9 ms·

I don't understand this case, to be honest. On one hand people tend to side with youtube-dl, because everybody claims they did nothing wrong. But it can be arg

I don't understand this case, to be honest. On one hand people tend to side with youtube-dl, because everybody claims they did nothing wrong. But it can be argued that the testsuite (and CI pipeline) is the responsibility of the person who implemented. And I agree with that point. From youtube-dl's perspective, this is an unnecessary attack surface that can be easily removed. I mean, this was bound to happen at some point, don't kid yourself. With a project so big, I think it is irresponsible to not care for its legality. I mean, they could have just prevented this with a supersimple fix. 0. Use only CC licensed content in testsuite. If necessary, open up your own youtube-dl-tests channel and upload a video of your dog or cat. It just takes less than an hour. 1. Implement a license check, required by all plugins. Default to proprietary if none given. If proprietary, provide a url to Terms Of Service. 2. Let the end user manually confirm that the license is XYZ once it is proprietary and not public domain or CC based. Do this with every download. 3. Introduce a CLI flag like "--agree-to-license" in order to skip that. 4. Document this under legal compliance in the readme, and state that youtube-dl does in good faith try to comply with legal requirements, but that the responsibility is the action of its users that it cannot influence. Boom. Plausible deniability, and RIAA would have not a single basis for the case. I mean, this would have been so easy to implement. I don't understand why this wasn't integrated.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Former lead developer Philipp Hagemeiste: These videos were never fully downloaded anyways; they are automated test cases where the test just downloads the first 10KB, which amounts to a couple of seconds at most. This is certainly fair use. https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/ https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  I know this is an unpopular opinion and I probably get downvoted for this. But I stand my ground that I think the assumption of fair use for this copyright circumventing algorithm is wrong. ------ First off: Fair Use does not exist. It is an assumption, not a defined situation as it requires legal evaluation in court to apply. And on top of that: It is a regional difference and is therefore completely unpredictable whether it applies or not. Assuming fair use on a platform with a proprietary license that even forbids downloading, while downloading proprietary content specifically to circumvent copyright protection, while fair use does only exist as a "possibibility" inside, and only inside, the US and only after a legal case was decided in at least state level court ... really? You get sued for downloading 512kB of porn illegaly, just as you can get sued for downloading 10kB of copyrighted youtube videos. As I said, this was just a suggestion to remove that attack surface. Another attack surface is the trademark violation, but that's a different case.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— ... -- 17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
    - cookiengineer 6y ago
      How can you prove that youtube dl is used specifically for, say, classroom purposes? Can you prove it? Probably not. Is circumventing a copyright mechanism an educational or journalistic purpose? In a testsuite? ... Even when siding with you, you would need a court case to evaluate whether fair use applies or not. Again, as I said, unnecessary attack surface. I don't care whether you or I am right or wrong. Nobody of us can be right unless a court case has been made. It's unnecessary and could have been prevented.
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        You made a bald assertion that Fair Use does not exist, and is not law. U.S. Code demonstrates otherwise. You might wish to show the sportsmanship of admitting your previous error before embarking on further ones.
        cookiengineer 6y ago
        Fair Use is a circumstancial definition in the law. It is not clearly defined and needs a court case in order to apply. Therefore I still think that the assumption of Fair Use to apply is wrong. However, the assumption of copyright to apply on the other hand is correct. But, referring to whether fair use exists or not, I agree with you that technically it exists. But as the rest of the very same law criminalizes by default, you can still not refer to fair use if you do not have the required-by-law evidence at hand for it to apply. I think that fair use is almost always nearly impossible to prove, that's why I wrote my statement like this. And I agree that it was worded badly.
- thrownaway954 6y ago
  no it's not. intent is also taken into account of fair use and the intent of those test cases is to make sure their program gets around a specific counter measures youtube as put into place so people cannot directly download the media and are forced to stream it. look... i love the project and everything, but philip is just plain in the wrong and doesn't want to admit it.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    The statement is relevant regards one of RIAA's three claims; that youtube-dl infringes RIAA member works in executing its test suite. That averred infringement is a specific claim. Though weak, it's the strongest specific claim RIAA makes. Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed in the testing itself, contrary to RIAA's claim. The infringement does not occur in the source code or test suite itself, it occurs inccidental to testing functionality of the software (that is, it is inherently functional, not expressive), the copies made fall within existing limitations to exclusive rights (§112, §117, §512(a) and (b)), and tests (1), (3), and (4) of §107 fair use. RIAA's standing on anti-circ §1201 is separate from this question, poorly justified, and likely lacks standing.
