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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

#231

Post by mordae »

rpgmaker wrote: post #219
dredmorbius wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>YouTube is increasingly only a few pain points from mass exodus from both creators and audience. I hate to burst your bubble but that's not even close to be a realistic possibility. Wish it was but it's just not.

Go ask Twitch users.

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

#233

Post by JamesLeonis »

pgt wrote: post #223
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 annoyed me enough to put me back into a buying position. I looked at Gitlab pricing after paying Github every month for a long time (hey, Business Guy: we'll switch in a heartbeat) and I started thinking about what it would take to host code in a decentralized fashion. In a free market it is important that when you are displeased with a supplier that you truthfully tell that supplier why you are displeased (ideall…

> I started thinking about what it would take to host code in a decentralized fashion.

May I introduce you to GitTorrent?

https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

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

#234

Post by donmcronald »

antpls wrote: post #213
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…

They should remove the tests and the circumvent features from youtube-dl, then someone else should created a fork that is kept in sync with youtube-dl and with, for only difference, those tests and circumvent features. That way only the fork get periodically DMCA'd, which will be way easier to recover from : just create another fork with the tests

I wonder if it could just be done as a plugin system. Developers should start taking note of this kind of stuff and anything that might ruffle the feathers of big media should go into plugins.

Do the digital equivalent of the way rich people use holding companies and shell companies. Put all the high risk stuff into the smallest independent repo possible and abandon it at the first sign of trouble. Use an MIT license so anyone can fork it and continue development if you have to abandon it.

It probably wouldn't even take a ton of money to set up a matching corporate structure so you could control everything. Put all the risk into a subsidiary that doesn't make any money (or makes very little). Drag out DMCA complaints until they sue you and then bankrupt the asset-less company. Rinse and repeat.

If you want to get super ballsy, sell the plugins that infringe, but siphon all the money out of the subsidiary with trademark licensing. That way you can license the same trademark to the next company to maintain the brand. Bonus points if you put the holding company in a tax haven.

IANAL. That's probably a really bad idea. Don't do it.

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

#235

Post by mlaci »

Cloudef wrote: post #52

Would it be possible to capture video by using headless browser and rendering the video element & audio to file? Of course, this will induce some quality loss if encoded to lossy format again. But would effectively be "legal" as the tool would run the youtube's "DRM" and be not distinct from normal browser in any way. I guess the headless browser could maybe perhaps just download the stream to disk as well.

Yes, but in that case you need to reencode every video in realtime at playing. Maybe you speed up the process with capturing the different parts of the video in parallel and concatenating the parts in the end, but if you want good compression then you need to reencode the whole video again. This is far from just getting a video file from a CDN server. If you want to try it, just few line of code with MediaRecoder API in any browser.

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

#236

Post by exciteabletom »

kuon wrote: post #175

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 t…

Couldn't you retain the social aspect by mirroring the repos on Github? Linux does this.

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

#237

Post by dredmorbius »

xiphias2 wrote: post #188
dredmorbius wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Youtube works poorly on my Android tablet, my aging Linux desktop, and even on a recent iMac, the flexibility of mpv, mps-youtube, or VLC is often preferable.

More options are more options, surprisingly enough.

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

#238

Post by dredmorbius »

ghthor wrote: post #229
uponcoffee wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a miracle that OSS ever was developed by large groups of people before github existed. /s

If individual developers are subject to lawsuits and harassment for their contributions, some may choose not to.

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

#239

Post by donmcronald »

kzrdude wrote: post #114
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.

I don't see how that is true, we can move at any time. There is no dependency, only addiction.

It's true. Look at all the tooling and workflows that depend on GitHub. Issues, pull requests, code review, etc.. Combine it with integrated services that require GitHub to run like Actions (CI) and Codespaces (dev env) and you start to see how it works.

In a few years it'll be normal for new developers to view a software project and a GitHub project as the same thing because the entire process from creating the project to publishing it (on Azure most likely) will happen via GitHub.

Saying that no one is dependent on GitHub is like saying a mechanic isn't dependent on their tools. Moving away from GitHub is like a mechanic walking out of the garage with a single crescent wrench (the git repo). Then you find out no one else sells any of the tools you know how to use and that the only option is to rent them from someone else (Atlassian or GitLab).

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

#240

Post by dredmorbius »

JdeBP wrote: post #180
SimonPStevens wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're being gratuitously obtuse.

Acknowledge the point and move on.

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