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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

#211

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…

Am I the only one that finds it hard to engage with the RIAA as good faith actors? It feels similar to patent trolls whose business strategy is simply to leverage the court by exploiting poorly executed legislation.

Oh, copyright monopolists are a million times worse than patent trolls.

Patent trolls don't make the laws, they just exploit them. Copyright monopolists literally make the laws and then complain that the whole world isn't following them. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on lobbyists and essentially buy whatever laws they want. Leverage courts? Copyright monopolists will literally leverage the might of the US government and military to enforce US laws overseas. Look up US Trade Representative reports on "notorious markets" which is all about getting foreign countries to enforce US copyright law as if they had nothing better to do than police imaginary american property. It's packed full of language like "stakeholders" which is code for these monopolists. It's like they're the bosses of the US government.

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

#212
There is no such thing as streaming without downloading.

With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls).

DRM bad.

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

#213
post #151

"downloading a video" probably sounds almost as weird to a gen-z as "recording a song from the radio" sounds to a millennial. pretty wild when you think about it.

You're shooting yourself in the foot with this example. Millenials did record songs from the radio to audio tapes. I did it (I was born in 1985), my little sister did (she was born in 1990), etc.

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

#214
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal would have to create a fake user for every integrated Whatsapp/Telegram user, and the client would have to create an e2e key pair. Signal's zero knowledge policy doesn't need to be compromised in order to achieve that. Hopefully it would be possible to opt out of the integrations.

It's not that simple. What do you do when a Signal user creates a group with members using Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram?

"Sorry, group chat functionality with external users is not supported".

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

#215
post #182

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…

It's not just base-64. The 'url' of the next chunk of data is encoded in the data of the previous chunk. (As opposed to just doing a chunked transfer of a bigger file). This feature is only in place for some videos, mostly music videos. This was deemed a 'rolling cipher'. It obviously isn't. Or at best, its a rolling cipher with the key being completely public at all times.

As a non-lawyer I would assume that a simple testimony by an expert witness (i.e. a crypto expert) would easily squash this argument.

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

#216
post #151

"downloading a video" probably sounds almost as weird to a gen-z as "recording a song from the radio" sounds to a millennial. pretty wild when you think about it.

But then again TikTok has a 'save video' feature (yet another small example of how it's a better product than YouTube, whether you're a power user or not) which exports videos into you filesystem.

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We didn't have X for two million years therefore X bad

I think it's a very strange argument.

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

#218
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU they are. Soon, chat apps are required to be able to connect to each other, thanks to the EU. Telegram Signal WhatsApp Freedom for the people instead of companies! That's why I prefer the EU over the US.

They don't have to explicitly require that of communications services. Just write interoperability into law and the problem goes away. The reason they don't work with each other is there's a line in the terms of service that says you can't use anything but their official software to interact with their servers. WhatsApp will literally ban your number forevef if it detects this. That's the root cause of the shittiness…

Third-party clients are great and I agree that the ability to use them should be enforced by law. But really, that's not enough - I don't want accounts on numerous different networks just because one group of friends is here and another is there and the school is using that one etc. Once you are at a certain size, you should be required to federate with the one official chat network.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have heard of anti-trust regulations, yes?

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely will be, now that google is looking to more proactively enforce ads. But the biggest danger is that videos and channels can get removed by any, all, or no reason. -Copyright middlemen/parasites -Trolls -Shifts in what’s politically or advertiser acceptable (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/14ddlng/unalived/ ) -Massive data loss (see myspace) -And especially the capricious whims of the ch…

I have music playlists turned to swiss cheese on paid streaming music services, and it's for that reason that I've turned to doing the unthinkable: buying mp3s like some kind of devolved luddite.

I don't get why everyone jumped onto streaming in the first place - it was always clear to me that not "owning" any of the music/movies I like was a bad idea.
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