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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

#181

Post by dredmorbius »

ineedasername wrote: post #171
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…

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.

YouTube is increasingly only a few pain points from mass exodus from both creators and audience. Advertisers and copyright maximalists less so.

Bandwidth and distribution are no longer the limitations on independent hosting they once were. Independent discovery methods (e.g., DDG video search), are improving. Noncommercial orientation makes youtube-dl and similar mechanisms a net positive --- simplify the web-based delivery, increase viewer flexibility, provide greater tolerance for network or system variability.

My own interest in YouTube has very little to do with commercial mass media, and far less to do with ad-seeking chum-spewing bottom-feeders.

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

#182

Post by jron »

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…

Couldn't the software simply fetch the token and display it to the user for manual input? It seems like the software's automatic use of the token is somehow breaking part of the DMCA. Is it actually illegal to display returned data from a web request? Is the manual input of "keys" legitimately a possible loophole? Did any of the early DVD rippers require manually adding keys?

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

#183

Post by varispeed »

dschuler wrote: post #169
varispeed wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the concept of psychological injury is treated as a second class event where often it can leave scars for years or even lifetime.

Could you expand on what you mean by that? I assume you don't mean someone giving someone else the middle finger.

This is an extreme, but for example telling someone mean things can have a lasting impact.

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

#184

Post by ta1234567890 »

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…

> You could argue that courts aren't as accessible in the US as they should be without deep pockets (rightfully so)

Are you saying that it's ok/good for people with less money to have worse access to courts than people with more money? If so, why?

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

#185

Post by grishka »

davidzweig wrote: post #177
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, use…

As I already said in another thread several days ago, not quite. For most videos, yes, you do a request to https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=... and there are links to files and adaptive streaming playlists. But then there's stuff like VEVO music videos, and those have an additional layer of protection in the form of some signature IIRC that you need to add to those stream URLs to make them valid.

Source: I added a custom YouTube player to my app several years ago, and, actually, besides my own reverse engineering, youdube-dl sources were quite helpful with figuring it all out. It didn't play those "protected" videos though.

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

#186

Post by bityard »

jmnicolas wrote: post #75
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…

> 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 at all, I've been installing the latest releases of youtube-dl from PyPI via pip for years. In fact, it's still there. The RIAA takedown has had no effect (so far) on my usage of youtube-dl. The RIAA clearly doesn't have any understanding about how open source Python programs are commonly distributed.

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

#187

Post by JdeBP »

will4274 wrote: post #150
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". (-:

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 movi…

It's not a reach when YouTube was specifically named as the reason that youtube-dl will be "absolutely useless". That was what was clearly stated.

Whereas it is a reach, ironically, for you to assume that all WWW sites are like YouTube, especially given the discussion of "extractors" that I pointed to, and even are moving targets.

As I said before, this premise, that you have assumed like AshamedCaptain, is highly erroneous. I suspect that neither of you have actually looked to see what WWW sites out of the hundreds that youtube-dl works with actually do have changing HTML, and how many of the "extractors" are still happily working years after they were written. (Sadly, the open issues list on GitHub, which would have helped to determine this, is gone, GitHub being a single point of failure.)

This is just entirely erroneous assumption and hyperbole, that everything is like YouTube, that things will change "a million times", and that magically all of those hundreds of WWW sites will stop working and "you will not be able to use it for anything".

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

#188

Post by xiphias2 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #181
ineedasername wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

YouTube is increasingly only a few pain points from mass exodus from both creators and audience. Advertisers and copyright maximalists less so. Bandwidth and distribution are no longer the limitations on independent hosting they once were. Independent discovery methods (e.g., DDG video search), are improving. Noncommercial orientation makes youtube-dl and similar mechanisms a net positive --- simplify the web-based d…

I love that youtube for me works everywhere: on my iPad, Samsung phone and my smart TV, laptop, the offline viewing mode is better than in any other application. None of these are hard to replicate, but it's still a lot of work (and some of the devices that I mentioned are walled gardens).

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

#189

Post by rakoo »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #157
edgarvaldes wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

or just literally host a web page yourself with a link to a git repo, also on your server. All this centralization of git is silly

That's because the whole point of github is not hosting, it's the collaboration. This is where centralization helps.

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

#190

Post by Darkphibre »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
hyperbovine wrote: post #7

For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)

Whatever the public perception is, they did indeed get Napster et al offline, which I think is the thing they cared about. Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.

I'm still annoyed at the ruling against mp3.com. They created a hash of the physical CD-ROM, and if it matched one that was already in their cloud they wouldn't actually rip the contents for your own personal copy of the exact same bits. It was tantamount to ZFS deduplication being outlawed.

Reminds me of What color are your bits: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23.

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