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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

#171

Post by ineedasername »

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…

Part of the problem is that even if the code gets reinstated, the RIAA may just pressure Google into changing its method of protection. Then perhaps a new tool could be created, but not very easily if the RIAA succeeds in establishing a precedent for taking down tools that have the potential to infringe.

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

#172

Post by jcranmer »

depressedpanda wrote: post #129
gamblor956 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you look at a graph of music industry revenue, it peaks in 2000, collapses until 2015 (at ½-⅓ its peak value), and has been on a strong uptick since then. Peak apoplexy about the impact of piracy was around 2005, and there was a strong desire to tie the collapse in revenue directly to piracy.

From what I can tell, most of the studies establishing a clear economic cost to piracy tend to rely on numbers originating from the music industry without clear attribution to data, or by naïve analyses estimating that 1 download = X lost sales, without considering effects like budgetary limits (I'll spend at most $X on entertainment this year) or conversions to profitable sales.

Additionally, there's a lot fewer studies on piracy post-revenue nadir. It seems as if the rise of streaming has caused the industry to stop panicking so much about piracy, and there's some evidence that streaming has converted consumers to paying customers.

All-in-all, I would say that it's not so much that piracy hurt the industry as piracy filled the existence of a market segment that the industry refused to fill. Piracy only hurt the industry in the same way digital cameras hurt Kodak: the existing business model was unsustainable, but they refused to pivot to take advantage of the clear coming shift in the business model.

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

#173

Post by jk700 »

Mindwipe wrote: post #162
jk700 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I downvoted you for putting false information that countries outside of the US don't have similar anti circumvention laws, FWIW.

Too bad, because there was no false information. Plenty of countries don't have not just anti-circumvention laws for copyright, but also DMCA-like laws and may even require you to obtain a court order before you can get something taken down. Except for a couple of countries, most countries could make it significantly harder to take down youtube-dl under such obviously false pretenses. Some countries are even particularly hostile and ignorant towards copyright-related demands from other countries.

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

#174

Post by uponcoffee »

Lammy wrote: post #153
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…

It’s about awareness, not distribution. How many people learned youtube-dl exists due to news about its takedown?

Their comment was not about distribution, but on going development.

It's easy for an individual site to break youtube-dl, and it happens often. Awareness/distribution don't matter if:

A) there is no central repository for updating the project//distributing updates B) threat of legal action deters maintainers from the project

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

#175

Post by kuon »

I have been thinking about leaving github for a while. It is a very good platform, but as time passes, I realized I wanted to be more in control of my projects.

Yesterday, I moved about 250 repos away to a gitea instance. Transition required a bit of tinkering (a few scripts) but went smoothly.

The good sides are:

- very fast, a lot faster than github for pushing/pulling but also the web UI is a lot faster

- I'm in total control, I can change the look of the UI, create as many orgs as I want to organize my repos…

Now the cons:

- No social network effect, I don't know how contributions to my projects will evolve

- Subject to DDoS and the like, I need to keep my instance accessible because I moved my FOSS projects on it

Maybe more, it's been one day only.

I am not suggesting all project should move out of github, it is a very good tool, but I think it wouldn't be bad to rely less on it.

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

#176

Post by benologist »

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.

What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...

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

#177

Post by davidzweig »

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…

'rolling cipher stuff' - I think you just do a regular web request to a Youtube video page URL (ie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...), and the response contains (in a json object) several URLs that point to the video content in various ordinary formats. You don't need to run any JS even, or pull any tricks, just parse the response string and fish out the URLs. 'rolling cipher' means the URLs change (over time, user?), so they aren't useful for sharing to others. What is the 'technical circumvention' here?

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

#178

Post by the8472 »

Mindwipe wrote: post #158
the8472 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing for this section of the DMCA either. But it becomes an automatic liability issue when you're informed so a host is betting their business and in some cases the jail time of senior executives to ignore it. That is the case pretty much anywhere.

> But it becomes an automatic liability issue

Is there? Just because someone claims (without court determining it) that some content is illegal doesn't make it so. So there would have to be some language in the law that the intermediary incurs liability due to mere allegations.

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

#179

Post by smolder »

Qub3d wrote: post #54
benologist wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...

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,…

The commercial streaming solutions are only going to be good until they're the only game in town. Commercial entities don't simply build good things and leave them intact for people to benefit from with no profit motive. Once the leverage is there, there will be abusive monetization, consumers will be treated like crap, until perhaps some breaking point where it can be disrupted.

How would streaming become the only game in town? Piracy and any other online mischief are being stamped out the hard way, by taking control of our technology from us. Approved operating system, approved drivers, approved software, approved browser, approved websites, no piracy, no privacy, no deviance.

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

#180

Post by JdeBP »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #152
JdeBP wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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". (-:

Not GP, but I understand what they are getting at. They were shortening to be concise. What was actually meant was... "You will not be able to use it for anything because YouTube and every other video sharing website supported by youtube-dl will have changed a million times.

... which revision is equally based upon the erroneous premise that all of those WWW sites are the same as YouTube. Clearly, with all of the hundreds of "extractors", they are not.
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