Live data from Hacker News

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

mastodon.social

221–230 of 253 posts

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

#221
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll gladly pay a % of what I pay to download yt-dl

Bandwidth isn’t free, folks! Imagine all the carrier pigeons whose valiant effort we call upon every time we git clone! Must they toil in obscurity?

Ah, the legendary carrier pigeons of the internet! If only bandwidth were powered by their fluttering wings. In reality, the modern internet is a vast infrastructure of data centers, cables, and protocols. But it's fun to imagine a world where data is carried by avian couriers.

Historically, carrier pigeons (or homing pigeons) have been used to deliver messages over long distances. There's even a humorous and real experiment where a carrier pigeon carrying a USB stick was faster in transmitting data than an ADSL connection: the "Pigeon vs. Internet" race.

But in all seriousness, the point you're making is valid. Bandwidth is not free, and the resources required to maintain and expand the internet's infrastructure are significant. It's easy to forget about the underlying systems when we use everyday services. Just like water and electricity, the convenience of modern technology can make it easy to overlook the complexity and cost of the infrastructure that makes it possible.

So, while we don't have to feed and care for digital pigeons, it's always a good reminder to be appreciative and conscientious of the resources we use.

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

#222

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…

> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public.

Ain't that some bullshit.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 violations is enough to establish a trend, while giving people a little bit of leeway for the first and second violations since they may not know / understand the rules. 3 strike rules are formulated because there is a general consensus that such rules are fair and just, not because people like baseball.

Interesting to see that take. As a outsider, three-strike laws have always seemed to be a uniquely American form of injustice, leading to overpunishnent. It's disappointing (and a little chilling, considering the global policies of the tech giants originate in the US) to think some people might consider them fair or just.

Two 'second' chances seems generous to me. How many would you give before acknowledging a pattern of willful violation?

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CDs ... Sturdier than vinyls Are they really though? It's my impression that even mass produced pressed CDs have a reputation for rotting on the order of 20-30 years. Vinyl lasts a century or more if you don't physically abuse it. CDs are certainly easier to rip though, so probably still worth it.

Compact discs generally do not wear on use, vinyl does.

Oxidation causes CDs to rot even if you don't play them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity

If you play a vinyl record enough to wear it out, at least you listened to it a lot before it wore out. With CDs, you might never listen to the music even once and come back years later to find it has destroyed itself.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? I don't want into any "official chat network". I despise whatsapp and its success in Europe is a testament to the lacking class, culture and taste of its clueless inhabitants.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes, but checkout the redundancy that filecoin nodes offer, they basically pin IPFS for free, not intentionally its just turning into a killer app for filecoin https://web3.storage competes with the web 2.0 SaaS pinning services like Pinata

I readily admit I haven't looked super deeply into Filecoin but I thought they were trying to cryptocurrency the pinning problem, and thus not "for free" right?

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

#227
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah, so not really interoperable.

This was why XMPP failed. The UX was terrible because different clients didn't support the same features broadly and it was a big mess. And everyone just went with centralized services where everything works as expected.

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

#228

It's important to keep a few things in mind: - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore) - Your copy was a lot worse quality than what you could otherwise buy - You could at best distribute it to a few hundred or maybe even 1000 people if…

To save bandwidth, Youtube does lossy compression that drastically reduces the video quality (especially for SD videos) compared to the original file.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but checkout the redundancy that filecoin nodes offer, they basically pin IPFS for free, not intentionally its just turning into a killer app for filecoin https://web3.storage competes with the web 2.0 SaaS pinning services like Pinata

I readily admit I haven't looked super deeply into Filecoin but I thought they were trying to cryptocurrency the pinning problem, and thus not "for free" right?

filecoin has a coin. I don't know where the burden is for consumers.

a third party service https://web3.storage built a file storage tool on the permissionless network that uses filecoin nodes to pin IPFS links, so it doesn't matter? this third party service tries to make a business model and has overhead costs, and that currently involves a 5gb free tier with unlimited bandwidth. Used to be 100gb. Still cheaper than Pinata and other pinning services that don't use filecoin. And all of that is cheaper than company run centralized file storage because those charge by bandwidth and cant be compared.

This discussion isn't really about whether the service provider has costs, its about a solution for consumers the same way we would talk about a VC subsidized centralized service that happens to be free, for now.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the button on any official YouTube app or web interface that offers to save a local unencrypted file for an anonymous user?

I guess the right click button that allows me to “save link as” is circumventing a websites lack of a “download this image” button?

Yes. Especially when the site uses indirection and js specifically to obstruct it. It doesn't matter that it's not possible to really prevent it, they can demonstrate that they definitely intended to. Locking something with a trivial lock, but still clearly a lock with no other intended purpose but to be a lock, is entirely different from not trying to lock something, when it comes to going to court to claim that someone stole something.
Post reply on HN