wrote:
| Unfortunately, it is making a copy. These guys also fucked
| up by "marketing" it for use in circumventing such
| controls. They should have showed how to pull OCW lectures.
|
| (a)(2)(C) is the part. IANAL but that's my take.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
| jchw wrote:
| I can understand why it would seem like circumvention,
| but one usage of YouTube-dl even with the README
| invocations is so that you can listen to or watch the
| media in a personal capacity. Not technically any
| different from how you might using the actual YouTube
| client, albeit probably in violation of YouTube's ToS.
| "Copying" in a legal sense might need a little more
| rigor. (IANAL either, though, so hell if I know.)
| smsm42 wrote:
| That's some prime rate bullshit. Like saying since I could use
| Linux to download copyrighted materials, and there are guides
| around which tell how to do so, Linux should be removed from
| the Internet.
|
| Also a good reminder - never trust a third party to host your
| files, always have a backup. And hosting your infrastructure on
| Github means anybody who wants it can take it down with a
| single letter.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Like
|
| That's the operative word, because it isn't "like" at all to
| a nontechinical person. If you explain it as "yeah so I have
| one tool that literally has 'youtube' in its name, and it
| downloads videos, also some of the test cases to make sure it
| works show it work on copyrighted videos" and the other one
| is "people can use it to watch videos...sometimes? Maybe you
| can even run the first tool on it? But like a billion people
| use it for completely different things" you can probably see
| how this works.
| [deleted]
| molmalo wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing: The next step following this
| line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients,
| because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material.
|
| This is crazy.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _The next step following this line of thinking would be
| trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used
| to download copyrighted material_
|
| Didn't the RIAA put up a considerable effort against
| torrenting in the early 2000's? I remember quite vividly them
| going after just about anyone who made music available, even
| if you owned your own songs and were simply uploading them to
| a web UI to listen to in the browser (Remember Muxtape?)
| ht85 wrote:
| Now that 4chan is behind bars, it's time to sue the Internet!
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Why stop with torrent clients? They should ban all browsers,
| because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!
| atleta wrote:
| And you don't even need a browser for that. Your operating
| system comes with TCP support and that in itself is enough.
| (OK, some of them may probably be willing to build in all
| kinds of restrictions, so maybe they can get a RIAA stamp.)
| ferdek wrote:
| Well, following their logic behind DMCA compliant, I guess
| fiddling long enough with developer's console on Chrome or
| Firefox would allow you to download potentially copyrighted
| material from youtube the same way youtube-dl does.
|
| sed s/youtube-dl/firefox/g and voila, DMCA for Firefox
| ready to submit...
|
| Let's go further! Let's DMCA the Linux kernel because it
| runs Firefox/youtube-dl/curl/wget!
| saagarjha wrote:
| The Linux kernel does not have "youtube" in its name-it
| isn't advertised as a way to download videos.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| So if youtube-dl had a different name it'd be ok?
| imtringued wrote:
| I think we should just replace all humans with an Ethereum
| smart contract. No humans, violation of law.
| usr1106 wrote:
| All computers with the option to install applications or
| unlocked/unlockable bootloaders can be used to make copies
| of copyrighted materials. And it certainly happens a lot.
|
| But then, when secure boot came, Microsoft was forced to
| grant every owner of an Intel compatible computer the right
| to unlock it for antitrust reasons (luckily).
|
| So were is the borderline between a legal tool and an
| illegal tool? Well, lawyers will find out...
|
| In the meantime youtube-dl needs to be distributed some
| other channel. Which of course might raise the risk of
| back-doored or otherwise poisoned version floating around.
| Fnoord wrote:
| We need to ban oxygen. It CAN be used to download
| copyrighted materials!
| simcup wrote:
| >we need to ban boron/phosphorus
|
| FTFY
| bergstromm466 wrote:
| Why stop with browsers? They should ban all computers,
| because they CAN be used to download and play copyrighted
| materials!
| romwell wrote:
| Browsers?
|
| We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs!
| The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of
| the music industry with how easily they _can_ be used to
| create unauthorized copies!
|
| Oh wait.
| jackhack wrote:
| I realize you're being sarcastic but with a line of logic
| like that, you have a bright career in Congress, should
| you want it.
| dirtnugget wrote:
| Thanks for the throwback
| fernandotakai wrote:
| i love how dead kennedys literally left one of their
| cassette tapes sides blank and printed "Home taping is
| killing record industry profits! We left this side blank
| so you can help." on it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust,_Inc.#Artwo
| rk_...
| [deleted]
| indigochill wrote:
| Why stop with browsers? With enough creativity you can use
| any network protocol to download copyrighted material, so
| they should just ban computer networks.
| rovr138 wrote:
| Any input or output device
| tanseydavid wrote:
| No joke -- if they could get the legislation signed into
| law they would be thrilled.
|
| They could care less about side-effects and collateral
| consequences for adjacent technologies and use cases.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Because the law doesn't take kindly to "well,
| technically" arguments.
| hawkoy wrote:
| Another abuse of DMCA on the frontpage earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24867212
|
| Indian startup taking down dissent, whistle blowers and
| leaks using take down requests to youtube and social media.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Same for any kind of information exchange, like speech or
| the written word. Common sense says their argument doesn't
| hold water at all. Should courts decide in favor of the
| takedown that'd just go to show how broken our legal system
| is. Let's hope not.
| larrik wrote:
| The RIAA would absolutely ban all torrent clients if they
| could. If one advertises itself as a way to download
| copyrighted material, they would try to pull the exact same
| thing.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| What about chromium? They should take that down as well,
| imagine what children can see using that thing. `curl`,
| `wget` as well as gitlab - massive offender, random number
| generators - one of the biggest offenders, any worst
| nightmare you can imagine can be produced by it!
| Shared404 wrote:
| And don't forget the evil math people can use to hide their
| illegal content!
