Tldr all these comments - youtube dl got in trouble because they link to copyrighted material in the readme which from a legal perspective shows intent to circumvent copyright. If they had just linked to videos they had uploaded themselves as examples everything would be fine.
YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#682Your weekly reminder that 1. You should not have your development process on a centralized platform, at least not if you're doing anything that smells of copyright issues 2. If you do host on a centralized platform, have regular, decentralized backups of code and issue tracking. 3. Also, avoid US-centric hosting for this kind of thing. But really, refer to 1.
there will never be a safe country. The robust option is to mirror them in hostile countries. Divide them and conquer
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely was very sloppy of them to show examples on actual copyrighted material. Couldn't they have simply put examples of public domain content?
JFYI i was wrong. There were no such examples in the README or “marketing material,” there was URLs and metadata in a few unit tests.
Not that big of a difference, since I see unit tests as examples, still sloppy either ways.
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#684I just installed it from archive.org using the url homebrew uses. It's a simple matter to run brew install -d youtube-dl plug the url that into archive.org, download the archive, cp it to the dl location (minus the .incomplete) that brew expects, and then run it again without the -d so it thinks it is already downloaded.
I wouldn't have installed if they hadn't done this, and I'll probably never use it, but this rubbed me the wrong way.
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#685Worth noting the MPA already tried doing this to Popcorn Time, a BitTorrent client designed to provide a Netflix-like UX.[1] The Popcorn Time devs put in a counter-notice and the repository was back up a few weeks later when the period for the MPA to respond expired. The same thing will probably happen here because this is not one of the purposes of DMCA takedown letters, period. Even if there are inappropriate test…
I just used windows-g to record upside down music video. Seems to work fine. mp4 file is in my captures video. Sound is great. How is that acceptable and this isn't? btw, Popcorn time is a bit different situation. I would say bit torrent is more the problem, or at least the people who upload pirated content. What is odd though is that it's the RIAA filing suit here and not google. Google has a real complaint, RIAA ce…
> What is odd though is that it's the RIAA filing suit here and not google. Google has a real complaint, RIAA certainly does not.
Probably not wanting to poke a hornets nest of the open source community.
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#686I doubt there will be many pro-RIAA perspectives here so as someone familiar with their leadership and goals, I might as well add some perspective. Imagine yourself stumbling upon some incredible technology breakthrough. Let's say, it's some magical script you wrote that automatically improves the efficiency of any container by 70%+. You've worked for years on this specific problem, went broke a couple of times tryin…
Your proprietary code analogy is incredibly weird. Why would anyone need gofyourself-dl to download your container code? And what does Google have to do with the creation of youtube-dl, which is used to download stuff hosted on Google's website? And you talked about publishing code, but where does youtube-dl publish the videos it downloads?
Or are you just implying that not executing all of Google's code and not watching a gazillion ads to download and view videos is some sort of "theft of IP"? Or is it that youtube-dl doesn't automatically delete the video after watching? I seriously don't get it.
> don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism
What would they prefer doing? Arrest people who are using youtube-dl to listen to music? Go after people who are rehosting music from youtube on their website?
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#687This isn't a DMCA takedown. It's a cease and desist letter citing the DMCA.
The difference matters. GitHub is required to honor DMCA takedowns. Other legal requests are granted on a case by case basis.
-- /u/telionn @ reddit
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtube...
As I understand, takedown is a 17 USC 512 (copyright infringement) safe-harbour, but not a required or indemnifying protection under 17 USC 1201, anti-circumvention:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
Lumen (Chilling Effects) is silent on this point in their FAQ: https://lumendatabase.org/topics/14
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#688Curious if anyone with legal expertise knows if this has legs? They say: > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. But the "circumventing" is still accessing a stream the use…
Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"? From the RIAA's point of view, it works to their benefit that a download link doesn't exist, and it may be something they like, but that doesn't mean that's why. It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn't exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their site if you want to rewatch…
> Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?
an actual court in germany ruled that: https://openjur.de/u/2194436.html
sadly german only. lots of fud and hamburg is often pro copyright owner. not sure if that would hold at the highest instance.
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#689Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an example of that: > 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…
Does it really matter what they said? This is like the reverse of those common disclaimers on hacking tools and tutorials which claim: This is for educational use only. I've always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers? Are their authors untouchable just because they put in some boilerplate disclaimer like that? As for what was written in some code somewhere in the repo, it could have been written by anyone…
> I've always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers?
No. And there's no educational exception in the DMCA anyway.
Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
#690Earlier 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…
Right, but that's not the heart of the matter. It's one thing if a tool designed for legitimate archiving use results in incidental violation of copyright. It's another thing entirely, legally, if a tool is designed for violating copyright. In such case, it doesn't matter if there are also legitimate fair use uses of the tool. And that's what the README showed: that youtube-dl was built primarily to violate copyright…
The kicker is that if their demo examples had been something like that, or e.g. students downloading copies of free lectures, or etc, the RIAA would have much less of a case. No actual code would have had to change.
If you have a tool which skirts (bad, overreaching, probably constitutionally invalid) laws, be smart about how you present them!