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

141–150 of 292 posts

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

#141

Post by edgarvaldes »

bleepblorp wrote: post #132
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…

Github hosting is not the be all and end all of open source software development. There are alternatives, ranging from hosting on one of the Chinese public clouds, using 'bulletproof' hosts that cater to such things as phishing groups, cutting a deal with the Russian mob to host development in Russia, hosting on an .onion site, or making connections with the Pirate Bay folks.

So the alternatives are groups associated with authoritarian regimes, pishing groups and mobs?

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

#142

Post by userbinator »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #141
bleepblorp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github hosting is not the be all and end all of open source software development. There are alternatives, ranging from hosting on one of the Chinese public clouds, using 'bulletproof' hosts that cater to such things as phishing groups, cutting a deal with the Russian mob to host development in Russia, hosting on an .onion site, or making connections with the Pirate Bay folks.

So the alternatives are groups associated with authoritarian regimes, pishing groups and mobs?

"If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."

This isn't all that different from the fact that sites which prominently support free speech attract all the extremists, because that's the only place they have.

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

#143

Post by TobTobXX »

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.

True, but doesn't solve the DMCA issue. Every git provider in the US would be liable if they refuse DMCA takedown notices.

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

#144

Post by boomboomsubban »

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.

The allegedly relevant sections of the DMCA do not contain any forced takedown measures except under court order. So I agree it doesn't seem to be a traditional takedown order, there doesn't seem to be any other reason they took it down.

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

#145

Post by qppo »

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…

Depending on the artist and label it's a giant question mark whether the label has any hand in the live performances or tours. Touring has always been expensive (and lucrative), but the agencies that deal with it traditionally haven't been labels.

The traditional business model of a record label is almost entirely obsolete, and they need new revenue streams. That said, the people who run these businesses are antithetical to innovation and creativity in business and that's why industry groups like the RIAA exist in the first place.

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

#146

Post by toyg »

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…

Cam down. This will just end up like DeCSS, when it was packaged separately and left to the user to trigger the necessary download.

Distribution/integration is the easy part. The hard part is to anonymise and secure core developers, and to allow contributions to continue flowing in a safe manner.

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

#147

Post by OzzyB »

jarbus wrote: post #2

Really good to see Nat Friedman working towards resolving this issue.

I guess you didn't open and read the screenshot from the IRC chat.

At the bottom of the image; after being asked what needs to be done, he says: "Just the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to get the copyrighted material" (emphasis mine).

He's essentially echoing the main talking point that YTDL isn't a scraping tool that acts as a User-Agent (which is legal), but an illegal tool that "circumvents technological measures" because it "decrypts" and runs some JS code just like any browser would.

It's what we call being "yeah, yeah yeah'd" -- I don't expect much from GitHubHQ at this point other than trying to save face and maintain their position as the "developers friend".

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

#148

Post by jcranmer »

gamblor956 wrote: post #138
depressedpanda wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not claiming that 1 download = 1 lost sale. But it's well-documented that piracy negatively affects music, film, and game studio income. See, e.g., https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-sound... Piracy may the opposite effect for software but it definitely has a negative effect on entertainment related IP.

If you read the fine print in that study, it is concluding the cost of the piracy purely in terms of 1 download = 0.2 lost sale. There's not even a discussion of the potential word-of-mouth effects or later sale generation potentials for pirated music.

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

#149

Post by AnthonyMouse »

bleepblorp wrote: post #88
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.

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…

That's not how buying government officials works. You don't have to buy a majority of them. You just need a couple who then go in and horse trade for the thing you want. Then they vote for some boondoggles and healthcare bills, and in exchange 51% of the other ones vote for the thing they (i.e. you) wanted.

You can look up how much the RIAA and MPAA spent on campaign contributions. It wasn't a billion dollars.

And "campaign contributions" are only one path to victory. You could also go the route of getting Wikipedia et al to do what they did for SOPA.

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

#150

Post by will4274 »

JdeBP wrote: post #140
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the argument does not depend on that premise, unless you are suggesting that the other websites never ever ever change their HTML. i.e. replace YT with $YOUR_FAVORITE_VIDEO_HOSTING_WEBSITE in the message above.

Your argument that "You will not be able to use it for anything" because "youtube HTML will have changed a million times" is most definitely based upon that erroneous premise. Or a misunderstanding of the word "anything". (-:

You come off as responding in bad faith. The argument is not specific to YouTube; YouTube is just the example. You're reaching to find something that technically incorrect, even though the point is fairly clear. There's an obvious difference between a static target (like a DVD) and a moving target (like a web service). With a static target, an archive is useful for all items produced prior to the archive. With a moving target, an archive is useful until the target moves.
Post reply on HN