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Hush, don't leak their master plan! Of course they'd _love_
| to just ban about anything that _can potentially_ be used to
| commit copyright infringement. Of course that includes your
| web browser, too. Unless it can only visit a list of websites
| pre-approved by RIAA ;)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| varispeed wrote:
| Why not just ban computers or even why not jail people who
| even think about using ytdl? These organisations like RIAA
| need reality check. Sadly there is no body to stand against
| their bullying and stiffling the freedom of speech.
| sk2020 wrote:
| EFF takes up these causes sometimes, right? This notice is
| hollow sabre-rattling, so I wouldn't worry too much. What
| can RIAA do if somebody forks the project and hosts it in
| the Lithuania? Not much. Yell into a pillow, maybe.
| Zenst wrote:
| Yes, would be messed up given the state of play upon gun
| laws.
| dwardu wrote:
| so should we take down web browsers as well? because they CAN
| be used to download copyrighted music and videos.
| ikeboy wrote:
| I'm also NAL, but familiar with IP law.
|
| My analysis is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874277
| and I'm broadly skeptical of the legal viability under US law.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Why in the world did they include copyright works in the
| README? That's contributory infringement!
| jchw wrote:
| Why? youtube-dl is a violation of YouTube's ToS most
| probably, but does using it to download a copyrighted video
| _necessarily_ constitute copyright infringement? I have
| literally used youtube-dl to _watch_ YouTube, in the past; it
| 's handy to be able to use whatever media player you want,
| including ones that have better scrubbing.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Maybe not Copyright, but perhaps CFAA, for accessing the
| site in ways that was not authorized by the site owner.
| grumple wrote:
| So would using an adblocker, or any extension for that
| matter, also be a violation?
|
| Another point: If you put your content up for public
| viewing, you're implicitly allowing people to download
| the material as that's what browsers do. You are
| downloading a video every time you go to youtube to watch
| a video.
| xxpor wrote:
| >So would using an adblocker, or any extension for that
| matter, also be a violation?
|
| This hasn't been tested, but yes. This is a plausible
| argument. And it's why the CFAA is complete garbage.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Umm, yes the law makes it clear downloading copyrighted
| material you do not own is not legal.
|
| The RIAA and MPAA were suing users of Kazaa, BitTorrent,
| etc individually because of this law you may or may not
| like, but that's again the law!
| 15155 wrote:
| The RIAA and MPAA were suing users of Kazaa who were
| alleged to have redistributed copyrighted works. These
| lawsuits were not because someone possessed or
| redistributed free software source code.
| jchw wrote:
| I don't think you understand. Yeah, you can sue people
| for illegally redistributing copyrighted works. However,
| I am skeptical that you can do the same for people using
| YouTube-dl to consume copyrighted works. You are
| downloading the file from someone who has a license to
| redistribute it, you are just using a CLI utility instead
| of the page itself. You can't _view_ something without
| downloading it in some capacity.
|
| I'm not saying there's no possibility this is "illicit,"
| I am saying this is not the same as illegally downloading
| music off of Kazaa.
| godshatter wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. Instead of using a browser
| to access a website, parse the files given to it, and
| download the data so that the user can view it, you are
| using youtube-dl to access a website, parse the files
| given to it, and download the data so the user can view
| it.
|
| But I'm not a lawyer.
| himinlomax wrote:
| > Umm, yes the law makes it clear downloading copyrighted
| material you do not own is not legal.
|
| It most certainly does not, as almost nobody "owns"
| "copyrighted material," instead most users are granted a
| _license_ in this context.
| fuzxi wrote:
| You replied to the wrong comment, I think.
| eli wrote:
| I think you are misunderstanding the legal argument. The DMCA
| Section 1201 specifically prohibits (among other things)
| technology that "is marketed ... for use in circumventing a
| technological measure that effectively controls access to a
| work protected under this title." The example in the README is
| evidence of this.
|
| The argument is that youtube-dl is _primarily_ used for
| breaking DRM not just that it could be used for doing so.
| ehsankia wrote:
| It definitely was very sloppy of them to show examples on
| actual copyrighted material. Couldn't they have simply put
| examples of public domain content?
| jchw wrote:
| JFYI i was wrong. There were no such examples in the README
| or "marketing material," there was URLs and metadata in a
| few unit tests.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| But what is being circumvented? As far as I'm aware there are
| no controls put in place that are being circumvented.
|
| Edit: I'm also curious why the riaa would have standing at
| all? Even assuming there is some protection being
| circumvented, it's not the riaa's control that is being
| circumvented.
| eli wrote:
| Saving videos
| thesimon wrote:
| Although the OS might do that as well when you watch a
| video and put the computer into hibernation mode.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| Youtube-dl doesn't do anything your browser doesn't do
| already do when accessing said video.
|
| Also, I asked what is being circumvented, not what the
| tool does.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Calling the thing youtube-dl in the first place rather than
| GenericDownloadHelper or something like that could, I guess,
| be seen as marketing it for a specific purpose.
| eli wrote:
| Agreed, though the RIAA may well have sent a letter anyway.
| There's not really any downside to them sending a takedown
| that is overly broad.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Sadly yes. Legally this was actually rather stupid.
|
| Giving the project an innocuous name - think of a cute
| animal that isn't already being used as an open source
| mascot - and not _explicitly_ mentioning popular artists in
| the README would have made the RIAA 's case harder to
| argue.
|
| As it stands now, whatever the ethics or politics, legally
| there isn't much of a defence.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so, let's fork it and call it something like FURIAA
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah I'm sure the RIAA won't notice their name hidden in
| there and argue the tool is designed to obtain their
| content.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Too late; the code is already tainted. It carries the
| colour of "intended, marketed and used for copyright
| violation", and you can't just wash it away by
| reuploading the repo under a different name.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Why not?
|
| If youtube-dl incorporates some generic HTTP library
| (which it presumably does), is that now "tainted" too? If
| it used the one from Chrome, does everybody have to stop
| using Chrome? That seems problematic. Also, if that's the
| case I foresee some epic trolling ahead as people
| incorporate "interesting" code into their overt piracy
| tools. I bet some of them even incorporate code built
| into Windows or macOS.
|
| If not, what stops somebody from taking all of youtube-
| dl, changing the name and three lines of code, and saying
| that the removed lines were the ones promoted for
| infringement?
| saagarjha wrote:
| The law isn't some computer program that you can trick if
| you try hard enough. If someone can reasonably tell that
| you just took a program and rejiggled it a bit to pretend
| it's something else, they are going to come after you
| regardless and likely be successful when they do so.
| Aeolun wrote:
| So lets have someone _outside_ the influence of the RIAA
| do so? Not everyone lives under their thumb.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" The law isn't some computer program that you can trick
| if you try hard enough."_
|
| I don't know what you're talking about. It happens _all
| the time_.
