17 ms·

Isn't that evidence for the case though? youtube-dl has code to see through obfuscation methods which are only available to specific YouTube partners. If you're

Isn't that evidence for the case though? youtube-dl has code to see through obfuscation methods which are only available to specific YouTube partners. If you're a tool for downloading open, not copyrighted videos, why do you need that?

wizzwizz4 6y ago
youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool. You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union? youtube-dl is a useful library for the job. You can use youtube-dl to download videos, but the intended use here is clearly for watching them. Just because syringe needles are tested on (and advertised for) human skin and are also tested with poisonous chemicals, that doesn't mean you should attack syringe needle manufacturers for making murder weapons.
- hnlmorg 6y ago
  You're trying very hard to make a technical distinction but the problem is that this is a legal problem not a technical one and rightly or wrongly, legal definitions don't always align with technical ones. For starters, intent is factored into the law. There's several different classifications of murder depending on intent. Likewise someone carrying a kitchen knife home, still packaged, from the shops is unlikely to be reprimanded compared to someone carrying a more decorative knife around. They're both knives but one instance clearly carries a different intent to another. The problem with youtube-dl is that having tests which work against copyrighted content and having the README describe usages against copyrighted content, it's much harder to argue that the intent of this is purely for copyleft content. Your point about this being an access tool (which actually makes no difference in terms of circumventing DRM anyway -- which was the claim for the take down) also doesn't fly because this tool creates a file on your local disk so it's hard to argue that the intent is for that file to be temporary. I'm not saying I agree with the take down notice (I don't) but something a great many techies on here miss is that not every argument can be won with science.
  - decasteve 6y ago
    > ...intent is factored into the law. What gets lost or missed is the underlying intent of the protocols and tools being used to share content. An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access. I'm not saying people should be free then to republish/share copyrighted works. Just that we are free to use tools to retrieve files that have been served openly via the web.
    - what-the-grump 6y ago
      Right, but even when offering free resources to the public you still maintain the manner in which they are accessed and distributed. It's not as clear as let's say access to a public park on private land. But the idea would carry weight that youtube may control the manner in which their publicaly accessable website may be accessed. Let's say you can access via the YouTube app which does not require an account, and now you reverse engineer that app to bypass the app all together. It's a bit like cutting a hole in the fence around the playground. I'm not a fan of what happened it's just clear to me why it happened.
      - decasteve 6y ago
        This was indeed bound to happen. The discussions we have are what's needed to decide how the internet/web moves forward. And there's a bit of cake eating and having it too from both sides. There's an expectation from the publishing/serving side of the equation that the content is being served to a proprietary app or a web browser that works a particular way. With the browser being one of Chrome, Firefox, etc., along with Google's YouTube apps. On the user side, especially those who understand how the content is served, that the browser is not the only abstraction allowed. Google themselves run bots to scour the internet employing all sorts of tricks to access and index content. There's a fundamental way in which the http protocol works and its content served that is client agnostic. Everyone, Google Search most of all, have benefitted from this. Making tools other than browsers illegal will fundamentally break the internet in my opinion.
- corobo 6y ago
