Oh they're going after youtube-dl...

F

https://github.com/github/dmca/...

😂

@frogstair that's a rather vague statement, and it very much depends on local legislation.

I for one find it hilarious that the DMCA notice mentions a decision from a local court in Germany and goes yeah so pretty much the same right?

@frogstair because this CAN be used to download copyrighted stuff, but also non-copyrighted stuff.

By your logic they should do dmca takedowns on anything that can be used to download anything as I can easily download copyrighted material through curl or wget or my browser...

@frogstair small point. That license grants exclusive rights to YouTube to distribute and reproduce the content. If you as a user download the videos and do not distribute them, it's not a violation of the license or the terms of service. Similar to how recording movies on your VCR was not illegal.

@frogstair I never mentioned YouTube.

As for YouTube, fair enough.

But taking down a downloader for only one service...

You can use this fucker for a number of services/sites (https://gist.github.com/sky-y/...) and even build your own downloading parsing in.

If youtube-dl would solely target YouTube, I partially would understand the takedown but this is just bullshit.
They could've asked to remove the copyrighted tracks from the repo!

@frogstair And that depends on the country. In the Netherlands, solely downloading for personal use without redistributing is actually legal.

@frogstair You can make copies for personal use under German copyright. Also, you have to actually download the video data anyway, or else the browser could not display them.

@frogstair Go to the link in the OP, search for "German" in the page, and wonder why.

@frogstair So if I fork it, change the name and build in my own parsing/downloading for a custom project while still keeping the other services (as for parsing/downloading) enabled, should that amount for a takedown as well?

@frogstair Ah, good to know that a tool I fork, rename and adjust to make something happen that is entirely legal is copyright infringing!

@frogstair Only that the law isn't what you think it is - and DCMA abuse has always been totally common.

@frogstair By that logic all torrenting software should be banned/DCMA'd as well.

my god what a shit show of a thread

spare yourselves the copyright debate, it's different for every country anyway, and the content of the actual dmca note is bs

@frogstair No I mean as for that torrenting software is very often used to illegally download copyrighted content 😅

@frogstair Also nonsense. Anyone can provide e.g. OSS SW via torrent even if the actual author doesn't provide it that way.

@Fast-Nop Yeah this was my point, especially since I use torrents for 99 percent only for downloading (and seeding) Linux iso's

@frogstair Of course you can go after every seeder, and that's exactly what happened back in the day, which is why Sharehosters were invented.

@frogstair But what about the music video? Can you even buy those? And if they were to air on network TV, couldn't I TiVo/DVR those videos and watch them at home any time?

@frogstair Maybe you weren't there back in the day, but filing lawsuits against thousands of individual torrent seeders was exactly what the copyright holders did in the early 2000s.

@justamuslimguy it doesn't matter if you can buy copyrighted content somewhere or not. Only the copyright owner can distribute the content, or they can give others permission to distribute it. In this case they have given Google the permission to distribute the content and now they are mad that people can obtain the content from Google.

@frogstair The big difference is that even back then, they went only after the seeders. What caught a lot of people by surprise is that by default, their torrent programs also re-seeded, i.e. uploaded, what they downloaded. So they were uploaders without realising it, and the industry made up totally bogus "damage" calculations to have a court case.

Now with YT, the upload is legal - or else, they would go after YT (and have done so in the past), not after a tool.

The case for copyright infringement with YT-DL is very thin, actually only the YT links in some test cases which indeed should be replaced.

That's because the download itself is legal (or else no browser could display it), and unlike torrent programs, nothing is re-distributed.

@electrineer So just as the record companies give MTV distribution rights for music videos, if I record MTV at home and watch it later. Nothing wrong with that. Why is it wrong with YouTube?

@linuxxx The illegal part is the parsing logic from YouTube, because it has a single purpose and that purpose is incompatible with YouTube's ToS, since YouTube provides the means to download videos that are marked as open. If you removed that, what you'd be left with is perfectly legal.

@Lor-inc breaking terms of service isn't the same as breaking the law.

@justamuslimguy it basically isn't

@Fast-Nop I find it hard to see how sharing a link to YouTube is illegal. Unless YouTube is distributing content illegally, then maybe. But even then it's YouTube who breaks the law, not the one who shared the link.

