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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

#121

Post by onli »

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.

Maybe also worth mentioning that Uberspace is not your average hoster. It's a highly developer focused and developer friendly hoster with the fitting technical expertise, combined with a lot of character (plus interesting business model). If only one german company would not accept a baseless claim as this it would be Uberspace.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

weego wrote: post #66
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…

It's not worth playing cat and mouse with scrapers, it'll always be relatively trivial to solve compared to the engineering effort to come up with a new strategy, and that's with brute force scraping which is a fair way behind methods commercial scraping companies have been using for a long time.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

wallacoloo wrote: post #108

> By now it is clear that the RIAA’s takedown notice backfired badly. With the ‘Streisand Effect’ in full swing, there are now probably more copies of YouTube-DL online than there ever were. 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…

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by Arnavion »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #110
jmnicolas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(Not here, my distro has a backports repo, and I'd suspect a significant if not majority of users get it from a repo of some sort, distro or not). 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 we…

I'm on a rolling distro and I still maintained my own copy of youtube-dl (with a cronjob to run `youtube-dl -U`) instead of using my distro's package. If I used my distro's package, every time it broke I would have to wait a few days for my distro to update its package with the fix, even though upstream would've cut a release with the fix within a few hours.

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

#125

Post by AshamedCaptain »

cyphar wrote: post #116
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I realize that since NewPipe's Java; but it's just an example.

I really doubt the "it's just the test cases" justification btw, since test cases would likely be fair use. The deencryption stuff is the problem, and NewPipe does it too.

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

#126

Post by heavyset_go »

nocturnial wrote: post #119
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…

It's not a traditional DMCA copyright take down, but a take down that's enforced under a different section of the DMCA. I believe that in this case, there is no avenue for issuing a counter notice, but I'm not a lawyer and I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

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

#127

Post by ilugaslifk »

offtop5 wrote: post #81

Someone else needs to reimplement it, in Rust cause that's what all of you want . Then never include a test case with music videos. I was using it to download public domain videos, if certain video producers want specific drm then that's fine.

Despite its name, half the value of `youtube-dl` is that it Just Works on every (free-as-in-beer, and non-DRMed) video site known to man. Every obscure Youtube alternative, every local news station's dogshit CMS, every porn site, Twitter, Twitch, HGTV, you name it.

The far bigger part of the job would be rewriting all 800 custom extractors, then perpetually maintaining them against constant, silent, often adversarial breaking changes in each one.

Using Rust instead of Python would cut the very fat long tail of contributions that makes most of this viable, and would doom this project more than most.

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

#128

Post by wumms »

dschuler wrote: post #98
varispeed wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Beamtenbeleidigung

In Austria and Germany insulting a government official is handled by the same law as insulting a normal citizen is (except for that also the superior can file charges for subordinates).

[German] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamtenbeleidigung

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

#129

Post by depressedpanda »

gamblor956 wrote: post #82
Qub3d wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue this happened in spite of their efforts. The music industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the streaming world for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that with centralized platforms, artists have no reason to use labels for "discovery" purposes any longer. Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did. Ironically,…

Labels were never about discovery. They were about promotion, production, and all of the expensive stuff you need at scale. For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.) But they're all…

> But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy [sic] has a notable impact on creator's earnings.

Do you have any data that doesn't make the ridiculous and false assertion that 1 download = 1 lost sale, with which to back that claim?

Because from what I've read, piracy has the opposite effect.

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