51–60 of 253 posts
It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.
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…
How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?
It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.
Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent see…
We also see that even with these protectionist policies, only a select few are ever even able to be economically viable, let alone successful. Art's opportunity cost is so front-loaded that it's difficult to produce things while working full time, so the majority of potential successes are prevented from even starting. And then the artistic process is impeded by these laws, as rentiers cry "similarity" over the most absurd things, which creates a chilling effect. It's particularly bad in music.
The best way to support the arts is UBI and the abolition of copyright.
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…
> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?
The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online.
Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid.
Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically relevant cases. It is gonna take years to unfuck this.
* duh, they don't even know differences of encoding vs encryption...
It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.
Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent see…
This reasoning is taken at face value in most discussion but should be challenged. A lot of assumptions and potentially specious logic is embedded here, and it's not clear and obvious that any of the following are true:
* it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public
* Paying people to encourage making ideas public increases the amount of value
* most ideas are worth anything at all
* that the most valuable ideas will be made public even with these protection regimes in place
It's arguable that even though there was less information out there before copyrights and patents became a thing, that people were still driven to create art and science, and the quality per unit might have even been higher. And even with patent and copyright in place, truly valuable ideas are still kept secret.
The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?
Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online. Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid. Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically re…
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…
"(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work"
The argument would seemingly be that youtube is in no way "effectively controlling access to a work." And none of the peculiar details of it's implementation are designed to operate in this capacity. Quite the opposite, it's technology is designed to broadcast, for the purposes of inserting ads, content to anyone who merely requests it.
Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site and has nothing but an ad-hoc system with limited availability that takes action only after content is uploaded. As there are many videos that are past copyright protection or have been explicitly released into the public domain, and they make no distinction in the "technical measures" used in those videos, that they aren't effectively controlling access, and the tools aren't circumventing them for this purpose.
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…
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 remember that in Finland, it was debated in courts whether breaking DVD CSS encryption using readily downloadable software was infringement upon an effective copy protection scheme or not. An appeals court decided it was (i.e. CSS was deemed "effective"), but the requirement that the copy protection scheme be "effective" in order for circumvention to be considered illegal is still there in copyright law. (The legislation is based on whatever the EU-wide regulation is and includes provisions somewhat similar to the DMCA such as the prohibition of circumvention.)
I doubt that "copy protection" that can be circumvented by reading the YouTube web page source code would be deemed effective under that law. Does the DMCA not have a similar limitation? Or is the RIAA just trying to play the lobbying and rhetoric game despite having weak legal grounds? (Wouldn't be surprising.)