  Come off it, the other part of the name is "dl" I use YouTube-dl as much as the next guy for lawful reasons but these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Please remember that to reverse this YouTube-dl needs to go through a court. Courts are not code that can be tricked by clever wording. If anything you'll be trying to describe what it is to some old grandma who hasn't got a clue what GitHub is never mind convincing them this software isn't for downloading YouTube videos. By all means everyone go on with coming up with clever interpretations of the law but you're just farting into the wind P.s downvoting my comments doesn't change the way the law works either, but if it helps you feel good have at it :)
  - nybble41 6y ago
    > … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Regardless of the name, the tool supports over a thousand different sites, not just YouTube, and is routinely used for streaming rather than downloading, with no permanent copy saved. If you run "mpv https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY" to simply play the Blender Open Movie "Spring" it relies on youtube-dl behind the scenes to stream the video. (Though of course the difference between streaming and downloading is a trivial one; getting the content to the end user's device is the hard part.) YouTube itself is the entity responsible for duplicating and distributing the content, and they have a license to do so, ergo there is no copyright violation here. The most any user of youtube-dl might be liable for, assuming they don't save a permanent copy or further redistribute the data, would be a violation of YouTube's TOS. Which is no concern of the RIAA. To call youtube-dl a "circumvention tool" is laughable; obfuscation of a video's URL is not DRM.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- brianush1 6y ago
  > You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union? Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything about this through a quick Google search, but I'd love for this to be true.
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL) a good example of this is the European Court of Justice Case C-355/12 "Nintendo v. PC Box" where europas highest court ruled that DRM must respect the principle of proportionality and circumvention of technical protection is only illegal if done for unlawful purposes. If DRM prevents lawful purposes, then the DRM is not proportional to consumer rights (or those of other corporations). If circumventing DRM is illegal is a question of the specific case and must take into account the purpose of the tech used to do it and what people actually use it for. This, at the core, means it is very hard to argue that some library written to circumvent DRM is "illegal tech" and have it taken down in this manner, because the DRM could be inappropriate and it is not the copyright owner who has to decide that. The ECJ was asked by a Milan court for a preliminary, so they gave instructions how the Milan court should handle the matter and how the law is to be interpreted. The base case was about a mod-chip sold by pc-box, who argued as a defendant, that circumventing nintendos DRM for the purpose of playing homebrews was ok and nintendo preventing that is inappropriate. In the general case this was a huge win, because "circumventing DRM is illegal" is only true with a big IF, not as a blanket statement. And from that follows that usage of alternative clients is well within the consumers rights, but again i am not a lawyer. However note that the Milan court then ruled in its case 12508/2015 that this particular mod chip is illegal. Nintendo gave a lot of evidence about the advantages of their DRM in terms of cost, ease of use, security etc, comparing it to inferior implementations of their choice that would fail to protect the copyright holders interests, as well as evidence of usage of the mod chip for piracy. On the other side pc-box defaulted, filing no evidence showing that their users are a vibrant community of homebrew gamers and techheads that circumvent DRM for purposes well within their rights, like running self written software on the hardware. The Milan court also argues that defendant has a burden of proof to show that a more proportionate drm method was possible, which i strongly disagree with, and which seems to follow nintendos argument that their solution is appropriate even if more restrictive then strictly necessary. Note that Milan does not speak for the EU.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  > youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool. What you’re describing is a circumvention device. The DMCA explicitly outlaws these. 17 U.S. Code § 1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
  - gottz 6y ago
    um.. simple.. move the code out of the US region then. it's perfectly legal in EU

