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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

#251

Post by lloeki »

sfifs wrote: post #204
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, most YouTube videos do not use any technological measure to prevent using any TCP client, not simply Google's Javascript player compbined with a web browser, to download the video. Moreover I have observed that for most YT videos Google's player uses "progressive download", i.e., a number of successive HTTP requests with incremented Range headers, not "streaming". Thus, for most videos, there is no need to circu…

I believe a court in Germany has already ruled on the rolling cipher being a technological restriction (and that is referenced in the complaint). The point of the technological measure (together with TOS) is to make the intent clear. youtube-dl could probably have been fine without implementing the cipher decryption function but since it did and had a test suite to check and flag if it doesn't work, it made itself a…

I’m failing to see how handing a key to someone along with the address to the door it unlocks communicates any intent about that someone to unlock the door with his left hand only, and never with his right one.

Now, if they had designed a system where the key could only be operated once/for a given timeframe from a specific left hand glove, then the intent would be clear (IOW DRM container like widevine or fairplay). But the intent of making it from cumbersome to impossible for right handed, broken armed, or disabled people, or just missed the bus and being late, to use the key would be very clear also.

What’s clear to me from this overall SNAFU is that they’re after the eyeballs. The content only matters as an eyeball attractor.

I’m wondering if in the EU youtube-dl could fall under protection for interoperability.

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

#252

Post by rrobukef »

lloeki wrote: post #251
sfifs wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe a court in Germany has already ruled on the rolling cipher being a technological restriction (and that is referenced in the complaint). The point of the technological measure (together with TOS) is to make the intent clear. youtube-dl could probably have been fine without implementing the cipher decryption function but since it did and had a test suite to check and flag if it doesn't work, it made itself a…

I’m failing to see how handing a key to someone along with the address to the door it unlocks communicates any intent about that someone to unlock the door with his left hand only, and never with his right one. Now, if they had designed a system where the key could only be operated once/for a given timeframe from a specific left hand glove, then the intent would be clear (IOW DRM container like widevine or fairplay).…

I think a better analogy is: Handing someone a key to unlock a door to watch an artwork and then taking the (a copy of, a photo of) artwork with you.

You can see the Mona Lisa but you cannot take a photo of the Mona Lisa without previous consent of the Louvre.

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

#253

Post by berkes »

dschuler wrote: post #198
varispeed wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Certainly, that’s true. There are many ways to hurt others with words, even avoiding definitions that would be against the law in Germany. This is a bit personal, but my brothers and I grew up in Germany with a father who was verbally and emotionally abusive. However, he didn’t break any laws regarding offensive speech at least. Ironically legislating against offensive speech protects people from superficial harm of…

Current monarchs even. In the Netherlands just a few years ago, people were jailed for spray painting and shouting 'Fuck de Koning'.

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

#254

Post by lloeki »

rrobukef wrote: post #252
lloeki wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m failing to see how handing a key to someone along with the address to the door it unlocks communicates any intent about that someone to unlock the door with his left hand only, and never with his right one. Now, if they had designed a system where the key could only be operated once/for a given timeframe from a specific left hand glove, then the intent would be clear (IOW DRM container like widevine or fairplay).…

I think a better analogy is: Handing someone a key to unlock a door to watch an artwork and then taking the (a copy of, a photo of) artwork with you. You can see the Mona Lisa but you cannot take a photo of the Mona Lisa without previous consent of the Louvre.

> You can see the Mona Lisa but you cannot take a photo of the Mona Lisa without previous consent of the Louvre.

You can, they just ask you to responsibly not use a flash.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/F0948J/tourists-photographing-mona...

This specific painting is public domain, you could copy it to your heart’s content.

> I think a better analogy is: Handing someone a key to unlock a door to watch an artwork and then taking the (a copy of, a photo of) artwork with you.

I kinda get your point, but it’s completely non obvious that the key from YouTube has any sort of such value: it’s just a string of chars, it could just as well be some homegrown encoding, tracking system, or error check+. A ticket has clear information about its validity in space and time. I’d argue that the alleged protection is so lousy as such that it could very well be dismissed as being one, whereas a ticket+museum or video+drm you cannot get the content out of the container, at least not easily so, and it’s very obvious that it’s there to prevent that, with enforcement of metadata on the key (e.g cert/key with time, device or account id, pubkey signature, ...)

I seem to recall a legal provision (might be DMCA even) that says if the protection scheme comes to be trivially bypassed then the circumvention clause doesn’t hold water, in essence codifying protection obsolescence and making e.g DeCSS ultimately legal, but I can’t find the reference to that.

+ I’d argue it’s actually more akin to the second one.

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

#255

Post by BlueTemplar »

gamblor956 wrote: post #72
cookiecaper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's the thing a lot of techies have glossed over. The increased usage of youtube-dl since the takedown letter was sent makes the RIAA's case stronger if the RIAA takes this to court. (It's not as apparent on HN where people have been bringing up their (mostly) fair uses, but on Reddit and other forums, people have been proudly proclaiming how they just downloaded youtube-dl and began downloading music videos…

YouTube makes these videos freely available. Downloading / recording them is in no way illegal.

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

#256

Post by nickflood »

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…

If your hosting provider is in a country with DMCA-like laws, they can be targeted the same way GitHub was and would probably comply the same way as well. So was there really a point?

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

#257

Post by BlueTemplar »

ineedasername wrote: post #165

The source code amounts to instructions that could be used to violate copyright. So there's a distinction here: Is it illegal to tell people how to violate copyright, when that method has other uses? If so, what about a blog post telling you how you can use your cell phone camera to record a youtube video?

Downloading / recording YouTube videos is NOT a copyright violation.

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

#258

Post by BlueTemplar »

rouxz wrote: post #45
danaris wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it would ban any form of scraping ...which many entities would love to do. If it were illegal to extract data any way but through an official API, with a TOS and fees and everything, that would make a bunch of dying business models so much more viable.

afaik it is against Google TOS to scrape data from their services e.g. play store but I can't find the evidence now. Some mobile store analytics agencies do it very carefully seizing the risk of their google account being banned forever. Haven't heard the precedents, still.

ToS aren't laws.

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

#259

Post by toyg »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #212
toyg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But user loss implies contributor loss, and that is the problem. It's not about me being able to find it (I definitely will be able to :) ), or guaranteeing a "safe harbor" to developers (there are plenty of organizations that are dying to host something like this). It's about a project hat requires a shit ton of constant manpower not having it because of it being "tainted".

It’s not C++ and complex encryption, this is a python web scraper - hardly rocket science. I don’t think manpower will be significantly harder to come by than it was in the past — the opposite, in fact.

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

#260

Post by fxtentacle »

leetcrew wrote: post #206
fxtentacle wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still listed in the law that you're not allowed to insult royalty, but that does not appear to be enforced. For example, see Böhmermann insulting Erdogan on national TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair https://archive.org/details/SchmhkritikAnRecepTayyipErdoanzd... Here's a transcript: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... Imagine doing such a poem about Trump in th…

the text doesn't load for me in the translated version for some reason so I can't comment directly on the poem. it's hard to imagine any legal action taken against someone who wrote an insulting poem about trump though. people say stuff like "I hope he dies" on social media every day.

I have a hard time believing that a CNN announcer would keep his/her job after saying this about Trump on national TV:

"His dick stinks badly like kebab, even a pig's fart smells nicer. He is the man who beats girls while wearing rubber masks. Most of all he likes to fuck goats and oppress minorities."

But like Wikipedia says, Böhmerman retained his job. In my opinion, that's the difference. A higher level of tolerance for speech that most people disagree with.

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