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GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

torrentfreak.com

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Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#71

Post by saurik »

jasode wrote: post #37

Some example comments in this thread: >"People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, " >"Time for a decentralized version control system?" >"The nice thing about fossil" ... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the true difficulty : The community wants a (1) Schelling Point [0] for workflow/issues/discussions/PRs that's also (2) censorship resistant. So far, (1) and (2) con…

How about a copy of GitLab hosted as a Tor hidden service? (The core problem there being that someone has to be willing to host it, of course, as this isn't truly a decentralized approach to the problem, and so maybe one day gets outed and something seriously bad happens to them... but, practically?)

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#72

Post by mrtksn »

konjin wrote: post #69
mrtksn wrote: post #18

Technologists once again shocked that a policy issue cannot be solved by Technology. Tech solutions that are not aligned with the policy only work until lawyers and politicians catch up.

A newsgroup works. Its just that no one under 30 seems to realize that you don't need js to have a web application.

That’s why it works. If it had significant impact to worth their compensation the lawyers would have been on it.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#73

Post by reflectiv »

mkl95 wrote: post #66

I think some people are missing a major point about youtube-dl's takedown. The purpose of this DMCA claim wasn't just to prevent people from downloading videos, it was to set a legal precedent for the RIAA and similar organizations to troll Github and anyone hosting public repositories with it, by linking them to "illegal downloads". By agreeing to this without any public opposition, Github has become similar to Yout…

I am sorry...but what would the RIAA troll Github for exactly?

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#74

Post by JoeAltmaier »

bitwize wrote: post #67
bnj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you have any insight about how this works when applied to other mechanisms and tools? YouTube-dl has a lot of use cases, among which are the downloading of potentially copyrighted works, in a way which seems similar in my mind to the way a VCR has a lot of use cases including, possibly, the recording of TV shows in violation of a license. Why are VCRs permissible to distribute but not this softwa…

> Why are VCRs permissible to distribute but not this software? 1) Because the Supreme Court -- in a narrow 5-4 decision -- ruled them so in the "Betamax case" after the MPAA tried -- and up to that point succeeded -- to have them banned as tools of copyright infringement. The MPAA was sore about this for decades afterward, maintaining that the SCOTUS was simply wrong as a matter of law. My girlfriend's stepfather wa…

Clearly that's pretty silly. A photocopier fits the rule of devices that violate copyright. So does a camera. Yet they are for sale.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#77

Post by saurik »

oever wrote: post #9
amelius wrote: post #3

Time for a (truly) decentralized version control system?

ForgeFed is a decentralized version control system under development. https://forgefed.peers.community/

This is just a federation protocol, so it doesn't really solve the problem: federated systems are just a way to make it easier to interoperate between a number of separate instances, but every individual "thing" (in this case, a repository) is still going to be hosted on an instance that can be taken down (and sure, it could be put on another one, but then you didn't solve the problem); what you want is a "truly decentralized" (the word "truly" in parentheses was a critical part of the comment you were replying to) and really hopefully "distributed" revision control alternative, not merely a mechanism to "enable interoperability" (the phrasing from their website) between existing services (which should make the issue clear: if no existing service could host the repository in question, then interoperating between existing services doesn't suddenly cause stable hosting to appear).

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#78

Post by konjin »

mrtksn wrote: post #72
konjin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A newsgroup works. Its just that no one under 30 seems to realize that you don't need js to have a web application.

That’s why it works. If it had significant impact to worth their compensation the lawyers would have been on it.

No, js is fundamentally a technology with an anti-competitive ethos enforced by the fact you need an army of engineers employed full time to keep even a trivial site up and running, and on top of that it has surveillance built into it's core. You can't be anonymous using it by design.

Apps built on top of tcp that don't have persistent state, like signed emails, don't suffer from either of those problems and are fundamentally decentralized, anonymous and more user friendly once you try and use them 5 years after they were created.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#79

Post by mkl95 »

reflectiv wrote: post #73
mkl95 wrote: post #66

I think some people are missing a major point about youtube-dl's takedown. The purpose of this DMCA claim wasn't just to prevent people from downloading videos, it was to set a legal precedent for the RIAA and similar organizations to troll Github and anyone hosting public repositories with it, by linking them to "illegal downloads". By agreeing to this without any public opposition, Github has become similar to Yout…

I am sorry...but what would the RIAA troll Github for exactly?

Sorry if it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The RIAA can now call Github out whenever they have an argument for them enabling downloads of copyrighted content through their repositories. And Github is expected to fix it for them.

Re: GitHub Warns Users Reposting YouTube-DL They Could Be Banned

#80

Post by chmod775 »

mrtksn wrote: post #62
chmod775 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create your own TPB by just crawling the DHT network for torrents and downloading the torrent metadata from active peers. In fact I did this once as a fun weekend project. Also you pretty much gave a counterexample to your own argument by bringing up TPB. The "people with guns" would love nothing more than for it to go away, yet here we are - 17 years and counting.

As I said, when it becomes insignificant enough no one cares. As with TPB, it’s blocked in many places and service is down quite often. A few people bother to use it, thus guys with the guns don’t bother. It’s the same situation with your homebrew unlawful stuff. As long as your impact is not worth the attention of the guys with the guns you can do whatever you want.

In fact "the people with guns", as you like to call them, do little else day-in day-out than try to scrub google results and other places, because they do care, yet they are losing badly.

As long as one can google "thing" + "torrent" and come up with something in the first few result, it's pretty obvious who isn't winning.

Then there's also the actual statistics for torrent usage...

Sure they can take down a pirate bay or some other tracker now and again, but at the end of the day for each site they take down there will be 10 new ones.

And that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying "pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so."

The best efforts of those people with guns are proverbial drops in the ocean.

What always happens when laws and reality aren't in alignment, is that people ignore those laws en masse.

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