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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 vide

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.
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    Overall, in this case you cannot assume to be right by relying on fair use, because fair use as a legal concept implies that there has to be a court decision in order to exist. And all of the required measurements in order to apply fair use are almost impossible to prove, therefore it is an unlikely case to win in court. I agree with the political sentiment in this discussion, and I have a biased opinion, too - but when talking about pushing the needle in a specific direction the maintainers of youtubedl did a bad job at doing so. I mean, they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding, so it is obvious that this was bound to happen and they should have been more careful. Especially when they, as a project, cannot afford lawyers to fight potential battles in court. That's why I described it as an unnecessary attack surface, because that's what it is. Don't give them reasons to push the needle.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      >one of the most powerful industries That's just a reason to not pay them anything ever even you find it desirable, they are obviously incapable to handle the money, powerful and incompetent is just too malicious.
    - tveita 6y ago
      > they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding The music industry through RIAA are aggressive and may be punching above their weight class in litigation and lobbying, but remember that they are not really that large in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not in the class of juggernauts like oil, medicine etc. https://www.riaa.com/reportcat/sales-revenue/ https://www.riaa.com/reportcat/sales-revenue/ says the US music industry had $11.1 billion in revenue for 2019, a fraction of many large tech companies.
      - brokenmachine 6y ago
        Although this is fact is probably correct, and is mildly interesting, it has no relevance here because $11.1 billion is certainly a hell of a lot more than youtube-dl has to fight them in court.
- ezoe 6y ago
  Then, you can't test that and former youtube-dl maintainer said in an interview that they download just few seconds of it and he believe it satisfy the fair-use but well, he think it should be removed to avoid issues if necessary. https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/ https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/
- panny 6y ago
  >If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally It isn't illegal. Copyright protects the video/audio content, not the hyperlink. You would have to establish ytdl induces infringement. Grokster induced infringement. An automated test does not induce infringement.
- deelowe 6y ago
  How does an automated test suite that downloads a mere few seconds of data simply for the purposes of software testing constitute infringement and not fair use? We've allowed this to go way too far. There is no way the RIAA can prove any sort of damages from this. This is an abuse of the copyright system for the sole purpose of attacking a tool they are unhappy with. Given the RIAA's history, are we in any way surprised by this? It is extremely important to recognize in all this that as a country formed during the enlightenment, the founders of the US understood the importance information sharing holds for a free society. Copyright is intended to protect against wonton plagiarism and illegal redistribution. Fair use provisions exist to prevent abuse of this system and allow for legal redistribution and derivative works. These concepts. Patents and copyrights are at their core, systems designed to encourage distribution, not restrict it. Groups like the RIAA, Disney, the MPAA, and others are chipping away at this.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    On what grounds do you think it would constitute fair use? Fair use isn't some magic pixie dust that lets you do whatever you want with someone else's copyrighted material. Fair use is a defense you can raise in court, _after_ you have been sued. It is not a presumptive right.
    - labawi 6y ago
      I was quite surprised by your claim, as I'm quite sure it is a right in EU and other countries. It seems you have been correct, though not any more. See quote[1]: The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally characterized fair use as an affirmative defense, but in .. (2015) .. U.S. Court of Appeals .. concluded that fair use was not merely a defense .. but was an expressly authorized right, and an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work by copyright law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        No, Tyler's still correct. Fair use is still a defense to copyright violations, not a right. The 9th Circuit did not hold that fair use was a right in that case (the dancing baby case), only that a copyright holder must consider whether the alleged violation was potentially fair use before filing a lawsuit. Importantly, the copyright holder is only required to consider whether the violation is fair use. They can still decide that it is not, and proceed with their lawsuit, with the only additional effort required being to state in their claim that they considered fair use and decided that the violation was not fair use. (Note: while the 9th Circuit precedent is limited to the West Coast of the US, because most tech companies are HQ'd in CA or WA, so as a practical matter this case governs the internet.)
- curryst 6y ago
  I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that the distinction is important. If you can demonstrate that those links were chosen because there were no viable links that were free of copyright, rather than to encourage users to pirate things, it would strengthen a fair use argument. Many people are pointing to those links as evidence that youtube-dl was intended to be a tool for piracy (under the assumption that downloading videos from YouTube is automatically a DMCA violation, which I'm not fully convinced of).
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition. Publishing the software anonymously on hidden servers (say, Tor onion Services) is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition, because the legal system will f*k you up.
samoa42 6y ago
> youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool it sure is on my end
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  The keyword here is "isn't just". It is, but there's more. For example, I use the commandline tool youtube-dl to download videos, but I sometimes also use mpv to play YouTube videos transparently (it invokes youtube-dl internally). The former use is user-facing, while the latter one is not.
rpastuszak 6y ago
> play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player Mildly off topic and poor timing I guess, but can you recommend any?
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  VLC uses youtube-dl. https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube
  - rvnx 6y ago
    Which is then in violation of YouTube ToS
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Any use of youtube-dl is in violation of the ToS, no?
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      An existence of a github repo can't be in violation of YouTube ToS, because it doesn't use YouTube service.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Surely Fair Use exceptions and DDA provide legal reason for downloading any media in USA. A particular download might lie outside those exceptions, but it's not a thing you can deduce from code, you need to know who is running out and what the context is. This comment is my personal opinion, not legal advice, and in no way relates to my employment.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>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. what is the purpose of this obfuscation? I mean if it is to hide the licensed content then legally speaking it doesn't sound like a great argument.
- hhjj 6y ago
  I didn't dive in the code that much but I think it is a cost effective DRM, a protection you can't remove accidentally by renaming a file on your computer (ie you need to break it specifically even if removing said obfuscation is easy) and thus is protected by DMCA. In my opinion, it is the only argument in RIAA letter that is relevant. So to have a "nice" youtube-dl, just remove those tests and more importantly the DRM removal (not sure it will benefit RIAA in long term though...)
  - ttt0 6y ago
    It's not DRM. It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access. The purpose of obfuscation is the opposite, it makes sure that you can still for example run the obfuscated code, but it's just hard to understand what's going on. The reality is that there is no "circumvention of protection measures", like RIAA is claiming. Youtube provides a javascript to decrypt their cipher, youtube-dl runs it just as intended and that's it, that's just what a normal browser does.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access. From a technical (code) perspective, obfuscation may be an inadequate protection. But legally, the DMCA only requires some technical measure, and obfuscation satisfies that requirement. It is irrelevant that youtube-dl waits until after Youtube decrypts the content, since the law as written is agnostic to the specific technical details of how copyright protection schemes are implemented.
      - 6y ago
dagurp 6y ago
Probably a dumb question but could they remove the tests and put them in a different repo?
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  That's what I was thinking. It can optionally integrate youtube-dl-tests or whatever.