    - thrownaway954 6y ago
      dude... you just dug your own grave with your statement: "Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed..." bottom line... they are still downloading and copying the file, regardless of what for or how much which is exactly what the RIAA is claiming. you can cite whatever it is you want, the fact is that youtube-dl is DEAD wrong in what they are doing.
      - soraminazuki 6y ago
        Since when did fair use mean "no copying at all?"
        thrownaway954 6y ago
- gamblor956 6y ago
  The issue isn't how much of the music videos were downloaded during testing. That may or may not fair use. The issue is that they were testing the ability to download music videos in the first place, meaning that the tool was intended at least in part to download music videos subject to copyright.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius
marcan_42 6y ago
0. As people have stated before, the whole point of those tests is that they test a specific kind of obfuscation that YouTube only uses for certain partner videos. So unless someone manages to dig up some obscure partner video that has that feature turned on and yet arguably consists entirely of freely licensable or non-copyrightable content, that won't work. 1~4. youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool, it is a library and tool that lots of other software shells out to, e.g. so you can play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player. Integrating ToS links and extra user interaction into that isn't trivial.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  As I said, it was a suggestion to remove that attack surface. If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally, then don't cry when the legal system f*s you up. Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition.
  - feanaro 6y ago
    I think there are essentially two problems here that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio in these kinds of discussions. One is that people often mix political and legal matters in colloquial discussions of such topics. I frequently catch myself doing it too. It is clearly not in the interest of most people for functionality that youtube-dl offers to be illegal. In fact, most of the time it isn't really illegal, in a de facto sense, since it is never acted upon and prosecuted. However, sometimes a shady organization such as the RIAA acts upon this legal grey area and tries to push the needle in its own direction. When people then say "There is actually nothing wrong with this, this is definitely not illegal.", they are actually making a political statement without realizing. They are really saying: this shouldn't be illegal because it makes no sense that it is so. Since people actually hold all the power, this act makes this the reality in a way, but in order for this to completely materialize, the will of the people must first be focused so that it is reified into law. The other problem is that the world is not the US and there are many jurisdictions where circumventing copyright protections and/or downloading a media file for personal use are not problematic at all. This fact also often seeps into the discussion, but sometimes only implicitly, so people often talk past each other.
steerablesafe 6y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if a fork popped up and did most of these things right. It would also be the right time to drop the 'youtube-dl' name for something better.
- pitay 6y ago
  Something like 'VideoArchiver' if you want to be safe.
  - steerablesafe 6y ago
    Or MultimediaArchiver, AFAIK it works with some audio only sources as well.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Working off my "Swiss army knife" metaphor, something evoking that. - mediaswak - mediablade - sonicscrewdriver (say, "ssdr" for short) - mediamultitool (mmt) - webMediaFlexiTool (wmft)
    - steerablesafe 6y ago
      For me the first thing that comes to mind for "multimedia Swiss army knife" is ffmpeg. I think that right keywords here are "web", "media" and "download" (although it can do things other than downloading, like extracting stream URLs or just querying available formats).
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      StreamingSlayer
    - torified 6y ago
      freedomdownloader
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  https://github.com/dvoyakiy/youtube-dl-reborn https://github.com/dvoyakiy/youtube-dl-reborn
swiley 6y ago
As a user, I would really like youtube-dl to not break on random videos. I have a number of machines that can't handle watching youtube directly in firefox but using youtube-dl with mpv works fine. If RIAA can't handle people watching their videos then they should go build their own hosting site and force people to download some .exe DRM to watch them.
- torified 6y ago
  The RIAA should provide me with a dedicated device and pay me for any and all traffic use that is unrequested/ad-related, instead of trying to hack the PC and network connection that I am paying for to force me to watch ads.
anthk 6y ago
You send all the calls to invidio.us servers, period. Problem solved.
