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Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

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Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#22

streamable.com just removed a random video of mine for “community guidelines” I use the site to save random Twitter and Youtube videos. They aren’t publicly shared. Kind of disheartening to see a random video removed without knowing which one. And all for paying $108/year for a simple convenience. Definitely downloading all of them and canceling.

I selfhost https://github.com/alexta69/metube

I have it sitting on a URL and I have an iOS share shortcut to throw any URL at it and it downloads the video.

Copy-paste from my ansible setup if you're interested, shouldn't be that hard to convert to docker-compose.

    - name: Build metube options separately, avoids inline JSON in metube setup
      ansible.builtin.set_fact:
        metube_ytdl_options:
          postprocessors:
            - key: FFmpegEmbedSubtitle
            - key: SponsorBlock
              categories:
                - sponsor
            - key: ModifyChapters
              remove_sponsor_segments:
                - sponsor
          subtitleslangs:
            - en
            - "-live_chat"
          verbose: true
          writeautomaticsub: true
          writesubtitles: true

    - name: Create metube container
      community.general.docker_container:
        container_default_behavior: "no_defaults"
        name: metube
        image: alexta69/metube:latest
        restart_policy: always
        env:
          UID: "{{ plex_userid }}"
          GID: "{{ docker_users_groupid }}"
          DELETE_FILE_ON_TRASHCAN: "false"
          DOWNLOAD_DIRS_INDEXABLE: "true"
          DOWNLOAD_DIR: /downloads
          TEMP_DIR: /metube-tmp
          STATE_DIR: /config
          TZ: "{{ timezone }}"
          YTDL_OPTIONS: "{{ metube_ytdl_options | to_json }}"
        mounts:
          - type: bind
            source: /stacks/metube/config
            target: /config
            read_only: false
          - type: volume
            source: metube_tmp_location_volume
            target: /metube-tmp
          - type: volume
            source: plex_metube_volume
            target: /downloads
        labels:
          "traefik.enable": "true"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube.middlewares": "authelia@docker"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube.service": "metube"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.rule": "Host(`metube.home.domain.com`) && (PathPrefix(`/favicon`) || PathPrefix(`/add`))"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.service": "metube"
          "traefik.http.services.metube.loadbalancer.server.port": "8081"
        ports: []
        dns_servers:
          - "{{ docker_network_ipv4_bridge_dns }}" # adguard
        networks:
          - name: bridge_ipv4

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#23
post #12

The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market. To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions…

This is a DMCA concept that is presumably recongised by various international treaties … but is it widely implemented and enforced?

WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0].

Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you live in North Korea or Russia, DMCA 1201 applies to you.

Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them. At worst, a few countries would demand some horse trades[1].

Practically speaking, however, democracies are bad at protecting against small harms exacted against large numbers of people[2], so this never happens. Europe has the Pirate Party but the most successful national iterations of it have had to adopt broader Green[3] and technolibertarian agendas in order to have any semblance of electoral viability. In the US, first-past-the-post is an insurmountable hurdle despite the fragility and incompetence of our two major parties. Here, political issues don't so much form new parties as much as they infect the shambling corpses of existing ones.

Barring that, if only one country decided to repeal their anti-circumvention laws I imagine there'd be a lot of grumbling from the US or Japan, potentially new tariffs, but no outright sanctions. The weird part about world trade is that a lot of these provisions are only enforceable on very poor countries. China blatantly violates WIPO all the time and we, practically speaking, cannot quit them. There is no international leviathan capable of, say, rolling tanks on Beijing and demanding market access and copyright enforcement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering

[1] Term of art for "unrelated and usually minuscule things used to bargain for a larger purpose"

[2] e.g. how Intuit got the US government to not provide tax preparation services or software to the public for a decade and a half so they could sell their own offering. It's a thing that annoys people but not enough to get voters to flip sides.

[3] including German "Green", i.e. "nuclear is bad, so we shut down all our nuke plants and started burning lignite[4] instead"

[4] What's lignite? Lignite balls.

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#24
This is actually correct, since recording a song from the radio by itself generally doesn't fall under fair use. The purpose of the copy is what makes it fair use, for example, as a sample played in a classroom, or for reference for readers/viewers as part of a critical work.

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#25

For anyone with self-respect, it is. Come get me, media-conglomerate scumbags. Remember how they whined against DAT and basically had it killed (abetted by Congress), claiming that "perfect digital copies" would destroy their business? Meanwhile, everybody on the planet knew that essentially all "piracy" took place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. And sure enough, even when "piracy" went digital, it was i…

[deleted]

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#26
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a DMCA concept that is presumably recongised by various international treaties … but is it widely implemented and enforced?

WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0]. Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you…

There's actually a potential line of attack that rose due to two SCOTUS decisions a few years ago. The Eldred and Golan cases essentially established that fair use is constitutionally necessary in order for copyright to coexist with the 1st amendment.

If the DMCA is found to hinder the effective exercise of a fair use right, it could be struck down (either facially or in an as-applied challenge)

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#28

The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market. To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions…

I wonder if a cassette deck connected to the computer is also a copy protection circumvention tool. I suppose it is?

1201(a)(2) prohibits selling tools that are either...

- Only capable of breaking copy protection

- Have minimal commercial utility other than to break copy protection

- Are advertised as being able to break copy protection

If you sold someone an aux cord with the marketing slogan "Copy music off Spotify and stop paying for your subscription", that'd violate 1201(a)(2) because of that third prong[0]. There's also plenty of copy protection circumvention tools that DON'T trip 1201(a)(2) because they aren't marketed as such and have noninfringing uses. For example, Google Chrome. You can use it to bypass right-click blockers because it lets you open Devtools without right-clicking. However, browsers have loads of commercial utility outside of this, and they don't specifically advertise their ability to get around annoying right-click scripts, so they're legal.

We don't normally contemplate this sort of thing because most DRM is specifically designed to be both obvious and separable from other permissible behavior. You cannot accidentally write a DVD decryptor that doesn't trip 1201(a)(2). This has led to people mistakenly assuming that the DMCA requires encryption to be involved or something for a copy protection circumvention tool to be illegal.

[0] I've actually seen this happen. There was someone selling VGA cables marketed as a way to copy Netflix.

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#29

Considering that many countries take a copying fee -- which is intended to cover lost revenue from exactly this use case -- for cassettes, harddrives and other storage media, yes yes it should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

I'll gladly pay a % of what I pay to download yt-dl

Bandwidth isn’t free, folks! Imagine all the carrier pigeons whose valiant effort we call upon every time we git clone! Must they toil in obscurity?

Re: Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

#30

The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market. To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions…

> youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool

Wait until they find out that Microsoft has been providing tools like COPY and XCOPY with their OS for decades...

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