wizzwizz4 6y ago

youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool. You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union? youtube-dl is a useful library for the job. You can use youtube-dl to download videos, but the intended use here is clearly for watching them. Just because syringe needles are tested on (and advertised for) human skin and are also tested with poisonous chemicals, that doesn't mean you should attack syringe needle manufacturers for making murder weapons.

hnlmorg 6y ago
You're trying very hard to make a technical distinction but the problem is that this is a legal problem not a technical one and rightly or wrongly, legal definitions don't always align with technical ones. For starters, intent is factored into the law. There's several different classifications of murder depending on intent. Likewise someone carrying a kitchen knife home, still packaged, from the shops is unlikely to be reprimanded compared to someone carrying a more decorative knife around. They're both knives but one instance clearly carries a different intent to another. The problem with youtube-dl is that having tests which work against copyrighted content and having the README describe usages against copyrighted content, it's much harder to argue that the intent of this is purely for copyleft content. Your point about this being an access tool (which actually makes no difference in terms of circumventing DRM anyway -- which was the claim for the take down) also doesn't fly because this tool creates a file on your local disk so it's hard to argue that the intent is for that file to be temporary. I'm not saying I agree with the take down notice (I don't) but something a great many techies on here miss is that not every argument can be won with science.
- decasteve 6y ago
  > ...intent is factored into the law. What gets lost or missed is the underlying intent of the protocols and tools being used to share content. An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access. I'm not saying people should be free then to republish/share copyrighted works. Just that we are free to use tools to retrieve files that have been served openly via the web.
  - what-the-grump 6y ago
    Right, but even when offering free resources to the public you still maintain the manner in which they are accessed and distributed. It's not as clear as let's say access to a public park on private land. But the idea would carry weight that youtube may control the manner in which their publicaly accessable website may be accessed. Let's say you can access via the YouTube app which does not require an account, and now you reverse engineer that app to bypass the app all together. It's a bit like cutting a hole in the fence around the playground. I'm not a fan of what happened it's just clear to me why it happened.
    - decasteve 6y ago
      This was indeed bound to happen. The discussions we have are what's needed to decide how the internet/web moves forward. And there's a bit of cake eating and having it too from both sides. There's an expectation from the publishing/serving side of the equation that the content is being served to a proprietary app or a web browser that works a particular way. With the browser being one of Chrome, Firefox, etc., along with Google's YouTube apps. On the user side, especially those who understand how the content is served, that the browser is not the only abstraction allowed. Google themselves run bots to scour the internet employing all sorts of tricks to access and index content. There's a fundamental way in which the http protocol works and its content served that is client agnostic. Everyone, Google Search most of all, have benefitted from this. Making tools other than browsers illegal will fundamentally break the internet in my opinion.
corobo 6y ago
Come off it, the other part of the name is "dl" I use YouTube-dl as much as the next guy for lawful reasons but these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Please remember that to reverse this YouTube-dl needs to go through a court. Courts are not code that can be tricked by clever wording. If anything you'll be trying to describe what it is to some old grandma who hasn't got a clue what GitHub is never mind convincing them this software isn't for downloading YouTube videos. By all means everyone go on with coming up with clever interpretations of the law but you're just farting into the wind P.s downvoting my comments doesn't change the way the law works either, but if it helps you feel good have at it :)
- nybble41 6y ago
  > … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Regardless of the name, the tool supports over a thousand different sites, not just YouTube, and is routinely used for streaming rather than downloading, with no permanent copy saved. If you run "mpv https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY" to simply play the Blender Open Movie "Spring" it relies on youtube-dl behind the scenes to stream the video. (Though of course the difference between streaming and downloading is a trivial one; getting the content to the end user's device is the hard part.) YouTube itself is the entity responsible for duplicating and distributing the content, and they have a license to do so, ergo there is no copyright violation here. The most any user of youtube-dl might be liable for, assuming they don't save a permanent copy or further redistribute the data, would be a violation of YouTube's TOS. Which is no concern of the RIAA. To call youtube-dl a "circumvention tool" is laughable; obfuscation of a video's URL is not DRM.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
brianush1 6y ago
> You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union? Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything about this through a quick Google search, but I'd love for this to be true.
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL) a good example of this is the European Court of Justice Case C-355/12 "Nintendo v. PC Box" where europas highest court ruled that DRM must respect the principle of proportionality and circumvention of technical protection is only illegal if done for unlawful purposes. If DRM prevents lawful purposes, then the DRM is not proportional to consumer rights (or those of other corporations). If circumventing DRM is illegal is a question of the specific case and must take into account the purpose of the tech used to do it and what people actually use it for. This, at the core, means it is very hard to argue that some library written to circumvent DRM is "illegal tech" and have it taken down in this manner, because the DRM could be inappropriate and it is not the copyright owner who has to decide that. The ECJ was asked by a Milan court for a preliminary, so they gave instructions how the Milan court should handle the matter and how the law is to be interpreted. The base case was about a mod-chip sold by pc-box, who argued as a defendant, that circumventing nintendos DRM for the purpose of playing homebrews was ok and nintendo preventing that is inappropriate. In the general case this was a huge win, because "circumventing DRM is illegal" is only true with a big IF, not as a blanket statement. And from that follows that usage of alternative clients is well within the consumers rights, but again i am not a lawyer. However note that the Milan court then ruled in its case 12508/2015 that this particular mod chip is illegal. Nintendo gave a lot of evidence about the advantages of their DRM in terms of cost, ease of use, security etc, comparing it to inferior implementations of their choice that would fail to protect the copyright holders interests, as well as evidence of usage of the mod chip for piracy. On the other side pc-box defaulted, filing no evidence showing that their users are a vibrant community of homebrew gamers and techheads that circumvent DRM for purposes well within their rights, like running self written software on the hardware. The Milan court also argues that defendant has a burden of proof to show that a more proportionate drm method was possible, which i strongly disagree with, and which seems to follow nintendos argument that their solution is appropriate even if more restrictive then strictly necessary. Note that Milan does not speak for the EU.
jonathankoren 6y ago
> youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool. What you’re describing is a circumvention device. The DMCA explicitly outlaws these. 17 U.S. Code § 1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
- gottz 6y ago
  um.. simple.. move the code out of the US region then. it's perfectly legal in EU