|
| Miscarriages of justice are common. As just one of
| endless examples, read about how much of forensic science
| is a joke, yet it passes muster in the courts.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _The law isn 't some computer program that you can
| trick if you try hard enough_
|
| But it is. Trying hard enough just means lobbying and
| pushing money into politics so that the laws are written
| to favour you. That's effectively the purpose of RIAA.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| See my response here for summary, and the article linked
| there for details:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874225.
|
| > _If not, what stops somebody from taking all of
| youtube-dl, changing the name and three lines of code,
| and saying that the removed lines were the ones promoted
| for infringement?_
|
| What that somebody says is immaterial. If they did clone
| youtube-dl, their clone carries the "meant for copyright
| infringement" colour, by the virtue of being a clone of a
| project with that colour, and not a completely unrelated
| and independent project. It's the provenance and intent
| that matters. Web browsers and HTTP libraries do not have
| the "bad" colour, and being general-purpose tools, they
| likely never will.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > If they did clone youtube-dl, their clone carries the
| "meant for copyright infringement" colour.
|
| Which part of it? Not the parts that consist of HTTP
| libraries, apparently? But you can break any given
| program into arbitrarily many components that are each
| independently useful as a component of a different
| program.
|
| In this case the "meant for copyright infringement" part
| seems to be some of the unit tests. Does that mean the
| rest of it is fine? Or that the HTTP library part of it
| isn't?
|
| You need a better way of distinguishing them than just
| claiming sorcery.
|
| I mean here's a direct quote from your article:
|
| > Most importantly, you cannot look at bits and observe
| what Colour they are.
|
| So if the same code appears somewhere else, why would you
| expect to still have the same "Colour"?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Which part of it? Not the parts that consist of HTTP
| libraries, apparently? But you can break any given
| program into arbitrarily many components that are each
| independently useful as a component of a different
| program._
|
| Not parts, but the entire thing. Colour propagates
| through causality. The article I refer to explains pretty
| clearly about what it means. It's the intent and
| provenance, not the bits, that are important. If youtube-
| dl gets classified as illegal, then any trivial
| modification to it will get the same treatment. Even if
| you end up slowly replacing every bit of code, if you
| forked off youtube-dl and didn't change the
| functionality, that's still essentially youtube-dl.
|
| (You can argue that after enough work done, the ship of
| Theseus isn't the same ship that sailed into the dock.
| But the important part is that it's still the ship _of
| Theseus_ , no matter how many parts you iteratively
| replace.)
|
| Consider cases like going after someone who took GPL code
| and republished it as proprietary, or plagiarism, or
| copyright infringement itself. For the law, it doesn't
| matter whether or not the bits you have are identical to
| those of the protected work; what matters is how did you
| get them. It's the same principle at work here.
|
| > _In this case the "meant for copyright infringement"
| part seems to be some of the unit tests._
|
| In this case, unit tests are _evidence that the whole
| project_ is meant for copyright infringement. The
| offending entries serve to establish intent.
| nullc wrote:
| > The example in the README is evidence of this.
|
| it wasn't in the readme, it was in the test suite.
|
| I don't think it would be difficult to argue that downloading
| the world for the sole purpose of making sure the downloading
| worked was not an infringement (or, alternatively, was fair
| use).
| chabad360 wrote:
| IANAL, but regardless, according to RIAA, youtube-dl is
| circumventing the "DRM" built into YouTube, and therefore
| they're violating anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA.
| Therefore a DMCA claim can suffice to take it down.
|
| Perhaps if youtube-dl used different examples (i.e. videos not
| protected by anti-circumvention) perhaps they could have
| avoided this.
| josteink wrote:
| Incorrect. DRMed YouTube-content cannot be downloaded using
| YouTube-dl. Only regular content.
| fireattack wrote:
| > according to RIAA, youtube-dl is circumventing the "DRM"
|
| I didn't find any mention of "DRM" or "Digital rights
| management" on the page. Can you be more specific?
| bluedino wrote:
| > this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent
| client would be
|
| popcorn time?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23075484
| echelon wrote:
| Conversely, the RIAA is making its media available on a known,
| at-risk platform to attain distribution. They're not protecting
| their copyright sufficiently, and the copyrights should be
| revoked.
|
| I can't wait for ML to lower the barrier to entry for music to
| near nil. Make anyone a vocalist or instrumentalist and hose
| these assholes.
| jordigh wrote:
| As much as I would like this to be true, copyright doesn't
| have to be defended in order to be kept. That's a very
| different law, trademarks.
|
| You can have your copyright infringed for decades before you
| try to prosecute the infringers, and the courts will still
| rule in your favour.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm suggesting that ML will lower the barrier to entry so
| dramatically that the value of individual songs and
| musicians will plummet. The back catalog of copyright that
| the RIAA holds will become a fraction of its value today.
|
| I could be wrong, but nascent technology in this field
| looks incredibly powerful.
|
| I think this will happen with all media.
| simcup wrote:
| You wouldn't even need ML. Iirc there was this guy who
| coded a script that played every permutation of 12 notes
| in a 5 minute period and then made all the Melodys public
| domain. Ianal so I don't know if this would hold up in
| court, but technically that should invalidate every
| copyright on Melodys after that point in time.
|
| E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU&t=135
| found the ted talk
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| This... doesn't make any sense to me. Are you arguing
| that songs written by machine learning will become
| sufficiently good at their "job" that there will be no
| value in actual humans writing music? And that this will
| be a good thing?
| echelon wrote:
| Yes and yes.
|
| People will still be driving and making money. But there
| will be more people doing it and catering to a much wider
| audience.
|
| It'll flatten the curve. All long tail.
|
| Patreon is the first hint at this.