That happens, when you are so bold, that you use the name of the commercial service most important for the music industry in your project's name _and_ have unit tests contain examples of downloading "copyright"-protected stuff.

Sure, we know from decss, that it will still survive somehow. But they would only have needed to pretend to not making it for the almost sole purpose of downloading stuff from Youtube.
I use it for offline-viewing videos from Youtube since the black flu happened and will obviously continue using it as long as it keeps working.

As i am on a rolling release Gentoo, i have the 3MiB source targzball for the 2020-09-20 release lying around on my system.
Does anyone know a DMCA-proof place to upload it to?

@Fast-Nop
Who could forget dragging literal children to court.

@Oktokolo Only the repo is blocked, not the download as Linux / Windows executable and source tarball: https://youtube-dl.org

For a mirror of the repo, see the rant link in the first comment of this rant.

>circumvent the technological protection measures

That's a pointless argument... If the content can be streamed publicly then no protection measures can possibly exist... I already viewed the content and you completely allowed me to download, decode and play the content on my machine in the given quality... Downloading it is not different from viewing it online over and over... I fail to see the issue. If build a water well in the middle of the town and put on a sign "feel free to drink" I can't complain if someone fills a bottle with the water and leaves.....

@electrineer No but a tool that breaks the ToS to do something that the platform allows in some other way if it's legal is obviously designed to break the law.

@Lor-inc I tried to read your comment 5 times but couldn't understand what you mean.

@Lor-inc Circumventing ToS is not equivalent to breaking the law because ToS aren't laws.

@Fast-Nop
It might be breaking civil law, depending on its validity as a contract, but I definitely agree it's not breaking criminal law.

@SortOfTested I remember court proceedings about "deep links", i.e. links directly to articles, where the owners didn't like that and wanted users to click through their ad-ridden portal instead. They lost because they put it online and can't just forbid direct linking.

This case is pretty similar because all the downloader even does is grabbing the actual video URL and downloading it.

@Lor-inc there's still an issue with your way of thought. What if the ToS is simply wrong, or written by someone who doesn't understand the service or the internet at all?

The userbase represents the environmental pressure here. The legal system has to adapt, they can't just do and say whatever either... This is why cities build sidewalks where people walk on grass, except we all know the legal system is still decades behind the digital boom... But that's now our problem... They put content on YouTube and YouTube now owns that content. And if someone doesn't understand how video streaming works on YouTube that's on them... "Boohoo, I uploaded all my nude pics to a service known to be hacked often and now I got hacked!"... Well that's your fault sweetie, not mine and not the services, you granted permission to a third party you could easily check was not safe...

Think about Netflix... They adapted to modern needs and they are on top currently...

@Hazarth In what realm is breaking an outdated law not illegal as long as there exists a law and someone is losing money?

@Lor-inc It's not about breaking a law. If people never broke laws they would never change. And this particular dmca is simply unjustified. Im gonna play the grey jedi here, but even piracy has It's place. It's part of the voice of the people. Not to mention with this dmca im still not convinced It's even in the grey area, I think It's just outright unjustified. The video protection makes no sense. You're telling me I can watch the video wherever and whenever I want, but I can't download it because that would allow me to watch it whenever and wherever i want? What's even the logic there? Ads? I already use an adblocker, as do most people here I believe. And let me tell you, in-video sponsorship ads are way more effective than that intrussive bs that just makes me want to punch whoever made me watch them so... See.. some companies adapted and It's working fine, the ones that refuse to adapt will be shouting and screaming until they dissapear silently, as is the case here

It's not a popular opinion I guess, but I do think tools like youtube-dl were made for a reason... Same as adblock, user-agent switchers, piHole, duckduckgo, p2p file sharing, this whole vpn selling business...

I mean if youtube-dl is bypassing the locks made by YouTube, then services like VPNs do too... There's a region lock for a reason... And the reason is just as asinine as this one...

But is anyone taking down them? No? Why not? Seems a bit one-sided once money is involved right?

@Hazarth since you got off to that tangent, there's also this project that enables automatic skipping of ads that are baked into the video https://sponsor.ajay.app/