YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#471

Post by lelandbatey » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

karmasimida wrote: post #108

I am not buying this. Does this mean bittorrent client can be taken down as well? Who is drawing the line here?

It's much dumber even than. A youtube web page contains everything necessary to view a youtube video. The concrete action the RIAA is accusing youtube-dl of is that it "circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher". The RIAA has used this same complaint to have other sites/tools taken down. I've looked into the youtube-dl implementation, and it turns out the Youtube's "rolling cipher" is at most merely rearranging the characters of the CDN url of the video, and they send you JS code in the page to correctly arrange the characters of the URL so you can download it. Youtube-dl is using the Google-supplied JS and a JS interpreter to transform the Google supplied URL into the URL they need to download the videos. Youtube is asking Google what to do, and Google is saying "here's how you download the video".

I explained the full RIAA complaint, with links to prior complaints and the youtube-dl source code, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#472

Post by nudpiedo » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

It was clear that youtube-dl has always been used for its utility. And the deeper problem here is why aren’t we allowed to do whatever want to whatever is streamed onto our screens? TV shows could be vhs taped without issue as long as not redistributed. For sure we cannot take this fight against google with the American laws, but I think the software was morally correct and should be legally permitted.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#473

Post by nogabebop23 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #223

eli wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMCA is a bad law, but you'd have a harder time arguing a general purpose web browser meets any of the following conditions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 (2)No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a techn…

Can you argue that youtube-dl meets any of those conditions? You can argue that youtube-dl facilitates making copies of copyrighted works; that's easy. But the items A, B, and C that you quote all require circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a protected work. And youtube videos, in the general case, have completely uncontrolled access. You can't circumvent measures that don't exist.

Unfortunately it's well established that accessing resources that, even if not protected what so ever, without permission is illegal. YT's policy T&S on how and when you can consume it satisfies this.

I believe in the youtube-dl case allowing you to consume videos outside of the T&S is the crime and the automated scale is the punative factor.

IANAL and I don't agree with this; just responding to the parent statement of "You can't circumvent measures that don't exist"

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#474

Post by alias_neo » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #379

RealStickman_ wrote: post #240

Made a torrent of the latest version from pypi. Hope it works. magnet:?xt=urn:btih:da76788b4d05583f8a3a7ed60f136c5647daa113&dn=youtube%5Fdl-2020.9.20.tar.gz&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bittorrent.am%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fopen.acgtracker.com%3A1096%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fretracker.krs-ix.ru%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.com%3A2710%2Fannounce Edit: NVM. Getting nowhere with setting that up.

Is there anything stopping someone from creating a new youtube-dl repo on GitHub with the README examples in question removed? On that note... how do you actually remove copyrighted content from a git repo? Even if you fixed the problem on the HEAD of the master branch, it would still exist in the version history.

Git history, just like human history, can be rewritten, if you only know how.

(It gets a bit harder of it's cryptographically signed)

EDIT: To whomever is downvoting, I'm not making a remark about some specific event, is a tongue in cheek poke at "history is written by the Victor". Chill.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#475

Post by rnhmjoj » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

brink wrote: post #442

Is there a decentralized version control system solution out there to host projects like this?

I know of two such projects from HN: GitTorrent and Radicle. The former seems abandoned but the latter is still being developed.

Radicle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916

Gittorrent: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto...

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#476

Post by 15155 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

andrewmd5 wrote: post #335

orliesaurus wrote: post #13

> We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies IMHO this wasn't the best move, I mean... t…

When the RIAA sued me for operating Aurous a few years ago they nailed me for exactly this. Using copyrighted album art and song names to advertise my FOSS meant to stream music from sources like YouTube didn't exactly win me any points in court.

Did they win the rights to the source code?

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#477

Post by murgindrag » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #429

stingraycharles wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add a data point, but back when I still was working for a video distribution startup, we offered our customers the ability to directly import their video inventory from YouTube. They were the owners of the videos, it was just a convenient (and very popular!) feature for them to let us handle this import. We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have done this easily without it. We imported hund…

I'm not a lawyer, but I am playing devil's advocate here. Did your customers own those video files or the rights to the video? If they are the authors and owners of the content surely they uploaded something to YouTube to begin with. Why is that not what they uploaded to your service? If they preferred to import YouTube libraries clearly YouTube was adding some value there.

A copyright is for a creative work, not for a set of bits.

It's unlikely transcoding a video added anything creative to the process.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#478

Post by dariusj18 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #429

stingraycharles wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add a data point, but back when I still was working for a video distribution startup, we offered our customers the ability to directly import their video inventory from YouTube. They were the owners of the videos, it was just a convenient (and very popular!) feature for them to let us handle this import. We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have done this easily without it. We imported hund…

I'm not a lawyer, but I am playing devil's advocate here. Did your customers own those video files or the rights to the video? If they are the authors and owners of the content surely they uploaded something to YouTube to begin with. Why is that not what they uploaded to your service? If they preferred to import YouTube libraries clearly YouTube was adding some value there.

Not PC but,

Some people use YouTube as their repository. Or if they lost the original files it would be a way to recover something. I once had to download mp3's of my own music from MySpace because I had an HD crash and lost them.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#479

Post by jackbravo » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

sschueller wrote: post #455

fenwick67 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called Git.

This is such a snark reply, you know exact that git and github are not the same thing. Discovery and issue management is important and is not part of git.

That would be https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki a decentralized version control, issue management and wiki software.

Discovery is not there though.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#480

Post by 15155 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

lelandbatey wrote: post #463

ikeboy wrote: post #428

Disclaimer: IANAL. The legal reasoning here is shaky. Notice that they cite a German court and assert that the law there is materially the same as that in the US. I did some research on this specific issue at one point, and I'm skeptical that Youtube's controls qualify under the law in question. RIAA cites two sections of the law: >the provision or trafficking of the source code violates 17 USC §§1201(a)(2) and 1201(…

The concrete action they're accusing youtube-dl of is that it "circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher". The RIAA has used this same complaint to have other sites/tools taken down. I've looked into the implementation, and it turns out the Youtube is at most merely rearranging the characters of the CDN url of the video, and they send you JS code in the page to correctly arrange the characters of the URL so you can downlo…

Sounds like the next step should be: "embed a JS interpreter and use Google's own code."