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| actually that it is in the test cases instead of the readme
| makes it seem worse to me, after all the readme is not
| addressed to anyone in particular, they needed examples of
| things someone might do and they used popular videos (that
| happened to be copyrighted) as those examples.
|
| But anyone running the test cases that does not have rights to
| those videos will have infringed, and then of course youtube-dl
| must also run their own test cases and we know they don't have
| rights to the videos.
| [deleted]
| kevincox wrote:
| It seems to me that they are making the claim that this tool is
| expressly for doing something that is forbidden by the YouTube
| TOS and breaking the music licenses provided.
|
| Of course YouTube has other videos that are under different
| licenses so it isn't clear that this is the only use case of
| the software.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Wait a minute, there's a difference between distributed
| copyrighted works, and merely copying it for yourself. In
| France for instance, we have this notion of "copie privee"
| (private copy), that says we are allowed to copy anything as
| long as we don't distribute it back. We even pay taxes on
| persistent memory for the privilege.
|
| Up thread there's also a citation of the Betamax case, which
| says that it's okay for people to record shows so they can
| watch them later, and it's okay to sell video recording
| devices.
|
| This is different from Bittorent, which automatically
| distribute any content you download. With this too, when you
| are downloading, you are also distributing, which is a much
| clearer case of infringement in most jurisdictions.
| bonzini wrote:
| That's a very common misconception of private copy; the
| existence of the private copy tax is not excusing copyright
| violation.
|
| What private copy wanted to cover is more like "I bought a
| physical CD and I make a cassette copy because my car
| doesn't have a CD player" or because I want to listen to a
| mix of my favorite music (so you paid a tax on cassettes
| and later on CD-R and CD-RW media). This was later extended
| to "I copy all my collection of music to a hard drive and
| stop flipping CDs in and out of the player" (so you pay a
| tax on hard disk drives).
| google234123 wrote:
| Using a copyrighted music track as the example in the README is
| really stupid or just shows a total lack of respect for
| copyright.
| jchw wrote:
| FWIW, they did not. This was misinformation from me,
| misreading the DMCA. I am not glad that my misunderstanding
| will now spread far and wide, but I at least caught it within
| the edit window.
|
| The DMCA is complaining about test cases. See
| extractor/youtube.py in your local copy.
| bleepblorp wrote:
| Copyright law is illegitimate and should not be respected.
|
| The stupid thing is hosting youtube-dl in the Untied States.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Does it really matter what they said?
|
| This is like the reverse of those common disclaimers on hacking
| tools and tutorials which claim: This is for
| educational use only.
|
| I've always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers?
| Are their authors untouchable just because they put in some
| boilerplate disclaimer like that?
|
| As for what was written in some code somewhere in the repo, it
| could have been written by anyone, even an RIAA plant who
| contributed that trojan horse to the project.
|
| What makes anyone think what was said there is endorsed by or
| even representative of the views of the rest of the authors of
| youtube-dl or is what youtube-dl is for?
|
| God, it pisses me off to no end to think that I'm going to be
| forced to use youtube's piece of shit, slow, ad-infested,
| tacker-infested, feature-poor, non-automatable browser
| interface.
|
| But, after taking a few deep breaths, I think within a year
| there'll be multiple alternatives to youtube-dl which will all
| bear disclaimers that they are _" for educational purposes
| only"_ and that they in no way endorse copyright infringement.
| zucker42 wrote:
| It's pretty ridiculous. They might argue that a browser is a
| technological measure to protect a copyrighted work which
| youtube-dl circumvents since the DMCA is written so vaguely.
| Cases like this demonstrate why anti-circumvention litigation
| really has to go.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Except the licensing under which the copyrighted works are
| uploaded explicitly allow for access via a browser, so no you
| couldn't. That's like saying that a DVD player "circumvents"
| DVD encryption, or a key "circumvents" a lock. It's the
| _intended_ use case.
| larrik wrote:
| The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme
| shows it was intended for that use, and the RIAA complaint will
| likely stand up to any legal scrutiny. Just because it can be
| used for legit purposes too won't matter in the slightest. I
| mean, Napster could have been used for legal means as well, and
| it got destroyed in court.
|
| The only chance tools like this have legally is when
| infringement is an "unintended side effect."
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Just to add a data point, but back when I still was working
| for a video distribution startup, we offered our customers
| the ability to directly import their video inventory from
| YouTube. They were the owners of the videos, it was just a
| convenient (and very popular!) feature for them to let us
| handle this import.
|
| We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have
| done this easily without it. We imported hundreds of
| thousands of videos like this.
|
| I suspect there are many more legitimate uses of YouTube-dl
| than you would expect.
| mulmen wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but I am playing devil's advocate here.
|
| Did your customers own those video _files_ or the rights to
| the video? If they are the authors and owners of the
| content surely they uploaded _something_ to YouTube to
| begin with. Why is that not what they uploaded to your
| service? If they preferred to import YouTube libraries
| clearly YouTube was adding some value there.
| murgindrag wrote:
| A copyright is for a creative work, not for a set of
| bits.
|
| It's unlikely transcoding a video added anything creative
| to the process.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Not PC but,
|
| Some people use YouTube as their repository. Or if they
| lost the original files it would be a way to recover
| something. I once had to download mp3's of my own music
| from MySpace because I had an HD crash and lost them.
| larrik wrote:
| Yes, which makes this very sad that a simple slip-up can
| make it very difficult to come back from this.
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| This is exactly the point. All they had to was use their own
| videos for the tests and readme and the dcma takedown would
| probably never would have happen. Plausible deniability.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Should it stand up to legal scrutiny though?
|
| What does it matter if I play the beatles on youtube by
| watching in a web browser or watching an .mp4 file that I
| just downloaded? It's functionally the same.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The former gives money to the original content owner for
| every listen while the latter does not. Which is why you're
| able to listen to it on youtube without having to
| personally pay someone.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| It _could_ but probably doesn 't
|
| One could argue that YouTube success is mostly about
| unlimited access to illegal copyrighted material uploaded
| by some unknown person in some unknown part of the world
|
| After all the thing it's already on YouTube and on my HD
| after I watched it
| Shared404 wrote:
| > YouTube success is mostly about unlimited access to
| illegal copyrighted material uploaded by some unknown
| person in some unknown part of the world
|
| Good point. I quite like that argument.
|
| Not that my opinion actually matters in this case.
| ydlr wrote:
| If the videos mentioned in the notice are hosted on
| Youtube without authorization, then the takedown notice
| should be sent to YouTube.
|
| If the videos were uploaded to Youtube with
| authorization, then accessing them through youtube-dl is
| not an example of the program being used for
| infringement.
|
| Either way, the purpose of the software is to download
| anything publically available from YouTube. Its purpose
| is not copyright infringement unless the purpose of
| YouTube is copyright infringement.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| That's exactly the point.
