How journalists use youtube-dl • Hacker News Board

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#11

Post by sesuximo » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

Imo... people should be able to download stuff for free if they’re able to see it for free. The “you can see it but you must watch an ad” model is weird and leads to unenforceable/wacky situations like this

(I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#12

Post by codegladiator » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

FWIW I was contacted by a "prestigious" publisher (the ken) and it was a story against google. The journalist was not even ready to listen to the "pros", she was just interested in whats the harm.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#13

Post by kavalec » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

What's the best "use case" for launching this offshore?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#14

Post by rbecker » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #9

Youtube-dl had some good notes in their README about legitimate uses and an explanation about how they tried to avoid adding sites that specialized in infringing content, but they really did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. That will not help their argument at all. Youtube-dl absolutely has important and completely legal uses, reporting being among them, but…

Downloading copyrighted videos, just like home taping, is legal. There was a supreme court case deciding that the latter is legal. I have yet to hear any reasoning why "home taping, but on the internet" would not fall under that same precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#15

Post by motohagiography » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

I used ffmpeg and audacity with youtube-dl to download and do file and spectrograph analysis on a faked political video. That analysis showing how the audio was spliced together may have killed the story before it got legs.

In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#16

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

Jokes on them! I have the source! And if it ever breaks I know how to patch it!

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#17

Post by comeonseriously » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

How is using youtube-dl different to using a "VCR" and recording OTA television?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#18

Post by WilTimSon » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

sesuximo wrote: post #11

Imo... people should be able to download stuff for free if they’re able to see it for free. The “you can see it but you must watch an ad” model is weird and leads to unenforceable/wacky situations like this (I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)

It's strange to me because I've been using adblokcers for as long as I've been watching things online, as do a large percentage of people, I'm sure. So does it really matter that much to YouTube when I download some video, considering me watching it brings it literally no benefit? What's the gain here?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#19

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

It's a bit tragic: Most tools have a potentially negative/illegal use case. These developers advertising those uses, even if it was just in the source code, wasn't a good idea. Now there is an uphill battle to legitimize its use again.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#20

Post by ugjka » Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

There's a fork of youtube-dl seems to be pretty active: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc