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YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

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Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#411

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!

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#412
post #86

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…

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#413

Ok, so who's building a distributed, cryptographic, uncensorable version of GitHub?

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#414

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 o…

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…

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#415
post #4

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…

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#416

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?

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 § 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 copyri…

> 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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#417
post #99

> 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…

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#418
post #4

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…

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.

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.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#419
post #99

> 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…

cURL could be used to download pornography. Think of the children!

Does cURL feature "here's how to download porn" anywhere in the code base or documentation?
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