[HN Gopher] Update: YouTube-dl reinstantiated thanks to EFF (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ Update: YouTube-dl reinstantiated thanks to EFF (2020) Author : ericdanielski Score : 375 points Date : 2021-01-20 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (assassinate-you.net) (TXT) w3m dump (assassinate-you.net) | jrochkind1 wrote: | > There is one thing that has been and is always going to be | counterproductive, especially in such situations: blind | actionism. Many people flooded the Internet (read: forums, | Reddit, bug trackers of projects), inciting panic and suggesting | to move to some other "free" hosted platform. This is clearly not | a solution. Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to | comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you | end up in court. | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: | [deleted] | stretchcat wrote: | AFAIK NewPipe does not use youtube-dl. | creatonez wrote: | > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with | such a request. | | Gitlab so far has a history of not responding to bogus requests | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | In addition, there is huge benefit if you can persuade a large | company to defend against this. GitHub/Microsoft is one of the | few entities that actually has the financial and legal | firepower to take on the recording and music industry. | | The smaller hosts may not have the financial and legal cushion | to do anything but rollover if the music industry lawyers send | them a notice. | musicale wrote: | > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with | such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in | court. | | Yet it wasn't actually DMCA takedown request, but a strange new | kind of takedown request, where a a private company claimed | (falsely) that youtube-dl violated section 1201 and demanded | that github remove it. | | Unfortunately github seems to have codified these new "1201 | takedowns" which didn't seem to exist previously. | kmeisthax wrote: | Even if DMCA 512 doesn't cover DMCA 1201 violating | circumvention tools, that wouldn't make GitHub in the clear | to host them. If anything, it would actually increase their | liability: the whole point of DMCA 512 is to provide a | process by which an ISP can disclaim liability for | contributory copyright infringement. | | If they refuse the request on the grounds of "you can't DMCA | a circumvention tool", then they're still liable regardless | of if a DMCA 512 takedown can or can't apply to a 1201 | violation, since there's still an underlying tort of | distributing a 1201 circumvention tool. If they accept the | request, and get sued anyway, they could at least argue that | they have a safe harbor (or should have a safe harbor). | jsight wrote: | Advocating for even more centralization isn't necessarily more | productive. I'd love for someone to manage a mirror of all | github repos in a place that is less likely to face these kinds | of legal jeopardies. | | Why not try to direct people toward that, rather than direct | them towards crossing their fingers and hoping the lone company | wins the fight? | withinboredom wrote: | Because the only way to "win" a "battle" is to take a stand | and "fight," running and hiding isn't winning. | | By building up sufficient case law, everyone can do things | better and the next time this comes in front of law makers, | there will be a better understanding of edge cases and better | laws can be written. | | I'd really love to see a Developer's Guild or Union that | could collectively take on these sorts of fights and argue | for all software devs. The EFF can't stand alone. | boomboomsubban wrote: | > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with | such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in | court. | | Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter | your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project | itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, | doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do | whatever they want until someone challenges them? | | While it's good that github eventually returned it, their | willingness to comply with such a sham should make projects | consider moving from them. | Mindwipe wrote: | > Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no | matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the | project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright | material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass | to do whatever they want until someone challenges them? | | The takedown request didn't claim the project was an | unauthorised post of copyright material. It claimed it was a | DRM circumvention measure, and US law is sufficiently vague | on that matter it really can't be said definitively one way | or another if that's correct unless someone is willing to | litigate it. | | Nobody does, in this case. Certainly, describing the request | as "completely fraudulent" is wrong. It may or may not have | been valid, but the legislation is sufficiently vague in most | of the US and Europe that it's entirely possible this could | go to court and the RIAA would win. | boomboomsubban wrote: | >. