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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

#161

Post by Sparkyte »

kmeisthax wrote: post #8

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 didn't think either was fair use. I think fair use applies to the utilization not the acquisition of. For example if I bought a movie and I used it with the intention to discuss it with clips, I can recode it because I physically own the medium. The fair use chimes in when the clips are in use. However when I download something with a tool from Google (YouTube) I'm violating their ToS. I might also be violating something in the middle that opens up some legal issues. So when you go to use a video only for fair use, you should ask the poster or the source for an unencrypted one. Also they should do the responsible thing and provide it.

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

#162

Post by mcpackieh »

userbinator wrote: post #143
jonhohle wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythin…

> they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key,

DRM in a nutshell. I think we have to assume the anti-circumvention laws are intended to apply in precisely this kind of circumstance, since that describes virtually all DRM. When these laws were written, it was even common for DRM to be implemented as XORing with some single byte "key", which was trivial to either extract from the program or just brute force.

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

#163

Post by bippihippi1 »

jojobas wrote: post #147
kmeisthax wrote: post #102

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.

even 1% of a billion dollars is a lot of money

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

#165

Post by lucubratory »

chpatrick wrote: post #158
lucubratory wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've been around for two million years without anything like this. Electricity bad!

...was someone claiming that electricity is human nature, to make you think this was a valid analogy?

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

#167

Post by jeffparsons »

Illotus wrote: post #155
jojobas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would basically guarantee that regulators would inevitably separate either Youtube or Chrome from Google.

I'd love to believe this, but said regulators don't seem particularly energetic these days.

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

#168

Post by laserlight »

MostlyStable wrote: post #45
doublepg23 wrote: post #36

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…

> 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 seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public.

This is naive reasoning. People have been publishing content without any DRM and have been earning money regardless. There are even people who don't care whether they make money or not. So, monetary incentive is not a must for ideas, or any kind of work, to become public. To the contrary, such incentives drive out good ideas, or works, in favor of bad ones, which only care about the money and not the benefit of the society.

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

#169

Post by AnthonyMouse »

kmeisthax wrote: post #23
rusk wrote: 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…

> 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.

But that's kind of a solution, isn't it?

Suppose the law prohibited circumvention but only when the copy made is an actual infringement and not fair use. And didn't prohibit tools, or at least tools with a substantial non-infringing use. For example you couldn't sell a satellite descrambler that solely allows the customer to watch without paying, but you could sell a device that allows a paying customer to make a fair use copy. Something like that.

So you comply with the treaty without the catastrophic overreach of the existing DMCA 1201.

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

#170

Post by jojobas »

Illotus wrote: post #155
jojobas wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would basically guarantee that regulators would inevitably separate either Youtube or Chrome from Google.

I would doubt it. Websites are essentially software distributed on demand, there is no requirement to distribute your software for any particular platform (browser).

If Apple can make their software (i.e. Final Cut or Logic) exclusive to Apple devices, so can Google.

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