31–40 of 66 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was the DMCA request invalid?
I assume others are downvoting because they assume you already know, but DMCA takedowns apply to active distribution of actual copyrighted content (like a mp3 containing music), not to tools that puportedly are for the purpose of enabling infringment. If the RIAA wanted to take down a tool, the not-illegal method would be to file a lawsuit against the developers, recieve (or preferably be denied, since their case has…
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…
Sometimes it's better to not even try. Acting is always the more powerful move. Just do your thing. You wrote an awesome program that downloads stuff, they got offended and banned it. You've already accomplished your goal so you let it go... But if you cared enough you could just write a scraper for the website itself. What are they gonna do about it?
In an ideal world, downloading copywritten data would be so easy and ubiquitous that the intellectual property laws would be unenforceable. Sure, they would get mad but who cares? There's very little they can do about it.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was the DMCA request invalid?
I assume others are downvoting because they assume you already know, but DMCA takedowns apply to active distribution of actual copyrighted content (like a mp3 containing music), not to tools that puportedly are for the purpose of enabling infringment. If the RIAA wanted to take down a tool, the not-illegal method would be to file a lawsuit against the developers, recieve (or preferably be denied, since their case has…
What github did probably wasn't illegal either. Most companies can fire a customer for no great reason, which github did.
A perfectly reasonable response, I suspect, might be to start sending github large numbers of inane takedown letters similar to the RIAA one, alleging that random tools can circumvent copy protection. For example, vscode, cpython, and many other projects live on github, and can be used to circumvent copy protection too. That's a true statement.
github is welcome to ignore those letters too, since they don't conform to DMCA requirements. Or they can follow them.
In either case, I'm kind of curious what github would do. I suspect if they randomly kill projects, most projects will go somewhere else. github won't be considered a reliable service provider. Or github will re-evaluate their policies to be more reasonable, and not take down projects willy-nilly, which would be a good outcome too.
I remember coding my own YouTube downloader because of similar reasons. My internet connection was way too slow to stream videos, even at the lowest quality, so I'd make a list of videos, download them in the background the entire day and then watch it offline at the end of the day. When I finally discovered youtube-dl, I was relieved that I no longer had to keep maintaining my script... and it supported almost every other video website.
Also, I just realized that it can still be downloaded from the official website and updated using --update argument.
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 make…
Does everything on Youtube use the rolling cipher? I thought it was only on things like major label music videos.
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.ycombin…
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 make…