|
| The content is already available
|
| The monetisation of the content depends on a lot of
| different factors, many have monetized unauthorized
| content over the years, many received money from the same
| unauthorized content by faking clicks and views and many
| avoid paying YouTube in the form of ads by using ad
| blockers
|
| I believe youtube-dl users amount to a maximum of a
| single digit percent of the above (with the digit being
| between 1 and 2 with 2 excluded)
| tartoran wrote:
| Someone who is capable of downloading youtube videos can
| easily block ads and many do, not because ads are bad but
| because they are both excessive in any form possible and
| a malware spreading channel. I do too but don't bother to
| download videos because it is still more convent to
| watch'em directly on youtube. But it seems those days are
| coming to an end soon, lets see
| lutorm wrote:
| Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.,
| 464 U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the "Betamax
| case", is a decision by the Supreme Court of the
| United States which ruled that the making of
| individual copies of complete television shows for
| purposes of time shifting does not constitute
| copyright infringement, but is fair use.[1][2] The
| Court also ruled that the manufacturers of home video
| recording devices, such as Betamax or other VCRs
| (referred to as VTRs in the case), cannot be
| liable for infringement.
|
| How is downloading something from youtube for later
| offline viewing ("time-shifting") in any way different
| from recording a tv show?
| xxpor wrote:
| The Betamax case was pre-DMCA. The law has changed. I'm
| not saying it's invalid, just that there's a different
| argument to be made.
| larrik wrote:
| The Betamax case was about stuff broadcast over public
| airwaves, whereas this is a medium that the RIAA barely
| tolerates, rather than the (ideal) main distribution
| channel. Seems like a big enough difference to me.
| ethanwillis wrote:
| The ruling there doesn't seem to rule out making copies
| of shows from a cable network, which are not exactly
| public airwaves in the same sense I think you mean.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I don't see the fact that the RIAA dislikes internet
| based streaming as relevant to the analysis. Downloading
| a publicly available video transmitted over a nearly
| global communications network is directly analogous to
| recording a show to tape from a TV signal.
| Reelin wrote:
| The signal is broadcast (ie not under your control) and
| so the sole purpose being permitted there is time
| shifting.
|
| YouTube is an on demand stream. It would be comparable to
| recording a pay per view movie that you purchased. Is
| that legal? (The question isn't rhetorical, but I
| seriously doubt it.)
| jdbernard wrote:
| But it's not legally the same.
| [deleted]
| roywiggins wrote:
| The intent matters. Browsers don't make it easy to get
| ahold of a copy of the file that you can share, youtube-dl
| does. Add that to a bad README and that's something that a
| court might treat very differently from a web browser.
|
| This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks
| but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the
| intention of using them to commit a crime. Either way
| you're carrying the same lockpicks, but if the court
| decides that you were carrying them with bad intentions,
| you're in trouble.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| No it doesn't follow at all, any more than had the repo
| owners included a couple of public domain recordings in the
| repo then the conclusion that the tool was clearly intended
| to download public domain recordings.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| You may feel it doesn't matter, but it does in fact matter
| to the entities where decisions are made on matters like
| this: the courts.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I guess that means those decisions are then based more on
| emotion than facts?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| If you would put aside your emotions for a second, you
| would see that this is clearly just an issue of different
| priorities and values -- on both sides. And the side that
| has the power has priorities that presumably, given your
| phrasing, disagree with yours. I understand that can be
| frustrating and that that frustration might lead you to
| questionable rhetorical devices, but it won't change the
| fact of the situation.
| larrik wrote:
| It's hard for a lot of techies to grapple with this, but
| courts and law are often decided by the _intent_ of the
| offense. This shows intent, whereas public domain works
| would not. The difference, in court, is _massive_.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| It's not that it's hard to grasp, we just think it's
| irrelevant, since plenty of people also have legitimate
| uses for this tool, and any other tool that allows them
| to do the same things is just as capable of downloading
| copyrighted youtube videos.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| Curiously, what do scrapers (aka "readers") have to worry
| about with this topic?
|
| Eg, i'm making an archiver and reader combination that, for
| personal use, archives stuff in a Git-like store. Yet, Git
| (and Git-likes) can also be used to distribute.. so
| hypothetically i could use this software to scrape and
| distribute content.
|
| My intention is primarily to make news articles/etc
| searchable, archived, etc. Yet i'm sure NYT would have
| something to say about my test cases scraping their site.
|
| .. the world is interesting.
| Reelin wrote:
| I think the recent LinkedIn case established that it is
| legal to scrape anything which is publicly available (ie no
| login required). Redistribution would be a copyright
| violation, but the scraping itself is legal.
|
| I'm not sure what that means for youtube-dl though.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Can't it be trivially reinstated then by removing any
| references to copyrighted content? youtube-dl has plenty of
| legitimate uses beyond just copyright infringement.
| rhino369 wrote:
| They can't fully un-ring that bell. The RIAA will always be
| able to argue infringement was the purpose since they used
| copyrighted examples.
| gassius wrote:
| Argue in front of whom exactly? Because thats ONE of the
| big problems with DMCA.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| This is a proper DMCA claim, not YouTube garbage, so the
| process goes claim->counterclaim->lawsuit.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Federal court in the USA.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Isn't the problem that this stuff is on youtube in the
| first place? The RIAA can't win against google, so now
| they're going against smaller players?
| Aerroon wrote:
| Didn't RIAA already win against Google? A lot of the
| messed up stuff with Content ID comes from Google's fight
| with record labels.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What if another person will recreate this repository
| without history and offending links?
| rhino369 wrote:
| Might help a bit, but it is still pretty relevant.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Plus they've advertised themselves as having that
| capability. I suspect that even after the removal the
| RIAA will argue that the fact that the ability to
| download copyrighted material, which is something that
| the project itself said it could do in the past and has
| not been modified, makes it continue to be illegal.
| Reelin wrote:
| I don't think that's quite how it works. It's not
| (generally) capability that matters but rather intent.
|
| The RIAA would of course argue that examples of
| infringement in the test cases or readme demonstrate
| intent. A reasonable response to that might (or might
| not, depending on the context) be that infringement in
| those specific cases was never intentional but instead
| purely by accident.
|
| If the infringement in this case ends up appearing to be
| intentional, it would probably make for a very uphill
| battle to argue that the tool itself was only intended
| for legitimate use cases.
|
| Edit: Of course, it's reasonable to ask - if it's legal
| for YouTube to distribute the content, does using
| youtube-dl suddenly make it illegal? Is it a violation of
| copyright to record a pay per view stream? What about a
| publicly available stream paid for by ad revenue?
| roywiggins wrote:
| The issue with the readme infects the rest of the code,
| even if it's removed. It's still evidence that the
| repository was intended to facilitate copyright
| infringement. The problem isn't the words of the readme but
| what those words imply about what the authors of the code
| intended.
|
| If they instead had released it and then said in a public
| forum "check out my cool code for copyright infringement"
| (but had a totally blameless README) that would be used as
| evidence in the same way.
