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YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

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Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#651

Post by OzzyB »

OzzyB wrote: post #272

Excuse me, but let's calm down a little with the whole "we're developers for developers" rhetoric. You didn't restore the repo, the restored repo is a heavily modified version based on the poorly interpreted opinion that having some Taylor Swift (who sucks btw) test cases in your code are grounds enough for a legitimate DMCA claim, and that the only way the repo can be "legally" restored is by removing them. You didn…

Sorry, I meant to say:

"Great Job GitHub! You really stepped up this time, things are so much better now that you're owned by Microsoft! Remember Developers, Developers, Developers!"

xD

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#653

Post by majewsky »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #170
grumple wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in seeing how much money from their suits gets to the artists, or even to distributors - or what effect on revenue their deterrence causes.

For German GEMA (which is working a bit different from RIAA, so can't be fully conapred) there are some numbers on Wikipedia, till 2012: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musika... They made 820 million € in revenue, 128M€ are their "costs", 692M€ of that 15% are their fees, remainingnis split between labels and artists and artists got 316.5M€, thus a quite low fraction ... and in German law the c…

To clarify: GP asked about "how much money [recovered from the lawsuits] gets to the artists". The revenue you're quoting is mostly not from lawsuits, it's regular license fees paid by broadcasters and event organizers.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#654

Post by Wowfunhappy »

shbooms wrote: post #332
TechBro8615 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIU the argument is more that youtube-dl is effectively a web browser and doesn’t do anything that a web browser doesn’t do. Further, it does not include any “secret” key for DRM circumvention like might be bundled with e.g. Chrome in the case of Widevine, where browser vendors agree to protect the secret key.

that's how understood it as well: "youtube-dl stands in place of a Web browser and performs a similar function with respect to user-uploaded videos. Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix." "We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,”…

I wonder where the phrase “rolling cipher” actually comes from. Did the RIAA just make it up?

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#655

Post by maeln »

NoSalt wrote: post #353
ryanar wrote: post #184

It seems like EFF fought for youtube-dl and GitHub used their letter as legal firepower to bring the repo back online. If GitHub were fighting for the developer they would have funded the attorney, right? Though from their blog post it does look like they are taking steps to fund defense in the future as well as other steps to improve the situation. Reading EFFs claim is pretty interesting, they state that saving a c…

To be honest, I had no idea youtube-dl did anything else other than download YouTube videos. What other functions does it have?

It support a gigantic amount of website, including audio one. Most of the time, I use it to have an offline copy of a podcast, radio show or some video that I might need to look at wherever I am not guarantee to have an internet connexion (very useful when travelling). It also has a lot of useful option like downloading the audio only of a video, choosing the quality of the video/audio which might be hidden in the website you are trying to watch it from, download subtitle (this is just so useful), you can pass ffmpeg options also to post-process the video in one go, ... There is just so many thing you can do with it. One last example : one of my computer really struggle to watch video/stream directly from the browser (for whatever reason), but with youtube-dl I can stream directly to VLC/MPV and it use 1/10 the CPU comparing to watching the same video in the browser.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#656

Post by colejohnson66 »

wgjordan wrote: post #580
wgjordan wrote: post #461

Rather interesting that GitHub decided to restore access 1 day after receiving the EFF's counter notice, instead of waiting 10 days. As a brief legal recap, in 1998 the DMCA added §512 [1] to US copyright law, which established a mechanism for shielding 'service providers' from liability for content posted by users (known as 'safe harbor'), but only as long as they follow formal procedures (known as 'DMCA takedown')…

After reading the EFF's letter a little more closely, I realize now that it wasn't even a formal DMCA counter notice representing the repository owners, just an informal legal rebuttal of the original claims. Oops. So GitHub wasn't legally required to restore access at all even after 10-14 days, since no official counter notice was ever received. That makes it more significant (not merely symbolic) that GitHub chose…

Not true. The first sentence of the first paragraph make mention that the EFF is representing the youtube-dl developers. An attorney-client relationship.

> The Electronic Frontier Foundation represents the current maintainers of the youtube-dl software utility, a free software project that uses GitHub as a home for development.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#657

Post by colejohnson66 »

kingo55 wrote: post #528
boomboomsubban wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they argued that their URL obfuscation is DRM. edit I think YouTube-Red's successor has DRM on it's videos, I don't think youtube-dl ever worked on them though.

I better throw out my web browser then. It is circumventing YouTube DRM by opening those URLs.

By that logic, playing Netflix on your browser is breaking DRM. That’s not how that works.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#658

Post by klmr »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #654
shbooms wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's how understood it as well: "youtube-dl stands in place of a Web browser and performs a similar function with respect to user-uploaded videos. Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix." "We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,”…

I wonder where the phrase “rolling cipher” actually comes from. Did the RIAA just make it up?

The (English) phrase is used verbatim in the (German) 2017 LG Hamburg claim and verdict. It is not explained there, nor did the claimant explain where they got it from. I’m assuming that it’s based on a misunderstanding of “rolling codes” [1], an actual cryptographic technique, which isn’t applied here (the only overlap is that the “s” parameter of the YouTube video URI varies for certain videos; and, well, the key in rolling codes also varies).

Interestingly that verdict also claims that URL encoding is a valid, effective encryption measure (I’m not kidding! See [2]; the German word here is “Prozentcodierung”, i.e. percent-encoding).

The court in question (LG Hamburg) is infamous in Germany for its technically illiterate, consistently laughable verdicts in IT-related cases (this isn’t a recent thing — it’s been going on for about two decades).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_code [2] http://www.rechtsprechung-hamburg.de/jportal/portal/page/bsh...

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#659

Post by crtasm »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #600
crtasm wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. There's a single green line that has an alteration to replace a music video ID "UxxajLWwzqY" in a test case that actually only makes use of ID "BaW_jenozKc" ("Use the first video ID in the URL"). The removed "Test generic use_cipher_signature video (#897)" case did make use of ID UxxajLWwzqY.

I see what you mean, but the extractor file still features how to deal with videos containing the cipher, all that was removed was the tests. Testing the generic cipher video may have been ruled unnecessary as it's universal.

That's the partial win here - repo restored with tests referencing the RIAA related videos removed but the code dealing with the rolling cipher itself still intact.

And next time youtube makes one of their frequent changes to their website the extractor will break in some way. Somebody will work to fix it and make use of the same tests, only now some of them won't be in the public codebase.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#660

Post by jasonjayr »

bigbubba wrote: post #119
jasonjayr wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random cynical thought -- they noticed because the automated testing was bumping up the # of views on those streams, so their members were being forced to pay royalties on views that were not real ...

Does use of youtube-dl to download videos from youtube really bump the view count? I have assumed that it doesn't, since it probably isn't passing whatever systems youtube has for addressing 'view count fraud'.

I haven't tested, so I couldn't tell you.

I imagine as YT's anti-download measures get more intense, the more yt-dl has to behave like a real browser, including ticking up the view count.

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