Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 292 posts

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

#91

Post by bleepblorp »

VonGuard wrote: post #53
Multicomp wrote: post #3

At some point all these exceptions to the dmca section 1201 do at some point indicate to me that we need to have the law updated to be more narrowly tailored rather than continuously apply exceptions to it which can later be taken away.

Speaking as someone who worked to get a 1201 exemption, and who personally shit in the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA's Cornflakes, I can confirm the 1201 process is stupid. Mainly because the RIAA,MPAA, and ESA always show up tp fight the exemption even when they know literally NOTHING about the exemption being asked for. We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no n…

Did you file ethics complaints with the RIAA lawyers' bar association(s)?

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

#92

Post by ahofmann »

varispeed wrote: post #79
Macha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a European, I can't find any irony in that. It seems completely normal to me.

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

#93

Post by chmod775 »

ikeboy wrote: post #87
chmod775 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

>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). The DMCA works the same way. If you refuse to remove content and it turns out to be legal, then you as a service provider can't be held liable. You only get in trouble if you ignore a valid notice and there is infringement. Neither is…

If that's the case I suppose the only notable difference is that the DMCA system is more formalized.

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

#94

Post by maweki »

chmod775 wrote: post #90
maweki wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why exactly would that be ironic?

One of 4chan's favorite past times is discussing which country has more freedom of speech. It always ends in a massive flamewar and I can only recommend not to repeat that here.

I was asking where the irony would be coming from, and not whether the attached statement was factual.

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

#95

Post by gamblor956 »

VonGuard wrote: post #53
Multicomp wrote: post #3

At some point all these exceptions to the dmca section 1201 do at some point indicate to me that we need to have the law updated to be more narrowly tailored rather than continuously apply exceptions to it which can later be taken away.

Speaking as someone who worked to get a 1201 exemption, and who personally shit in the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA's Cornflakes, I can confirm the 1201 process is stupid. Mainly because the RIAA,MPAA, and ESA always show up tp fight the exemption even when they know literally NOTHING about the exemption being asked for. We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no n…

There must be more to your story.

The RIAA generally doesn't have any involvement in video games, other than where its members license music to games (i.e., GTA), and they generally wouldn't have any grounds for being part of the proceedings you've described if their involvement was just the music licensing.

I can see the ESA being a huge dick in these proceedings, because it's their job to do that, but the RIAA literally wouldn't care as long as somebody paid the music licensing fee (for that low volume of users the licensing fee would generally be less than $100 annually, all inclusive).

I've been on the other side of an RIAA negotiation, and they were very easy to work with. We theoretically owed them millions of dollars for several years of unlicensed music streaming, and they waived the statutory penalties they were legally entitled to in exchange for us agreeing to pay a few hundred dollars of royalties a year to stream their members' music. All told, we paid less than $2500/year for streaming licenses for all of the Big 3 labels and a dozen or more smaller labels.

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

#96

Post by mrspeaker »

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/

I don't think so for youtube-dl. I think it's dead now. There was already hundreds of PRs to be merged - so many videos already weren't able to be downloaded on various sites.

The codebase was not the useful thing about this project: it was the constant upkeep and whack-a-mole-ing of the various site changes over the 1000+ supported sites.

This event may spark renewed interest and help, but my money is on "slow death" as support for sites and videos decays.

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

#97

Post by offtop5 »

the8472 wrote: post #47
Koliakis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like any of us are going to be able to change the DMCA overnight and people rely on this tool for all kinds of purposes. Do we wait for somebody to magically fix the DMCA or do we make minor fixes to youtube-dl to make it less susceptible to bullshit DMCA notices like this? I assume most people just want the original repo to go back up and for normal development to continue before functionality breaks becaus…

There are other options, e.g. hosting somewhere where automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing and the RIAA would have to go through a proper court process.

Why add a circumvention method in the first place.

If record labels want to stop users from downloading their content, that's more than fine. It's a giant attack vector for such a small net benefit.

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

#98

Post by dschuler »

varispeed wrote: post #79
Macha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is actually _less_ legal protection for speech in Germany than the US.

For instance, it's against the law to insult a government official like a cop (Beamtenbeleidigung). This could mean saying something like "damn cops" in earshot of the police - it doesn't take much.

You could argue that courts aren't as accessible in the US as they should be without deep pockets (rightfully so), but fundamentally free speech _is_ much better protected in the US.

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

#99

Post by rndgermandude »

cookiecaper wrote: post #60
rndgermandude wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. This looks more like pandering than anything else. Friedman has nothing to lose by making public statements of support, but a lot of reputation to gain if people buy into it. Instead of taking it down in the first place, Friedman should have told the RIAA to shove it, deliberately opening Github up to liability with the intent to defend this in courts and create precedent should the RIAA file suit. Even l…

I'm not a lawyer but afaik the DMCA takedown process is prescribed by statute, and platforms must comply to qualify for the legal protections that make hosting user-generated content possible. Friedman would certainly be removed by Microsoft if he jeopardized GitHub's legal protections by defying the mandated process, to say nothing of the potential of creating personal legal liability, both criminal and civil. youtu…

>I'm not a lawyer but afaik the DMCA takedown process is prescribed by statute, and platforms must comply to qualify for the legal protections that make hosting user-generated content possible.

Correct, that's why I said they should deliberately open themselves to liability, and the fight this in court.

Moreover, technically they already have, anyway. The anti-circumvention law (17 § 1201) does not even offer safe harbor protections; these are meant for copyright infringement only (17 § 512).

>Friedman would certainly be removed by Microsoft if he jeopardized GitHub's legal protections by defying the mandated process, to say nothing of the potential of creating personal legal liability, both criminal and civil.

Certainly? There is a risk of that happening, sure. But that is counter to the risk that MS faces from backlash within tech over a decision to fire him for taking on the RIAA.

But yeah, I know, Github and Microsoft standing up here is wishful thinking. One may dream :D

>youtube-dl remains freely available off-GitHub (not to mention on the local disk of anyone who ran `git clone`). I just used it 10 minutes ago. There is no public good served by defying the law here, and there is no reason to put the whole kit and kaboodle on the line over it.

It is less accessible. And the RIAA will not stop coming for them. Getting them thrown out of search results by sending the same legal bullshitery to google, bing, duckduckgo etc. Going after the hosters of the website (like they apparently already tried)

Moreover, they "lost" a large chunk of the community they had on github, incl issues and discussions etc (maybe Friedman at least has the stones to let them have their data?). People will also now think twice before getting involved in the project.

>tl;dr, ignoring the DMCA process isn't just a "somewhat risky move".

That's exactly what it is. The RIAA would have to respond by suing them (or stopping their campaign). Github isn't automatically liable, they just lost protection from liability, but can still win in courts.

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

#100

Post by rapsey »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #11
jjones2 wrote: post #9

Always host software outside of US or *eyes jurisdictions. Think Truecrypt.

What happened to Truecrypt? Isn't that the one with the fundamental flaw that means everything it encrypted is trivial to unlock today? EDIT: this is a genuine question, I thought it had been unmaintained for ages and vulnerabilities had been found. My memory betrays me?

Since Truecrypt is mentioned, I am going to use this place to highly recommend the book Mastermind. The that Truecrypt was based on named E4M was written by a man with quite an insane life story. He created a massive criminal enterprise.
Post reply on HN