6 ms·

Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law

gamblor956 6y ago
Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations. Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it. A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality. This is false. Also, time-shifting is not a a valid fair-use defense for material available on-demand, because the justification for time-shifting (as in the Betamax case) generally no longer exists. There are other fair use arguments that could be made, but time-shifting isn't one of them. They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense. I don't know if you're joking or not, but they cited a variety of US cases. Kazaa, Limewire, Napster, etc, are all US cases that all came down the same way: a tool intended primarily for copyright violations violates the DMCA, and in certain cases can even expose its developers to statutory damages under the copyright code. It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again. Nope, not even close for so many reasons already explained in this and other comments.
- _-___________-_ 6y ago
  > Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it. YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).
  - bartimus 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal violation when you're downloading a copy from YouTube even though you're the original copyright owner of the video. Youtube has a license to distribute the copy according to their TOS. That license will be subjected to specific terms (streaming + DRM protection). It might not include allowing creators to circumvent those terms for archival purposes.
    - _-___________-_ 6y ago
      "legal violation" is pretty vague. You might be disobeying their ToS, but it's not copyright infringement, since you own the copyright.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      It's very possible to have a TOS violation but not a copyright violation if you're the copyright owner of the video being downloaded. Owning the copyright means you don't violate the copyright in making a copy, but that doesn't mean you get to make that copy through any means; you still have to use legal means, and for a website, that means methods that are acceptable under the TOS of that website.
  - roel_v 6y ago
    "Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license," You really need to stop commemting in this thread on something you obviously know nothing about. That is not how IP licensing works.
bo1024 6y ago
> Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Are you a lawyer? Ethically I agree with you: copyright law regulates distributing copies to other people, and YouTube is the only one doing that in this scenario. But I've been told in other internet discussions that courts don't see it that way. Basically, that the point of the law is to allow big companies to stop people from accessing media without paying, and the interpretation is stretched as far as it needs to be in order to enforce that. So I don't know what to believe here.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see it the way of the party with the most money all the time. You can interpret laws until you're blue in the face, but they get to break the rules. Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally. It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".
  - qubex 6y ago
    > Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see things in the way of the party with the most money all the time. This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court. In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it. RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?) A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they? So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.

gamblor956 6y ago

Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations. Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it. A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality. This is false. Also, time-shifting is not a a valid fair-use defense for material available on-demand, because the justification for time-shifting (as in the Betamax case) generally no longer exists. There are other fair use arguments that could be made, but time-shifting isn't one of them. They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense. I don't know if you're joking or not, but they cited a variety of US cases. Kazaa, Limewire, Napster, etc, are all US cases that all came down the same way: a tool intended primarily for copyright violations violates the DMCA, and in certain cases can even expose its developers to statutory damages under the copyright code. It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again. Nope, not even close for so many reasons already explained in this and other comments.

_-___________-_ 6y ago
> Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it. YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).
- bartimus 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal violation when you're downloading a copy from YouTube even though you're the original copyright owner of the video. Youtube has a license to distribute the copy according to their TOS. That license will be subjected to specific terms (streaming + DRM protection). It might not include allowing creators to circumvent those terms for archival purposes.
  - _-___________-_ 6y ago
    "legal violation" is pretty vague. You might be disobeying their ToS, but it's not copyright infringement, since you own the copyright.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    It's very possible to have a TOS violation but not a copyright violation if you're the copyright owner of the video being downloaded. Owning the copyright means you don't violate the copyright in making a copy, but that doesn't mean you get to make that copy through any means; you still have to use legal means, and for a website, that means methods that are acceptable under the TOS of that website.
- roel_v 6y ago
  "Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license," You really need to stop commemting in this thread on something you obviously know nothing about. That is not how IP licensing works.

bo1024 6y ago

> Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Are you a lawyer? Ethically I agree with you: copyright law regulates distributing copies to other people, and YouTube is the only one doing that in this scenario. But I've been told in other internet discussions that courts don't see it that way. Basically, that the point of the law is to allow big companies to stop people from accessing media without paying, and the interpretation is stretched as far as it needs to be in order to enforce that. So I don't know what to believe here.

tripzilch 6y ago
Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see it the way of the party with the most money all the time. You can interpret laws until you're blue in the face, but they get to break the rules. Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally. It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".
- qubex 6y ago
  > Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see things in the way of the party with the most money all the time. This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court. In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it. RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?) A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they? So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.