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

Post by edgyquant » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

jk700 wrote: post #5

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…

Luckily they don't need to consider what some rich capitalist CEO thinks and don't need to return to MicrosoftHub and hopefully they won't. Especially given there are plenty of easy options available: self host gitlab outside of US, use something non-US, like gitea, etc. But in case they do something that stupid, there will be forks. I will probably even make one fork myself with removed code reinstated. EDIT: what t…

Post by cyphar » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:23 PM UTC

skylanh wrote: post #118

cookiecaper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quot…

Post by gilrain » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #125

cyphar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by nocturnial » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #126

nocturnial wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.