YouTube-dl is now part of GitHub/dmca.git

I agree with you, at least in parts. I was addressing only the issue of copyright with digital copies, where people watch. play or listen free of charge after a given period.

But still after the artist, crew, studio or company cashed from their success, they could still make copyright grants to people that want to reproduce their content.

For instance, the free extension would only cover private listening, viewing or playing. But if you want to play the movie in your theater and make some bucks out of it, them you would have to pay for the copyright with the 'extended period rule'.

If you are musician and want to sing the song in your show, you would have to pay for copyright.

The logic here goes to anyone that might sell others people labor while getting it for free. This should be protected by the copyright law, more or less the way it is now.

But for private consumption, just giving enough time that would not be reasonable to just "wait for when its free" for people that otherwise would be buying is enough.

If your kids want to watch the new Avengers movies that cost just 10 bucks, who would wait 3 years for such a small value?

The problem is the whole industry is still stuck in the 20th century where products were all physical goods.

The digital realm and copies are here to stay, they are fighting against the tide, and one day they will wake up that its a lost battle.

> A compromise is to retain the existing copyright periods (after which works go to the public domain),but after 5-10 years of creation, works would become free for non commercial distribution. So Netflix would still have to pay for movies in their catalog. But me torrenting it from people freely sharing it and playing it on VLC would be legal.

Yes, that's basically it. But 10 years is too much and unnecessary. Within 3 to 4 years anything stop being fresh. People that buy things when they are fresh are no longer interested, and its enough time to make it if your piece had a bad first launch, but by virtue started to catch-up and make some bucks to the creators.

The key is to define a period of time where the piece might stop trending until very few people pay for them. Analitics might help to get a reasonable period for each media.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:... article 6(1):

> 1. The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:

(a) you're allowed to use YouTube, (b) YouTube is undocumented, (c) this only applies to relevant parts of the code.

> 2. The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the infor­mation obtained through its application:

to be (a) used for other stuff, (b) distributed, (c) used for cloning or copyright infringement.

> 3. In accordance with the provisions of the Berne Convention for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the provisions of this Article may not be interpreted in such a way as to allow its application to be used in a manner which unreasonably prejudices the rightholder's legitimate interests or conflicts with a normal exploitation of the computer program.

Creating youtube-dl isn't infringing on anyone's copyright, and the rightsholder here is Google, so it's allowed. There's wiggle room for arguing – it's not as cut and dry as most Big Bold Legal Statements I make, so iamnotalawyerandthisisnotlegaladvice – but I'm fairly sure this is sound.

In the UK, you have unequivocal rights to do this. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/50B, based on this directive, says:

> (3) In particular, the conditions in subsection (2) are not met if the lawful user—

> (a)has readily available to him the information necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (b)does not confine the decompiling to such acts as are necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (c)supplies the information obtained by the decompiling to any person to whom it is not necessary to supply it in order to achieve the permitted objective; or

> (d)uses the information to create a program which is substantially similar in its expression to the program decompiled or to do any act restricted by copyright.

The wording in (d), here, is clearer than the EU directive – unless youtube-dl's existence can somehow be shown to be a copyright violation (specifically, if its creation was an act restricted by copyright), it's permitted. Not sure whether this would help in an EU court, but if other countries' implementations have taken the obvious interpretation of the directive, then the other language versions of the directive are probably clear on the matter.