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.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  Overall, in this case you cannot assume to be right by relying on fair use, because fair use as a legal concept implies that there has to be a court decision in order to exist. And all of the required measurements in order to apply fair use are almost impossible to prove, therefore it is an unlikely case to win in court. I agree with the political sentiment in this discussion, and I have a biased opinion, too - but when talking about pushing the needle in a specific direction the maintainers of youtubedl did a bad job at doing so. I mean, they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding, so it is obvious that this was bound to happen and they should have been more careful. Especially when they, as a project, cannot afford lawyers to fight potential battles in court. That's why I described it as an unnecessary attack surface, because that's what it is. Don't give them reasons to push the needle.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    >one of the most powerful industries That's just a reason to not pay them anything ever even you find it desirable, they are obviously incapable to handle the money, powerful and incompetent is just too malicious.
  - tveita 6y ago
    > they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding The music industry through RIAA are aggressive and may be punching above their weight class in litigation and lobbying, but remember that they are not really that large in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not in the class of juggernauts like oil, medicine etc. https://www.riaa.com/reportcat/sales-revenue/ https://www.riaa.com/reportcat/sales-revenue/ says the US music industry had $11.1 billion in revenue for 2019, a fraction of many large tech companies.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      Although this is fact is probably correct, and is mildly interesting, it has no relevance here because $11.1 billion is certainly a hell of a lot more than youtube-dl has to fight them in court.
ezoe 6y ago
Then, you can't test that and former youtube-dl maintainer said in an interview that they download just few seconds of it and he believe it satisfy the fair-use but well, he think it should be removed to avoid issues if necessary. https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/ https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/
panny 6y ago
>If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally It isn't illegal. Copyright protects the video/audio content, not the hyperlink. You would have to establish ytdl induces infringement. Grokster induced infringement. An automated test does not induce infringement.
deelowe 6y ago
How does an automated test suite that downloads a mere few seconds of data simply for the purposes of software testing constitute infringement and not fair use? We've allowed this to go way too far. There is no way the RIAA can prove any sort of damages from this. This is an abuse of the copyright system for the sole purpose of attacking a tool they are unhappy with. Given the RIAA's history, are we in any way surprised by this? It is extremely important to recognize in all this that as a country formed during the enlightenment, the founders of the US understood the importance information sharing holds for a free society. Copyright is intended to protect against wonton plagiarism and illegal redistribution. Fair use provisions exist to prevent abuse of this system and allow for legal redistribution and derivative works. These concepts. Patents and copyrights are at their core, systems designed to encourage distribution, not restrict it. Groups like the RIAA, Disney, the MPAA, and others are chipping away at this.
- TylerE 6y ago
  On what grounds do you think it would constitute fair use? Fair use isn't some magic pixie dust that lets you do whatever you want with someone else's copyrighted material. Fair use is a defense you can raise in court, _after_ you have been sued. It is not a presumptive right.
  - labawi 6y ago
    I was quite surprised by your claim, as I'm quite sure it is a right in EU and other countries. It seems you have been correct, though not any more. See quote[1]: The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally characterized fair use as an affirmative defense, but in .. (2015) .. U.S. Court of Appeals .. concluded that fair use was not merely a defense .. but was an expressly authorized right, and an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work by copyright law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      No, Tyler's still correct. Fair use is still a defense to copyright violations, not a right. The 9th Circuit did not hold that fair use was a right in that case (the dancing baby case), only that a copyright holder must consider whether the alleged violation was potentially fair use before filing a lawsuit. Importantly, the copyright holder is only required to consider whether the violation is fair use. They can still decide that it is not, and proceed with their lawsuit, with the only additional effort required being to state in their claim that they considered fair use and decided that the violation was not fair use. (Note: while the 9th Circuit precedent is limited to the West Coast of the US, because most tech companies are HQ'd in CA or WA, so as a practical matter this case governs the internet.)
curryst 6y ago
I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that the distinction is important. If you can demonstrate that those links were chosen because there were no viable links that were free of copyright, rather than to encourage users to pirate things, it would strengthen a fair use argument. Many people are pointing to those links as evidence that youtube-dl was intended to be a tool for piracy (under the assumption that downloading videos from YouTube is automatically a DMCA violation, which I'm not fully convinced of).
wolfgke 6y ago
> Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition. Publishing the software anonymously on hidden servers (say, Tor onion Services) is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition, because the legal system will f*k you up.

