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

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

#111

Post by gamblor956 »

thatcat wrote: post #77
ev1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Youtube is not the copyright holder, the RIAA's members are. They have licensed their content to Youtube.

Youtube stores cache files to a user's computer, obfuscated so they can't be easily copied or accessed, most likely as part of the terms of their license. That is legally sufficient to constitute a copyright protection scheme.

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

#112

Post by onli »

CreepGin wrote: post #59

Do those German firms hold a monopoly on copyright claims or something? Years ago I noticed all the Recent records on Chilling Effects (now Lumen) were originated from German. I dug a little deeper and found out one of the firms were generating thousands of records per day and some of the claims were simply mistakes because they used simple string matching algorithms to automatically report massive amount of google s…

It's Germany. Institutionally zero tech knowledge, but a very pro copyright legislature and political caste (that, at a high level, is also very corrupt. Think Wirecard and add Kohls schwarze Kassen). Even with its own evidently corrupt court that always sides with copyright holders, regardless how absurd the claim and even if the law does not agree with the judges at all. Of course that's a country where law firms like that can prosper.

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

#113

Post by skylanh »

rapsey wrote: post #100
Quarrelsome wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For someone that wants to quickly get to the action:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux

> In 2019, Evan Ratliff—who wrote a series of articles about Le Roux for The Atavist Magazine—published The Mastermind, a 446-page account of Le Roux's ventures.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549566/the-mastermi...

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

#114

Post by kzrdude »

Santosh83 wrote: post #44

In this entire story what I find more concerning than Youtube-DL itself is the almost crippling dependence developers over the Internet (that is, OSS devs) have upon GitHub right now.

I don't see how that is true, we can move at any time. There is no dependency, only addiction.

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #31
jimktrains2 wrote: post #4

> GitHub’s CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won’t be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material. Which is frustrating. Isn't the information needed to do this provided by youtube themselves? This isn't some private key that wasn't supposed to be public; it's literally given out every time…

When Handbrake first came around, it installed DeCSS since it was meant to convert DVD media. Because of that, I was not allowed to use it at corp job. At some point Handbrake changed to not include DeCSS, but if you had VLC installed it would use the library provided by the VLC install. This met our lawyer's approval and allowed us to use Handbrake vX.X and higher only. Just an anecdotal story about how software tha…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by cyphar »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #67
jk700 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses youtube-dl for all the videos online, it's presence in any repos isn't as important as it may seem, because it breaks from time to time for some websites and you need to update it in order to keep using it, which is only easy if you keep it in your home directory so you can just run youtube-dl -U once it breaks.

I completely disagree. I have been using for example NewPipe from FDroid which is autobuild regularly as native Android program. I would no longer expect FDroid now to keep doing this if they risk a DCMA letter that takes out their entire repo. And I would assume a shitton of users use yt-dl code through another GUI application, rather than directly through an EasyInstall/virtualenv/whatever. And will most py repos s…

NewPipe doesn't use youtube-dl, they have their own implementation of the stream extraction code[1]. Unless that codebase also has test cases which specifically try to download RIAA content, they would need to find a different justification for a DMCA takedown.

[1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

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

#117

Post by AnthonyMouse »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #76
choppaface wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A tarball of an _ancient_ youtube-dl version is absolutely useless because the youtube HTML will have changed a million times in the meanwhile.

But it's not a tarball of an ancient version of youtube-dl. It's a tarball of a version of youtube-dl from like two days ago. So then it gets posted to some other host or some distributed thing and development continues over there, only with twice as much support because of all the media coverage.

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

#118

Post by skylanh »

cookiecaper wrote: post #70
gruez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find it laughable to claim that a session token is a "rolling cipher". If the claim is to be taken at face value, it would ban any form of scraping, as most sites invariably use some sort of session token.

Scraping an unwilling system is already essentially illegal, there's a long case history on this. It's only recently starting to change (via pure judicial activism) in HiQ v. LinkedIn. As written, the CFAA allows anyone to make a felon out of a persistent scraper.

https://www.rcfp.org/scraping-not-violation-cfaa/

> A federal appeals court last week issued a “hugely important” decision with potentially major implications for data journalists when it held that using computer programs to collect publicly available information from the internet — or “scraping” — likely does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal computer crime statute.

Links are in the quoted text.

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

#119

Post by nocturnial »

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…

> The problem is that the project may not survive this.

I thought all they need to do is to issue a counter-notice. Popcorn did this and got their code reinstated on github: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24885079

In the worst case, they need to adjust their tests. This is what the issuer of the complaint brought up. Their tests of the code downloaded a couple of seconds of what the RIAA thought is copyrighted material. If I'm not mistaken, this is what they are basing their case on.

If youtube-dl removes those explicit urls from their test cases, I don't think they have a case. You could argue fair use, but remember it's only a test case in that program. The authors could just as easily reprogram the test cases to accept any url a user wants to test.

Anyways, consult lawyers, perhaps change the test code and issue a counter notice and move on.

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

#120

Post by teruakohatu »

mrspeaker wrote: post #96
choppaface wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issues were mostly for lots of the niche video sites supported by the tool. The YouTube code base was updated as often as it needed to be.
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