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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

#141

Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?

> Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?

You mean, "hasn't yet been enforced on a person by person basis". If history has proven anything, it is that the government and their corporate masters will do everything they can to expand their powers by passing new laws and enacting new regulations so that they can extract every dollar they can.

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

#142

It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.

We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone establishing it over non-scarce ideas. It's very bourgeois, not very human.

But for most of human history information was difficult and unprofitable to copy. Copying manuscripts by hand was expensive, and few people could read anyway so the market was limited. It’s no accident that copyrights were invented after the development of the printing press.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO it displays intent to require a browser that has JS, which yt-dl has sort of implemented.

Base64 doesn’t require JS, it requires a Base64 decoder, which either every language has, or any CS student who’s taken an algorithms class could write in a few hours for the language of their choice. Base64 encoding/decoding is the type of thing you could ask most applicants to write during an interview. It’s like saying they encrypted it in UTF-8.

Base64 is just one of the components of the JS that YouTube uses to generate the actual video URLs. It's been at least a few months since I took a look at it, but I remember it having a substitution cipher and some other transformations, but no "real" crypto like AES and such.

That said, if they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key, is it really circumvention of access control to unlock it with anything other than a user-agent they "support" (i.e. approve of)? As I mentioned in my other comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114697), a lot of people "download" from YouTube not to infringe copyright but to simply use alternative software to view the content.

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

#144
Copyright is just one of the impractically odious pillars of capitalism buckling under the stresses of late capitalism. Trying to "make it work" is a temporary measure at best, but I think more relaxing of the restrictions at least behind the advancement of technology by at least a couple of decades will be the only chance it has to remain relevant. The laws that stopped people from running bootleg vinyl presses are laughable when applied to copying a file from one of my computers to another.

The current experiment of seeing how many $10-$20 corporations consumers are willing to pay monthly ends either with monopoly/oligopoly of art or a new golden age of piracy.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 lawyers are this stupid. The law has other things listed beside encryption. Did they really call this "encryption" as you're claiming (citation?) or did it fall under another bucket?

They were referring to it as a "Rolling Cipher" (searchable) and reinforcing the claim based on Widevine as a protection mechanism for the (previously hosted) Youtube Red content. [1]

They were making the case "if youtube decided to replace the rolling cipher with widevine completely, it would seriously harden the DRM protection".

"Die Einordnung der "Rolling Cipher" als wirksame technische Schutzmaßnahme ist auch unter Berücksichtigung der Regelung des § 53 Abs. 1 UrhG zur Zulässigkeit von Vervielfältigungen zum privaten Gebrauch verhältnismäßig."

This translates to that they think base64 is a reasonable technical measurement to protect content.

By this logic they've established that URLs themselves are a valid copyright protection mechanism (encodeURIComponent uses base64url behind the scenes), which has another scale of consequences. That is why I'd argue that the court has no idea whatsoever what base64 is, what it does, or that it is even an openly defined specification as a text interchange format.

I think what confused the court is the parameter shuffling for the signature parameter in combination with base64. Even though this is not encryption they made it look like effective encryption in front of the court.

[1] https://openjur.de/u/2466945.html

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

time to upload the source and compilation instructions on ipfs

a friendly reminder that (a) ipfs is only as alive as there are seeders and (b) seeders ips are public just like bittorrent There was a recent Cult of the Dead Cow release that claims "encrypt all the things, Tor but for phones" or some such but I haven't studied it to know how much is aspirational https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork

This caveat is the same reason I can't really support PeerTube. P2P shifts copyright liability onto individual users.

Okay, maybe you could always technically sue someone for watching a YouTube video, but it was practically way more difficult by having to go through Google first to get an IP. P2P skips that step because you dox yourself whenever you use it.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am startled, and also glad, that record labels haven't put the screws to youtube enough to get them to implement widevine for music videos on youtube. Probably unworkable for the time being.

The problem is that if they implement Widevine they also need to license FairPlay, PlayReady, and Adobe's DRM schemes as well. Otherwise YouTube is effectively Chrome-exclusive. The reason why EME didn't lead to a catastrophic downfall of freedom on the Web is purely a function of DRM being expensive to license. Netflix can afford it but not YouTube, and YouTube creators generally don't want it[0]. Related note: if Y…

I'd say at this point youtube has so much more market capture than any non-chrome browser, they probably could just say "get Chrome or gtfo" and not even notice the audience dip.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if they implement Widevine they also need to license FairPlay, PlayReady, and Adobe's DRM schemes as well. Otherwise YouTube is effectively Chrome-exclusive. The reason why EME didn't lead to a catastrophic downfall of freedom on the Web is purely a function of DRM being expensive to license. Netflix can afford it but not YouTube, and YouTube creators generally don't want it[0]. Related note: if Y…

I'd say at this point youtube has so much more market capture than any non-chrome browser, they probably could just say "get Chrome or gtfo" and not even notice the audience dip.

It would break every service that uses embedded YouTube videos on custom viewers.

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

#149
Before even download, can we at least acknowledge that Youtube is the greatest copyright infringement platform on the planet?

Whatever the "excuse" of the uploaders and the host of those uploads (youtube), the sheer number of copyright protected material uploaded in clear sight should be the main concern of any copyright enforcer, not those who download.

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

#150

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 why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been. For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a…

Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong.

Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain copying tools. This was hot off the heels of the music industry getting a technology mandate for copy protection on digital audio tape (which would eventually be mooted by MP3 players, see RIAA v. Diamond). The problem is, technology mandates are difficult to draft and have significant problems (sometimes it's legal to copy things). So instead of banning copying tools altogether, they made them opt-out. If the copyright holder protects a work from copying, you can't sell the tool that makes it copyable.

This created a drafting problem: what constitutes protection? At the time 1201 was drafted the biggest copy protection in force was Macrovision, a system intended to make VCRs copying tapes record an unusable signal. So they just copypasted Macrovision into the DMCA. But there's all sorts of other ways you could copy protect things. Software was the most creative with all sorts of dastardly ways to make nonstandard media, ways to check for that media, ways to check that your checks hadn't been changed, ways to encrypt the binary so you can't disassemble it, ways to check for debuggers so you can't copy the disassembled version of any of the above checks, etc. All of that is way too uncertain to draft into the bill.

Congress's answer was to say that anything can by copy protection as long as it keeps you from copying things. This is extremely, offensively overbroad. And it also triggered a slew of new attempts to turn 1201 into a generalized "contempt of business model" tort. We had lawsuits over printer ink and garage door openers, because it's trivial to just smuggle more software into the design of whatever product you want to 'protect.' Thus nobody wants to touch any sort of adversarial compatibility, because that carries insane liability now, and since everything needs software now we've effectively ended capitalism and regressed to feudalism.

It is a mistake to think of law as a substitute for morality. Obviously criminal does not equal immoral. However, we can think of laws as a solution to coordinated action problems and economic "game balance". If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size. When Congress makes mistakes in drafting the law, we create the ability to build illiberal empires. But empires are not creatures of the law. They would still exist without it, making their own laws that would be far worse than the ones Congress gives us.

You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.

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