| tomrod wrote:
| Time to fork.
| rhizome wrote:
| Which is why RIAA is trying to kill the code itself.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Cure the disease not the symptom
| bigbubba wrote:
| The very premise of copyright itself then.
| young_unixer wrote:
| It beats me why they'd use those videos as examples knowing
| how finicky copyright law is.
| hiisukun wrote:
| I wonder what commit added those three listed examples (from
| three different music companies) to the README, and when.
| They're the worrying component as they show intent.
|
| In a dark universe timeline somewhere, the pull request for
| adding them to the README came from an RIAA employee.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| A comment somewhere else pointed out that the listed examples
| aren't listed in the README, but rather as part of the unit
| tests.
|
| It's confusing, because the letter calls it "the source
| code", which is not what anyone who knew what they were
| talking about would usually call it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That letter is written by lawyers-trying to explain the
| specifics of "test cases" versus "source code" is unlikely
| to be a useful use of space. (Plus, if you can get the
| entire project taken down, why not go for that?)
| smegcicle wrote:
| > it uses examples in the README as an example of that:
|
| >> We also note that the source code prominently includes as
| sample uses
|
| as far as I can tell these videos are not referenced in the
| README, but instead in the youtube.py extractor file, which
| would go against the accusation that they were featured
| 'prominently'
| mulmen wrote:
| From the RIAA perspective it seems clear this tool was created
| to download copywritten material. You can disagree with the law
| or think the tool has other valid uses but the intent of the
| tool author seems clear here.
|
| The author of the tool should have chosen a better example in
| the tests to at least maintain plausible deniability.
| bawolff wrote:
| Seems like putting that in the readme was pretty stupid. Intent
| matters in legal things, making the example infringing
| undermines the argument that the tool is good and some people
| are just bad.
|
| > This feels like DeCSS all over again.
|
| I think napster would be the better comparision (and especially
| napster compared to vcrs)
| lelandbatey wrote:
| They did not put that in the readme. The README contains only
| references to test videos, videos that don't actually exist,
| and one small-time video (in spanish?) that seems to be an
| old test video, but I have a hard time seeing for sure.
|
| The source code does contain references to copyrighted videos
| in the tests, tests intended to make sure that youtube-dl can
| download the data from videos using the extremely "token"
| signature scrambling that youtube employs for certain videos.
| You can see the test cases here:
|
| https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-
| dl/-/blob/master/youtub...
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| There's stuff like Justin Timberlake in there and Taylor
| Swift. This was immensely sloppy considering how the RIAA
| has won cases before.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I don't see how Napster is more applicable than vcrs. YouTube
| in this case is the broadcaster, putting content out to a
| general viewing public, ytdl is a recording device. For
| Napster to work, YouTube has to be imputes with illegally
| providing the copy and ytdl has to be the means to facilitate
| the copies transport.
| bawolff wrote:
| Napster and VCRs were both accused of being tools to
| infringe copyright, VCRs won the lawsuit, napster lost. A
| big part of that related to how napster positioned itself
| in terms of marketing compared to vcrs.
| nullc wrote:
| Without the existence of youtube-dl, youtube itself is
| necessarily commuting copyright infringement over the a good
| portion of the CC-By-SA works uploaded to youtube.
|
| (not all of them, since the uploader grants youtube a
| license... but if the work has copyright holders who aren't the
| uploader, it applies)
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I think in that case the copyright infringement would be the
| uploader rather than YouTube, but IANAL.
| [deleted]
| nullc wrote:
| There are CC-By-SA works uploaded to youtube by google
| employees while at work.
| pipi_delina wrote:
| This is so annoying... this means they can go after the OS we
| are using because some kids use their OS to download pirated
| stuff
| type0 wrote:
| Linux is already often banned in online videogames with
| claims that it's done to prevent cheating
| smashah wrote:
| This really needs to stop happening
| dheera wrote:
| https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
|
| > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.
|
| (a) Are there mirrors?
|
| (b) Are there Github equivalents in e.g. Russia where the RIAA
| doesn't have jurisdiction or extradition power?
| slezyr wrote:
| In Russia they've banned whole github multiple times and have
| their own "RIAA" that helped to create the firewall.
| dheera wrote:
| Not looking for Github specifically, but a Github-equivalent
| where the entire contents of the repo could be pushed to for
| continued development.
|
| If not Russia, any other country that has more freedom than
| the USA in software, doesn't take crap from the US, AND
| doesn't block Youtube.
| nguyenkien wrote:
| Chinese gitee, or self-hosted some where
|
| -- edit
|
| found one: https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
| esalman wrote:
| https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You can grab from the web archive.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201018120927/https://github.co...
| Santosh83 wrote:
| How can a program be in violation of DMCA? Is a knife in
| violation of the criminal justice system because some people use
| it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? How
| ridiculous.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system
| because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use
| it anywhere, ever?
|
| I mean, guns are banned in many countries using precisely the
| same reasoning. And I might totally be wrong about this but I
| heard that in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just
| kitchen knives.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| There's some subtlety, but basically, yes:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives
| yoz-y wrote:
| Oh I _love_ the specifics of that page. Did a lot of people
| try to walk around with kusari-gamas?
| m4rtink wrote:
| But it's just a totally normal agricultural tool! Totally
| not intended for ambushing Shogunate patrols in the
| night!
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > It's illegal to [...] carry a knife in public without
| good reason, unless it has a folding blade with a cutting
| edge 3 inches long or less
|
| > The maximum penalty for an adult carrying a knife is 4
| years in prison and an unlimited fine. You'll get a prison
| sentence if you're convicted of carrying a knife more than
| once.
|
| This blows my mind a little bit. I have a Swiss Army knife
| (among a ton of other things) in a waistbag that I carry
| most places I go. It proved very useful a few times, but
| other than "in case I need it" I don't have a particular
| reason I carry it. It seems really dystopian to me that in
| the UK, I could get 4 years in prison for that.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Does your Swiss Army Knife not fold? Is the blade on it
| over 3 inches long?
|
| Unless I'm mistaken it looks to me like that law was
| written almost specifically so that Swiss Army knives in
| particular are considered an exception to the rule.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen
| knives
|
| There's a "Challenge 25" (formerly "Think 21!" IIRC) policy
| which covers these kinds of situations - although it is just
| a voluntary agreement from the major retailers.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-
| vo...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| In New York, you need to be over 18 to buy Sharpies and spray
| paint.