m463 6y ago
Maybe the venn diagram of "people who create wild things and throw them out there" and "people who are legally cautious and circumspect" might show only minor overlap. It's sort of the opposite of creativity.
- m463 6y ago
  I just thought of a clearer way to say this. Creativity is about what can I do. Legal caution is about what can't I do.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Former lead developer Philipp Hagemeiste: These videos were never fully downloaded anyways; they are automated test cases where the test just downloads the first 10KB, which amounts to a couple of seconds at most. This is certainly fair use. https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/ https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cookiengineer 6y ago
I know this is an unpopular opinion and I probably get downvoted for this. But I stand my ground that I think the assumption of fair use for this copyright circumventing algorithm is wrong. ------ First off: Fair Use does not exist. It is an assumption, not a defined situation as it requires legal evaluation in court to apply. And on top of that: It is a regional difference and is therefore completely unpredictable whether it applies or not. Assuming fair use on a platform with a proprietary license that even forbids downloading, while downloading proprietary content specifically to circumvent copyright protection, while fair use does only exist as a "possibibility" inside, and only inside, the US and only after a legal case was decided in at least state level court ... really? You get sued for downloading 512kB of porn illegaly, just as you can get sued for downloading 10kB of copyrighted youtube videos. As I said, this was just a suggestion to remove that attack surface. Another attack surface is the trademark violation, but that's a different case.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— ... -- 17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    How can you prove that youtube dl is used specifically for, say, classroom purposes? Can you prove it? Probably not. Is circumventing a copyright mechanism an educational or journalistic purpose? In a testsuite? ... Even when siding with you, you would need a court case to evaluate whether fair use applies or not. Again, as I said, unnecessary attack surface. I don't care whether you or I am right or wrong. Nobody of us can be right unless a court case has been made. It's unnecessary and could have been prevented.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      You made a bald assertion that Fair Use does not exist, and is not law. U.S. Code demonstrates otherwise. You might wish to show the sportsmanship of admitting your previous error before embarking on further ones.
      - cookiengineer 6y ago
        Fair Use is a circumstancial definition in the law. It is not clearly defined and needs a court case in order to apply. Therefore I still think that the assumption of Fair Use to apply is wrong. However, the assumption of copyright to apply on the other hand is correct. But, referring to whether fair use exists or not, I agree with you that technically it exists. But as the rest of the very same law criminalizes by default, you can still not refer to fair use if you do not have the required-by-law evidence at hand for it to apply. I think that fair use is almost always nearly impossible to prove, that's why I wrote my statement like this. And I agree that it was worded badly.
thrownaway954 6y ago
no it's not. intent is also taken into account of fair use and the intent of those test cases is to make sure their program gets around a specific counter measures youtube as put into place so people cannot directly download the media and are forced to stream it. look... i love the project and everything, but philip is just plain in the wrong and doesn't want to admit it.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  The statement is relevant regards one of RIAA's three claims; that youtube-dl infringes RIAA member works in executing its test suite. That averred infringement is a specific claim. Though weak, it's the strongest specific claim RIAA makes. Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed in the testing itself, contrary to RIAA's claim. The infringement does not occur in the source code or test suite itself, it occurs inccidental to testing functionality of the software (that is, it is inherently functional, not expressive), the copies made fall within existing limitations to exclusive rights (§112, §117, §512(a) and (b)), and tests (1), (3), and (4) of §107 fair use. RIAA's standing on anti-circ §1201 is separate from this question, poorly justified, and likely lacks standing.
  - thrownaway954 6y ago
    dude... you just dug your own grave with your statement: "Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed..." bottom line... they are still downloading and copying the file, regardless of what for or how much which is exactly what the RIAA is claiming. you can cite whatever it is you want, the fact is that youtube-dl is DEAD wrong in what they are doing.
    - soraminazuki 6y ago
      Since when did fair use mean "no copying at all?"
      - thrownaway954 6y ago
gamblor956 6y ago
The issue isn't how much of the music videos were downloaded during testing. That may or may not fair use. The issue is that they were testing the ability to download music videos in the first place, meaning that the tool was intended at least in part to download music videos subject to copyright.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius