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure | | The takedown notices do not apply to DRM circumvention | measures, only copyright material. | | I agree it's completely possible that a court case could | rule against youtube-dl, but the only method for taking | down a DRM circumvention tool is to get a court order. | Mindwipe wrote: | DRM circumvention measures don't have a takedown | provision as such, but the hoster becomes jointly liable | as soon as they are notified, which was the point of the | letter. | boomboomsubban wrote: | If this were true, it would make no sense for github to | have reinstated youtube-dl. I assume such legal liability | would need the start of a lawsuit to be valid. | wonder_er wrote: | Based on how easily the EFF resolved the problem by sending | that notice to GitHub, it feels like this could be an easy | problem to solve in the future.. | | The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of | lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a | handful of really interesting blog posts. | | I would say this entire story is something to celebrate, | because it shows how easily a single person could stop this. | | Mitchell L. Stoltz, Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF signed | this letter, which probably took no more than handful of man | hours to compile. | | Pretty great roi. | stretchcat wrote: | Not every project will have a sufficiently high profile for | the EFF to notice. Relying on the EFF like this doesn't | scale, isn't future proof, and doesn't address the long | tail of the problem. | munk-a wrote: | I think it'll most likely come down to a question of cost | per incident - while a couple of lawyer hours is | certainly relatively cheap if that same cost is required | for every similar RIAA take down request then you'd need | to look at how many hours it takes for RIAA to identify a | good target and produce a take down notice. The | effortlessness of this particular incident gives me hope | that if the volume of take downs increased then maybe the | EFF or someone else could essentially put together a form | reply. | boomboomsubban wrote: | >The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of | lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from | a handful of really interesting blog posts. | | It's not clear that the RIAA needed to spend any real | lawyer man hours making the request, I don't think a | designated agent needs to be a lawyer but even if they do | they just send a form letter. | skocznymroczny wrote: | Any hosting platform in the US. | aryehbeitz wrote: | now sosumi is taken off snap store, probably due to pressure from | apple | ChrisArchitect wrote: | reinstantiated? or reinstated? this is not news (2020) | nicky0 wrote: | It's of interest. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | Further bulk of discussion from November: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726 | musicale wrote: | It should probably be "reinstated" as you suggest. | | And the title has been labeled (2020) as you suggest. | | HN isn't up-to-the-minute "news" necessarily; the best date | I've seen recently on HN was (516). ;-) | lmilcin wrote: | Just a reminder, that for every reinstated project there is bunch | of other that are going to die without public support. | | So no, the problem did not get resolved. | munk-a wrote: | I think the hope is that getting a few high profile counters | out there will have a chilling effect on the RIAA being so | cavalier with their notices - but I do agree that if the | counters would, in perpetuity, take hours of lawyers' time then | I'm uncertain if RIAA or the counter notices will scale better. | lmilcin wrote: | Except that it keeps happening constantly and platform-owning | companies just quietly "correct" the error and everything is | fine. | | It is not a fair process if it requires you to get public | outrage. | | Whenever I see a story of a kid which family succeeded to | collect money for an expensive treatment thanks to public | outcry, I always think about all those other kids who were | not so fortunate to get public interested in them. | | Should we be happy that we got one of a thousand saved or | should we be thinking there is something fundamentally wrong? | wonder_er wrote: | It sounds like the _real_ "Lesson to be Learned" is: | | "When a large organization makes asinine threats with spurious | reasoning, take a lawyer friend to lunch and help them draft a | sternly-worded email about the offending organization." | | "Mail said letter to threatened party. No further action needed. | Go back to solving meaningful problems." | rurban wrote: | > more importantly, all the metadata (for example, issues and | pull requests) that was posted on the platform by users, | developers and maintainers. Such information is invaluable to a | project, and a takedown of the entire repository with all this | data can hurt a project very badly. | | That's why you regularly need to update your issues with `git bug | bridge pull`. Then you have all the issues locally, and are not | bound to slick but the unfree website UI. You can edit and add | issues locally and push it eventually. Only problem is: | corabolation on issues with such a temp. took down GH project | relies on everybody interacting with it via git bug. But all the | bug refs are pushed upstream, wherever that is. | | About lost pull requests: Regular remote branches are the | standard workflow, and an issue can carry the description, if the | commits are not descriptive enough. | | Problems: issues are not numbered, only have hashes. They can be | merged out of order, there's no central truth. So references in | docs or commits need to use the hash, like bug #4e327af, not just | GH #403. | jhauris wrote: | For those down voting, can someone comment on why this would | not be a good idea? I hadn't heard of git-bug, are there other | caveats one should be aware of, or is there a reason this isn't | a problem worth solving? | bergstromm466 wrote: | Do they maybe want to be able to trust Github for the service | they claim to provide? And do they maybe agree with the | initial takedown? | inetknght wrote: | > _update your issues with `git bug bridge pull`_ | $ man git-bug No manual entry for git-bug $ git | bug git: 'bug' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. | The most similar commands are log | tag $ git --version git version 2.17.1 | | What is `git bug`? | michaelmure wrote: | See https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug | antman wrote: | Seems to be this one: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git- | bug#bridges | [deleted] | louloulou wrote: | Information doesn't want to be free - Cory Doctorow - Tech Forum | 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA | Matheus28 wrote: | Remember to donate to EFF if you support their work. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-20 23:00 UTC)