| esalman wrote:
| Guns are not banned in any country. They are restricted in
| almost every country, for good reasons. The level of
| restriction may vary based on culture, history etc.
|
| Also people who claim the same logic applies to kitchen knife
| and guns are mentally still living in the wild west of the
| 1800s.
| will4274 wrote:
| > Guns are not banned in any country.
|
| Wikipedia indicates that a few countries (e.g. Laos) ban
| all private citizens from owning guns. See: https://en.m.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nati...
| esalman wrote:
| Countries where guns are "banned" only include a handful
| of outliers. I think only Eritrea has a blanket ban on
| gun possession by civilians. "Applicants for a gun
| owner's licence in Laos are required to establish a
| genuine reason to possess a firearm, for example hunting"
| (https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/laos).
| 15155 wrote:
| Ah, sort of like how concealed carry isn't "banned" in
| Hawaii because a permitting process exists, but in
| reality <10 permits have been issued since the system's
| inception.
|
| https://ag.hawaii.gov/cpja/files/2018/05/Firearm-
| Registratio...
| m4rtink wrote:
| AFAIK guns were banned by the Tokugawa Shogunate during the
| Sakoku period till the Meiji revolution & gun ownership is
| still very limited in Japan even today.
| inasio wrote:
| Switchblades are illegal in many places (all of Canada for
| example).
| kelnos wrote:
| > _How can a program be in violation of DMCA?_
|
| The DMCA contains provisions that criminalize circumvention
| tools. The plaintiff only has to prove that a tool is mainly
| designed to aid in copyright infringement and/or that's the
| most common use. It's a super super bad law, but has
| unfortunately been used quite successfully over the past 20
| years by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA and others.
|
| > _Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system
| because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use
| it anywhere, ever?_
|
| Many jurisdictions in the US consider carrying a hidden knife
| beyond a certain length as illegal carry of a concealed weapon.
| benlivengood wrote:
| They're probably claiming it's a circumvention device.
|
| Some knives (switchblades and gravity knives especially) are
| illegal in most places. I think the UK is even stricter.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Some knives (switchblades and gravity knives especially)
| are illegal in most places.
|
| I think it's usually about carrying them in public outside
| your house. Likely not as illegal to have them at home.
|
| Gravity knives are scary in that the police have occasionally
| argued that certain common pocketknives (e.g. Leatherman) can
| be used as a gravity knife and arrest people (usually
| minorities of the wrong color). I once was going on a road
| trip across multiple states and had to research the laws of
| each state because I was carrying a Leatherman.
| njharman wrote:
| In many jurisdictions knives of certain length or design are
| illegal. To posess to manufacture. In short to exist.
|
| Many many other tools are deemed iheirently illegal. Guns,
| explosives, motorcycles over certain CC, encryption software,
| etc.
| lukifer wrote:
| This isn't a new debate; in the early days of the DMCA, it was
| used to go after the author of DeCSS [0], despite the fact that
| legitimate Fair Use cases for the tool exist (personal backups,
| playback on unsupported devices at the time, like Linux PCs).
| The case was in fact stronger there, as DeCSS explicitly
| circumvented encryption [1], which AFAIK youtube-dl does not.
|
| And, of course, the infamous case of Napster [2]; while the
| vast majority of user behavior was obviously piracy, the
| tool/network itself was content-neutral, and could also be used
| for public domain content, or works published with the
| permission of the copyright holder.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
|
| [1] https://www.stoel.com/legal-insights/article/the-anti-
| circum...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster#Shutdown
| ntauthority wrote:
| From the youtube-dl source code, in a file helpfully called
| youtube.py: def _decrypt_signature(self, s,
| video_id, player_url, age_gate=False): """Turn
| the encrypted s field into a working signature"""
| if player_url is None: raise
| ExtractorError('Cannot decrypt signature without player_url')
|
| It definitely _does_ do decryption, as stated in the DMCA
| claim:
|
| > is a technology primarily designed or produced for the
| purpose of, and marketed for, circumventing a technological
| measure that effectively controls access to copyrighted sound
| recordings on YouTube
|
| .. and some claims referencing a 'youtube to mp3' site ruled
| illegal by a German court.
|
| Not defending this, 'effective technological measures' are a
| horribly broadly-scoped hole, but there is decryption at play
| here.
| hamiltonkibbe wrote:
| Could you make the argument that the technological measures
| are not effective and therefore not "effective
| technological measures" since youtube-dl is able to access
| the recordings in spite of them?
| ev1 wrote:
| I anal, but from what I've read DMCA anti-circumvention
| of access controls applies even if it's the string
| backwards or ROT13'd, because intent.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I'll admit that I'm ignorant of US law specifics here, and I'm
| not sure about YouTube's DRM and/or policy regarding downloading
| videos is.
|
| So I'll ask: is this DMCA request justified? Why would the RIAA
| be going after YouTube-dl, rather than Google? Wouldn't it make
| more sense for the RIAA to go after YouTube instead?
| evan_ wrote:
| YouTube licenses the music.
| itake wrote:
| I wonder why they don't go after Chrome and Firefox as well.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Give them time.
| burkaman wrote:
| The RIAA's logic is that a youtube-dl user is equivalent to
| someone in a movie theater with a video camera. The situation
| they're concerned about is somebody downloading a music video
| that they've authorized to be on Youtube. They make money on
| Youtube views, but they're losing precious fractions of a cent
| when you download it and watch it offline.
|
| This is obviously not ethically justified, but I have no idea
| if it's legally justified.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Even further, they are saying that the primary use of
| youtube-dl is reproduction and distribution. Distribution is
| the actual illegal act.
|
| I can't speak to the average youtube-dl user's experience,
| but I've used it a lot and have never distributed a video.
| I've saved videos to watch later on my own, that's it.
| dsr_ wrote:
| The problem with their argument is that youtube-dl is a video
| camera. The US has already rules that video cameras, VCRs,
| DVD recorders, etc are all devices with legitimate uses, and
| you can't stop them from being made or sold. A movie theater
| is within its rights to ask patrons using video cameras to
| leave, and Google would be within its rights to lock down
| Youtube.
|
| The RIAA is fishing, and all the precedents are against them
| pulling up even a minnow.
| rurp wrote:
| > The RIAA is fishing, and all the precedents are against
| them pulling up even a minnow.
|
| Unfortunately there is a lot of precedent for the lawyers
| of a large organization bullying a smaller one and getting
| away with it.
