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Origins of the youtube-dl project

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Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#21

Post by deepspace »

michaelmior wrote: post #14
greggman3 wrote: post #3

I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was th…

While I can understand your frustration, I also understand the frustration of photographers and other creators trying to make a living who have their work stolen. Their anger was wrongly directed at you, but it is a real problem.

I would argue that the "stealing" does not happen at the time of download; after all the photos are free to view on Flickr as many times as you want, and your browser needs to 'download' them in order to show them to you. Saving a copy to your own hard drive for offline viewing does not fundamentally change that interaction.

It is only when you re-publish the photos that it becomes theft of intellectual property.

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#22

Post by mschuster91 »

jchw wrote: post #4

Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.

> I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue.

It's a risky move, dabbling with stuff that is targeted under DMCA. Anything hosted in the US is liable for takedowns - including domain names that are under the control of US-based companies. You'll need to deal with acquiring hosting and DDoS protection yourself, plus keeping track of security updates. And to be honest Europe isn't exactly a legal safe haven either, we also have nasty laws (e.g. in Germany the infamous "Störerhaftung") exposing you to liability.

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#23

Post by jordigh »

jchw wrote: post #4

Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal. I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.

> I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably,

I don't think it can be solved on Github.

"GitHub’s CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won’t be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material."

https://torrentfreak.com/riaas-youtube-dl-takedown-ticks-of-...

This pretty much makes youtube-dl useless, since the "rolling cipher" is just downloading the same bit of js, inspecting it, and executing it, almost the way a web browser does (AIUI, the difference is that yt-dl inspects the js and picks out the function to run from it instead of just running it all verbatim). This counts as circumvention according to the DMCA, which leaves yt-dl little legal standing in the US.

Also note that the "examples of how to download copyrighted material" in the yt-dl tests were just code for getting the first few bytes of a number of RIAA-sequestered music videos. Small excerpts are usually allowed under Fair Use. The RIAA didn't really look into that detail.

On the plus side, this fork is active and not DMCA'ed, for now. I just turned to it because I needed a fix for Bandcamp that upstream yt-dl doesn't have:

https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#24

Post by humford »

Been a longtime fan of YouTube-dl, so much better and faster than any alternative. I remember being in high school in a group project with some theater kids. They needed a ton of free stock footage from Vimeo and they were going through links one-by-one to download each video individually. I just compiled a list of the links, ran youtube-dl, and had it done in 5 minutes when they'd already wasted three hours on it.

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#25

Post by JoshTriplett »

michaelmior wrote: post #14
greggman3 wrote: post #3

I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was th…

While I can understand your frustration, I also understand the frustration of photographers and other creators trying to make a living who have their work stolen. Their anger was wrongly directed at you, but it is a real problem.

It's also off-topic, and it's especially off-topic because it was misdirected. The response to "my legitimate tool was attacked because people thought it was for X" should not be to talk about the problem of X and why it's important. It should be to figure out how we prevent useful tools from being taken down. Amplifying a different problem, the fear of which led to breaking a useful tool, does not help.

Also, if you don't want something downloaded, don't post it on the Internet in the first place. The problem you're talking about isn't that photos get downloaded, it's how those photos are subsequently used.

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#26

Post by jdndbfbf »

michaelmior wrote: post #14
greggman3 wrote: post #3

I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was th…

While I can understand your frustration, I also understand the frustration of photographers and other creators trying to make a living who have their work stolen. Their anger was wrongly directed at you, but it is a real problem.

If I run that script in an infinite loop, downloading the same persons photos, can I make they go bankrupt?

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#27

Post by nzmsv »

Back when Udacity just launched with their first course (Thrun's self driving car intro) I wanted to watch the videos on a big screen. I had a somewhat smart TV that could play files off a USB stick but did not have Internet access. Udacity hosted all their videos on YouTube at the time and there was no convenient way to download them. So I spent an afternoon hacking together a Chrome extension that would modify the Udacity website DOM and give me download links for the lectures (it had to be an extension to get around same origin restrictions). Udacity had some weird naming convention for their videos so I had to make some calls to their API as well as YouTube and correlate videos with titles. The YouTube part was "influenced" by youtube-dl. This was much faster than reverse engineering, even though I was writing new JavaScript and not using the original Python. Anyway, trivial stuff.

After watching the videos from my couch for a few days I decided to post a link to my extension on the Udacity message board... and it absolutely blew up! My dinky little extension had thousands of users all over the world seemingly overnight.

But the absolute highlight was getting an email from a student from Iran. Iran just blocked YouTube because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_of_Muslims and there was a whole group of students who could no longer participate in the course. Apparently they had some friends at a US university use my extension to download the videos and reupload to a VPS they ran. I was blown away - my quest to sit on a couch ended up accidentally helping fight censorship.

I maintained the extension until Udacity added a native video download feature and then took it down. But it was an interesting experience and definitely shaped my perception of fair use laws. They are important. People have way more legitimate uses for information than lawyers can imagine.

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#28

Post by andai »

nzmsv wrote: post #27

Back when Udacity just launched with their first course (Thrun's self driving car intro) I wanted to watch the videos on a big screen. I had a somewhat smart TV that could play files off a USB stick but did not have Internet access. Udacity hosted all their videos on YouTube at the time and there was no convenient way to download them. So I spent an afternoon hacking together a Chrome extension that would modify the…

> my quest to sit on a couch ended up accidentally helping fight censorship

That's brilliant! We can never predict the impact our tools will have on people's lives.

Your idea of partially porting youtube-dl to the browser gives me an idea... would it be feasible to port it fully? I think the biggest hurdle would be ffmpeg, but a few days ago I saw "A pure WebAssembly / JavaScript port of FFmpeg": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24987861

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#29

Post by qw3rty01 »

woofie11 wrote: post #17
res0nat0r wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitlab enforces DMCA requests. If you're a reputable company wanting to do legit business in the USA you have to follow the process, it really isn't up to Github or Gitlab unless they want to lose safe harbor status. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/dmca/

As well they should! Following the laws is part of not being sketchy. github went way above-and-beyond here. It is under no obligation to: 1) Enforce an invalid DMCA request 2) Take down forks and repos from other users, without DMCA requests 3) Threaten to ban users DMCA has a simple, neutral process. github receives a request. It's required to take down that specific tool if it's a valid request (NOT everyone who f…

How was the DMCA request invalid?

Re: Origins of the youtube-dl project

#30

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

greggman3 wrote: post #3

I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was th…

This story clearly illustrates the purpose behind "web APIs". To limit access.

As a user (not a web developer), I personally never saw the practical point of web APIs; I have always just "scraped the HTML". Many times the solutions I write outlive the corresponding "API"; IME, often the non-API method of data retrieval is more robust and reliable than using the so-called API.

YouTube used to have a freely accessible search API. Not anymore. However "scraping" the YT search result pages continues to work fine.

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