samoa42 6y ago

> youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool it sure is on my end

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
The keyword here is "isn't just". It is, but there's more. For example, I use the commandline tool youtube-dl to download videos, but I sometimes also use mpv to play YouTube videos transparently (it invokes youtube-dl internally). The former use is user-facing, while the latter one is not.

rpastuszak 6y ago

> play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player Mildly off topic and poor timing I guess, but can you recommend any?

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
VLC uses youtube-dl. https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube
- rvnx 6y ago
  Which is then in violation of YouTube ToS
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Any use of youtube-dl is in violation of the ToS, no?
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    An existence of a github repo can't be in violation of YouTube ToS, because it doesn't use YouTube service.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Surely Fair Use exceptions and DDA provide legal reason for downloading any media in USA. A particular download might lie outside those exceptions, but it's not a thing you can deduce from code, you need to know who is running out and what the context is. This comment is my personal opinion, not legal advice, and in no way relates to my employment.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>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. what is the purpose of this obfuscation? I mean if it is to hide the licensed content then legally speaking it doesn't sound like a great argument.

hhjj 6y ago
I didn't dive in the code that much but I think it is a cost effective DRM, a protection you can't remove accidentally by renaming a file on your computer (ie you need to break it specifically even if removing said obfuscation is easy) and thus is protected by DMCA. In my opinion, it is the only argument in RIAA letter that is relevant. So to have a "nice" youtube-dl, just remove those tests and more importantly the DRM removal (not sure it will benefit RIAA in long term though...)
- ttt0 6y ago
  It's not DRM. It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access. The purpose of obfuscation is the opposite, it makes sure that you can still for example run the obfuscated code, but it's just hard to understand what's going on. The reality is that there is no "circumvention of protection measures", like RIAA is claiming. Youtube provides a javascript to decrypt their cipher, youtube-dl runs it just as intended and that's it, that's just what a normal browser does.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access. From a technical (code) perspective, obfuscation may be an inadequate protection. But legally, the DMCA only requires some technical measure, and obfuscation satisfies that requirement. It is irrelevant that youtube-dl waits until after Youtube decrypts the content, since the law as written is agnostic to the specific technical details of how copyright protection schemes are implemented.
    - 6y ago

dagurp 6y ago

Probably a dumb question but could they remove the tests and put them in a different repo?

omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
That's what I was thinking. It can optionally integrate youtube-dl-tests or whatever.