| ffpip wrote:
| You can't even search for it?
|
| https://github.com/search?q=youtube-dl
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Maybe a stupid question but can the repository just be hosted in
| a server outside US jurisdiction and everyone carries on as
| before?
|
| Why do I need to be denied access to a repo if I'm outside the
| US?
| robgibbons wrote:
| As long as the source code in the repo itself does not infringe
| on their copyrights, this seems like a plainly frivolous lawsuit.
| shmerl wrote:
| They should have counter claimed this nonsense instead of taking
| down the repo. RIAA is an abusive troll.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> RIAA is an abusive troll
|
| That is one of nicer things that one say about the Recording
| Industry Association of America.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| It sounds like the RIAA is comfortable filing DMCA takedowns
| when the logic is questionable.
|
| If so, then I'm curious about the legality of a counter-attack:
| Look at any websites, photos, music, videos, and text presented
| online by everyone represented by the RIAA. If anyone in a
| competent jurisdiction sees _any_ similarity to prior art that
| they 've created, even if it's their 2nd grade writing
| assignment, hit them with a DMCA takedown notice.
|
| After all, we just need a good-faith belief that it _might_ fly
| in some court somewhere, right?
| gorbachev wrote:
| Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as
| soon as they receive a DMCA notice. It's then on the owner of
| that content to file a counter claim to restore it.
|
| Even if the content is not in violation of DMCA, your files
| will be gone for a day or two, or longer depending on how slow
| the publishing platform operators are to process the counter
| claim and how long it takes to file the counter claim.
| gouggoug wrote:
| Has anyone tried sending automated DMCA for the entirety of
| Github? Once half of github is under bogus DMCA, maybe
| that'll make them think for a minute.
|
| I'm halfway serious.
| kadoban wrote:
| You as a random person would be committing what's
| essentially (or actually?) perjury and I'd expect you'd
| either be ignored or prosecuted. Big companies seem to get
| freebies on this, doubt you would.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as
| soon as they receive a DMCA notice.
|
| No, they aren't _obligated_ to do anything.
|
| Github is _immunized from any liability they would otherwise
| have to the complaining party for hosting the material
| affected by the notice_ if they comply within the parameters
| of the DMCA safe harbor provision (which requires action
| "expeditiously" rather than "immediately") when they receive
| a notice.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > No, they aren't obligated to do anything.
|
| This is semantics. Because github absolutely would not be
| able to exist if it lost its safe harbor protections.
|
| So, it is "obligated", in that if it does not follow these
| laws, then it will 100% have shut down, eventually, due to
| business reasons.
|
| If the alternative to doing a certain action, is that your
| business will almost certainly be shut down eventually,
| then I think that is a reasonable situation to use the word
| "obligated" for.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Because github absolutely would not be able to exist if
| it lost its safe harbor protections.
|
| It wouldn't lose them generally, just with regard to the
| act of hosting that specific item. Without commenting on
| the particular case, if the claimed theory of
| infringement was patently frivolous on its face, even if
| the notice was formally valid under the DMCA, it would be
| reasonable for a provider to ignore the notice because
| they had insufficient risk of liability to concern
| themselves with.
|
| (This is conversely why providers tend to be less good at
| responding to counter-notices, again, the only hammer is
| liability shield, but this is for any liability they
| would have to the person whose content was taken down for
| taking it down. As this is usually none to start with,
| they are quite free to be cavalier with counter-notice
| process.)
| kadoban wrote:
| This is part of the DMCA process. Github takes it down until
| they get a counter-claim from the repo owner, don't think they
| really have much of a choice in it, legally.
| shmerl wrote:
| Yeah, this process is messed up. It gives preference to
| abusers, instead of making them prove things to take
| something down.
| kadoban wrote:
| It is messed up in practice, yeah. The counter to that is
| supposed to be that if you submit totally bogus claims you
| can be prosecuted for an actual crime, but as far as I know
| that never happens, at least for the big players.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is part of the DMCA process. Github takes it down
| until they get a counter-claim from the repo owner, don't
| think they really have much of a choice in it, legally.
|
| They have a choice, but if they would be liable for hosting
| the content but for the DMCA safe harbor, failing to take it
| down when they receive compliant takedown notice means that
| they are then exposed to that liability because they are
| outside of the safe harbor.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Great. Alternatives to github please.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| > We also note that the source code prominently includes as
| sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our
| members' copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted
| in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the
| source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute
| the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies
|
| IMHO this wasn't the best move, I mean... the use of copyrighted
| music as an example DIRECTLY stated in the repo, as an example to
| show what you can download with the tool
| hysan wrote:
| Does anyone have a local copy of the repo? I'm curious when
| that particular mention was merged into the repo.
|
| Thought - It's possible that someone in association with the
| RIAA made a code contribution that included that change for the
| purpose of creating evidence to file a DMCA.
| cipherboy wrote:
| The videos mentioned in the takedown notice are part of the
| test suite and not part of the README. Definitely not made by
| a RIAA member.
|
| See youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py line 588 in HEAD.
|
| Video was originally added in
| f7ab6cbe160afbba60537c7a830a4c65c6f0b3ea back in '13, to the
| file test/tests.json.
| userbinator wrote:
| If I remember correctly, PopcornTime's screenshots and examples
| were all carefully selected to contain only public domain
| movies for this reason.
| paulgb wrote:
| Copyrighted content _with a notoriously litigious industry
| group behind it_ , no less.
| nsgi wrote:
| Yeah, an example downloading a video of Elephant's Dream or a
| tech conference talk would have worked just as well and imply
| the tool has primarily legitimate uses
| cipherboy wrote:
| It wasn't in the repo's README: it was part of the test suite
| for better or worse.
|
| See: youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py line L557
| kelnos wrote:
| I doubt there's any "for better" in that. It's an easy bit
| for the RIAA to latch onto to make their case, and I expect a
| judge or reasonable person on a jury would make make a
| distinction between the two, but not enough to matter.
| andrewmd5 wrote:
| When the RIAA sued me for operating Aurous a few years ago they
| nailed me for exactly this. Using copyrighted album art and
| song names to advertise my FOSS meant to stream music from
| sources like YouTube didn't exactly win me any points in court.
| 15155 wrote:
| Did they win the rights to the source code?
| deelowe wrote:
| So, someone could fork it, change the readme and other files to
| remove all references to copyrighted content. No problem?
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