marcan_42 6y ago

0. As people have stated before, the whole point of those tests is that they test a specific kind of obfuscation that YouTube only uses for certain partner videos. So unless someone manages to dig up some obscure partner video that has that feature turned on and yet arguably consists entirely of freely licensable or non-copyrightable content, that won't work. 1~4. youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool, it is a library and tool that lots of other software shells out to, e.g. so you can play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player. Integrating ToS links and extra user interaction into that isn't trivial.

cookiengineer 6y ago
As I said, it was a suggestion to remove that attack surface. If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally, then don't cry when the legal system f*s you up. Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition.
- feanaro 6y ago
  I think there are essentially two problems here that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio in these kinds of discussions. One is that people often mix political and legal matters in colloquial discussions of such topics. I frequently catch myself doing it too. It is clearly not in the interest of most people for functionality that youtube-dl offers to be illegal. In fact, most of the time it isn't really illegal, in a de facto sense, since it is never acted upon and prosecuted. However, sometimes a shady organization such as the RIAA acts upon this legal grey area and tries to push the needle in its own direction. When people then say "There is actually nothing wrong with this, this is definitely not illegal.", they are actually making a political statement without realizing. They are really saying: this shouldn't be illegal because it makes no sense that it is so. Since people actually hold all the power, this act makes this the reality in a way, but in order for this to completely materialize, the will of the people must first be focused so that it is reified into law. The other problem is that the world is not the US and there are many jurisdictions where circumventing copyright protections and/or downloading a media file for personal use are not problematic at all. This fact also often seeps into the discussion, but sometimes only implicitly, so people often talk past each other.

steerablesafe 6y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if a fork popped up and did most of these things right. It would also be the right time to drop the 'youtube-dl' name for something better.

pitay 6y ago
Something like 'VideoArchiver' if you want to be safe.
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  Or MultimediaArchiver, AFAIK it works with some audio only sources as well.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Working off my "Swiss army knife" metaphor, something evoking that. - mediaswak - mediablade - sonicscrewdriver (say, "ssdr" for short) - mediamultitool (mmt) - webMediaFlexiTool (wmft)
  - steerablesafe 6y ago
    For me the first thing that comes to mind for "multimedia Swiss army knife" is ffmpeg. I think that right keywords here are "web", "media" and "download" (although it can do things other than downloading, like extracting stream URLs or just querying available formats).
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    StreamingSlayer
  - torified 6y ago
    freedomdownloader
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
https://github.com/dvoyakiy/youtube-dl-reborn https://github.com/dvoyakiy/youtube-dl-reborn

swiley 6y ago

As a user, I would really like youtube-dl to not break on random videos. I have a number of machines that can't handle watching youtube directly in firefox but using youtube-dl with mpv works fine. If RIAA can't handle people watching their videos then they should go build their own hosting site and force people to download some .exe DRM to watch them.

torified 6y ago
The RIAA should provide me with a dedicated device and pay me for any and all traffic use that is unrequested/ad-related, instead of trying to hack the PC and network connection that I am paying for to force me to watch ads.

anthk 6y ago

You send all the calls to invidio.us servers, period. Problem solved.

m463 6y ago

Maybe the venn diagram of "people who create wild things and throw them out there" and "people who are legally cautious and circumspect" might show only minor overlap. It's sort of the opposite of creativity.

m463 6y ago
I just thought of a clearer way to say this. Creativity is about what can I do. Legal caution is about what can't I do.