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RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

torrentfreak.com

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Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#71

Post by cookiecaper »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #25
danaris wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would ban any form of scraping ...which many entities would love to do. If it were illegal to extract data any way but through an official API, with a TOS and fees and everything, that would make a bunch of dying business models so much more viable.

And kill Google Search. Google can't afford for that precedent to exist.

It already exists and it's used to kill startups every day (including mine). Google gets a pass because they're real special. See Perfect 10 v. Amazon.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#72

Post by gamblor956 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
hyperbovine wrote: post #7

For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)

Whatever the public perception is, they did indeed get Napster et al offline, which I think is the thing they cared about. Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.

Yes, that's the thing a lot of techies have glossed over. The increased usage of youtube-dl since the takedown letter was sent makes the RIAA's case stronger if the RIAA takes this to court. (It's not as apparent on HN where people have been bringing up their (mostly) fair uses, but on Reddit and other forums, people have been proudly proclaiming how they just downloaded youtube-dl and began downloading music videos from YouTube.)

Ironically, by using youtube-dl en masse to "stick it to the RIAA" they may have inadvertently dug its grave instead.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#73

Post by cookiecaper »

mmcdermott wrote: post #69
LockAndLol wrote: post #43

I mean, it's nice that the Github CEO doesn't agree, but if the solution is to get it back on Github, then it isn't really a solution. Smaller projects won't get this kind of attention. What this whole episode should do is make it more common place to use tools like git-bug and mirror repos. Maybe someone will even write a tool to do so easily. But what I see happening is people just wanting the status quo to stay. U…

I've been fiddling with Fossil ( https://fossil-scm.org ) lately and the fact that it includes Wiki, forum and bug lists in the core source control project is looking better and better with all of this.

Fossil is great, highly recommended.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#75

Post by jmnicolas »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #55

The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost. The problem is that the project may not survive this. Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will…

> Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project

You had to install the Github version anyway if you wanted to have a recent version that would work with YT.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#76

Post by AshamedCaptain »

choppaface wrote: post #62
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #55

The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost. The problem is that the project may not survive this. Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will…

At this point it's less about software maintenance and more about the streisand effect ala DeCSS http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

No, it's not; this misses the point.

A tarball of _ancient_ DeCSS code has some value because you can use it to "decss" _all_ content made _before_ a certain date (e.g. most physical DVDs). So it makes sense to preserve the tarball in any method possible.

A tarball of an _ancient_ youtube-dl version is absolutely useless because the youtube HTML will have changed a million times in the meanwhile. You will not be able to use it for anything, neither for old nor for new content. Publishing/preserving youtube-dl tarballs is an absolute waste of effort.

The RIAA here is targeting existing project developers, and possibly also users. Trying to scare them away. Not trying to censorship old tarballs of the code which will quickly become useless.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#77

Post by thatcat »

ev1 wrote: post #36
Sephr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking the project authors to remove features that are covered by fair use isn't exactly what the authors want. It's better than no action, but not by much.

I'm wondering whether any legal team or similar have donated some time to figure out whether this is actually fair use or to set a precedent, because looking from the outside in, it clearly looks like an implementation meant to circumvent some form of intentionally-obfuscated protected handshake or access control. From a strictly code based POV, it is intended to download protected objects with tests to ensure that p…

That code is protection for YT TOS, not copyright law. If YT want's to use dcma in this way it should claim copyright of all posted material and see how that works out for them. Even if it the video's were copyrighted, it could be still be downloaded for fair use purpose rather than infringement. RIAA is using takedown's to protect google ad money, which is not the intended purpose of that legal action.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#78

Post by chmod775 »

Macha wrote: post #48
boogies wrote: post #33

To me the most interesting (and new to me) part is §Cease and Desist Notices: > Following our initial coverage, we learned that the pressure against YouTube-DL had already started weeks earlier in Germany. Law firm Rasch, which works with several major music industry players, sent out cease and desist orders in the hope of taking YouTube-DL offline. > Hosting service Uberspace was one of the recipients. The company h…

It's probably worth mentioning that Uberspace is based in Germany, not the United States, so may not feel the same risk from not obeying the DMCA as a US company.

I run a service based in Germany, and yes we don't care about DMCAs per se.

However German laws are essentially: "Once you are notified of copyright infringing/illegal content, you have to remove it, lest you lose your protection as a service provider and become responsible for the content."

A DMCA takedown notice would be such a notification.

On the upside you don't need to do anything if you don't have reason to believe the content is illegal in any way (unlike with DMCAs where you pretty much always have to remove first).

On the downside it's a bit easier to get into trouble as a provider if you chose to let something stay online.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#79

Post by varispeed »

Macha wrote: post #48
boogies wrote: post #33

To me the most interesting (and new to me) part is §Cease and Desist Notices: > Following our initial coverage, we learned that the pressure against YouTube-DL had already started weeks earlier in Germany. Law firm Rasch, which works with several major music industry players, sent out cease and desist orders in the hope of taking YouTube-DL offline. > Hosting service Uberspace was one of the recipients. The company h…

It's probably worth mentioning that Uberspace is based in Germany, not the United States, so may not feel the same risk from not obeying the DMCA as a US company.

The irony that freedom of speech is more protected in Germany than in the US.

Re: RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

#80

Post by eikenberry »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #55

The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost. The problem is that the project may not survive this. Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will…

I don't think distributions dropping it will have that big of an impact considering you only ever used those versions to bootstrap as you needed to `-U` update it regularly to keep it working (except maybe on Arch and similar bleeding edge, rolling distros).

I kind of hope they adopt flatpak or appimage based disto for it, giving it a more standard distribution mechanism and promoting one of those platforms.

Either way, this sort of advertisement is hard to beat. I'd expect the project to come out of this with more manpower, not less.

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