101–110 of 292 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony that freedom of speech is more protected in Germany than in the US.
That's not ironic. They spilled blood over it much more recently than we have.
I don't think it'd be ironic, but it's also not true. It's obviously not a free speech issue, and Germany has laws regarding copyright and circumvention of constraints. I doubt a large company would have taken the same route, uberspace is just generally pretty cool and user friendly.
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.
If you want the DMCA changed, you're going to need to find enough money to, as part of a competitive auction against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, successfully bribe: 218 Congresspeople 60 Senators 1 President 5 Supreme Court (in)justices. A conservative estimate is that getting the DMCA reformed would cost at least a billion dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions'). No one who has that much money spare has enough of…
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.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-revokes-lese-majeste-law/a-390...
Famously, games in the Wolfenstein series are pretty heavily censored in Germany:
https://kotaku.com/wolfenstein-2-has-a-strange-workaround-fo...
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…
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.
If you want the DMCA changed, you're going to need to find enough money to, as part of a competitive auction against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA, successfully bribe: 218 Congresspeople 60 Senators 1 President 5 Supreme Court (in)justices. A conservative estimate is that getting the DMCA reformed would cost at least a billion dollars in bribes ('campaign contributions'). No one who has that much money spare has enough of…
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.
Did it though? Sure, the Streisand effect caused more distribution of youtube-dl, but that's never really been an issue. Open source software as widely used as youtube-dl is mirrored in a hundred different places.
The issue here is what does future development of youtube-dl look like? It sounds like the rolling cipher stuff is going to have to go if development is to remain on Github, and that's a win for RIAA.
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…
Furthermore, if you view the IRC logs in question, he is only willing to reinstate the project if they remove the code the RIAA alleges violates Section 1201.
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.
And even then, where are users going to search the most recent version? You will definitely not preserve the same number of users if you switch from yt-dl being "one apt-get away/one FDroid install away/one pip install away" to "one bittorrent search/wget from shady .ru website". And let's not talk about how will people contribute. The project could be as good as dead.