19 ms·

RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO

772 points by ikeboy 6y ago

jarbus 6y ago
Really good to see Nat Friedman working towards resolving this issue.
- Sephr 6y ago
  Asking the project authors to remove features that are covered by fair use isn't exactly what the authors want. It's better than no action, but not by much.
  - ev1 6y ago
    I'm wondering whether any legal team or similar have donated some time to figure out whether this is actually fair use or to set a precedent, because looking from the outside in, it clearly looks like an implementation meant to circumvent some form of intentionally-obfuscated protected handshake or access control. From a strictly code based POV, it is intended to download protected objects with tests to ensure that protections are circumvented and the correct material can be retrieved. At the same time, removal of this code probably disables downloading of the majority of YouTube, and on top of that if there is no official collaboration on it, it'll be outdated within days.
    - thatcat 6y ago
      That code is protection for YT TOS, not copyright law. If YT want's to use dcma in this way it should claim copyright of all posted material and see how that works out for them. Even if it the video's were copyrighted, it could be still be downloaded for fair use purpose rather than infringement. RIAA is using takedown's to protect google ad money, which is not the intended purpose of that legal action.
      - gamblor956 6y ago
        Youtube is not the copyright holder, the RIAA's members are. They have licensed their content to Youtube. Youtube stores cache files to a user's computer, obfuscated so they can't be easily copied or accessed, most likely as part of the terms of their license. That is legally sufficient to constitute a copyright protection scheme.
        thatcat 6y ago
        Material is covered by fair use and can be used legally in that way. Takedowns are for copyrighted material being distributed to provide immediate relief, the yt-dl projects code is not owned by riaa therefore riaa is abusing the legal mechanism.
- rndgermandude 6y ago
  I disagree. This looks more like pandering than anything else. Friedman has nothing to lose by making public statements of support, but a lot of reputation to gain if people buy into it. Instead of taking it down in the first place, Friedman should have told the RIAA to shove it, deliberately opening Github up to liability with the intent to defend this in courts and create precedent should the RIAA file suit. Even losing - and losing a few million in legal fees and damages in the process - and losing is far from certain - would create precedent that would create a lot more certainty of what goes and does not go with the current law, and give activists and lobbyists concrete jurisprudence to point to when approaching law makers and Library of Congress for changes. Now that would have been real support. A somewhat risky move indeed, but also a necessary move if Friedman really thinks youtube-dl is an important piece of technology (with important policy implications). Instead, he essentially left the developers, which lack the deep pockets of Github/Microsoft, to fight on their own, going even so far to suggest to budge to the RIAA's claims that youtube-dl contains a "circumvention" technology without challenge and remove the offending bits. But at least he publicly stated he is "annoyed" by the RIAA. Talk is cheap. This is like showing up and telling David that "well, tough shit, Goliath is annoying but a lot bigger than you and will win, so you better capitulate, and I can help with that!". (Yes, Microsoft being a RIAA member complicates things; Microsoft should in my humble opinion leave the RIAA; being a member of RIAA isn't compatible with their "we're the good guys now" image they are trying to foster regardless of the youtube-dl fiasco)
  - johnmaguire2013 6y ago
    Furthermore, if you view the IRC logs in question, he is only willing to reinstate the project if they remove the code the RIAA alleges violates Section 1201.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - cookiecaper 6y ago
    I'm not a lawyer but afaik the DMCA takedown process is prescribed by statute, and platforms must comply to qualify for the legal protections that make hosting user-generated content possible. Friedman would certainly be removed by Microsoft if he jeopardized GitHub's legal protections by defying the mandated process, to say nothing of the potential of creating personal legal liability, both criminal and civil. youtube-dl remains freely available off-GitHub (not to mention on the local disk of anyone who ran `git clone`). I just used it 10 minutes ago. There is no public good served by defying the law here, and there is no reason to put the whole kit and kaboodle on the line over it. tl;dr, ignoring the DMCA process isn't just a "somewhat risky move". If we're going to break out the pitchforks, let's at least point them in the right direction: write your Congresscritters and tell them you want to see copyright law reform.
- OzzyB 6y ago
  I guess you didn't open and read the screenshot from the IRC chat. At the bottom of the image; after being asked what needs to be done, he says: "Just the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to get the copyrighted material" (emphasis mine). He's essentially echoing the main talking point that YTDL isn't a scraping tool that acts as a User-Agent (which is legal), but an illegal tool that "circumvents technological measures" because it "decrypts" and runs some JS code just like any browser would. It's what we call being "yeah, yeah yeah'd" -- I don't expect much from GitHubHQ at this point other than trying to save face and maintain their position as the "developers friend".
Multicomp 6y ago
At some point all these exceptions to the dmca section 1201 do at some point indicate to me that we need to have the law updated to be more narrowly tailored rather than continuously apply exceptions to it which can later be taken away.
- whatsmyusername 6y ago
  Never happen unless the RIAA pays for it to benefit them or we see another full sweep of the house, senate, executive.
- Zak 6y ago
  I think given that it is entirely ineffectual for its nominal purpose of preventing piracy, there's no legitimate argument against a complete repeal.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  Absolutely, especially with all the mess on Twitch recently, and with Youtube for the past few years, it's very clear that DMCA needs to be updated. I do like Tom Scott's comprehensive video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
- VonGuard 6y ago
  Speaking as someone who worked to get a 1201 exemption, and who personally shit in the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA's Cornflakes, I can confirm the 1201 process is stupid. Mainly because the RIAA,MPAA, and ESA always show up tp fight the exemption even when they know literally NOTHING about the exemption being asked for. We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no network connections. That's because we couldn't get anything more from the Copyright office. Still, the RIAA's lawyer was there to lie and not understand a god damn thing we said, and accuse us of making tools that could be used to pirate any MMO. I begged for them to tell me where to find such tools, as it would make life so much easier. Their lawyers were complete imbeciles who seemed never to have touched a computer, yet here they were telling a group of game programmers what they could and could not do with their programs. Fucking horrible people, all of them.
jimktrains2 6y ago
> GitHub’s CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won’t be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material. Which is frustrating. Isn't the information needed to do this provided by youtube themselves? This isn't some private key that wasn't supposed to be public; it's literally given out every time you view a video using it. Also, the "examples" were tests that used a given algorithm, as there may be different methods used on different videos.
- jk700 6y ago
  Luckily they don't need to consider what some rich capitalist CEO thinks and don't need to return to MicrosoftHub and hopefully they won't. Especially given there are plenty of easy options available: self host gitlab outside of US, use something non-US, like gitea, etc. But in case they do something that stupid, there will be forks. I will probably even make one fork myself with removed code reinstated. EDIT: what the downvotes are for? Do you really want youtube-dl to appease Microsoft, RIAA or something?
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    You’re on a pretty “capitalist” website and I assume that’s what downvotes are for.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    I downvoted you for putting false information that countries outside of the US don't have similar anti circumvention laws, FWIW.
    - jk700 6y ago
      Too bad, because there was no false information. Plenty of countries don't have not just anti-circumvention laws for copyright, but also DMCA-like laws and may even require you to obtain a court order before you can get something taken down. Except for a couple of countries, most countries could make it significantly harder to take down youtube-dl under such obviously false pretenses. Some countries are even particularly hostile and ignorant towards copyright-related demands from other countries.
hyperbovine 6y ago
For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)
- benologist 6y ago
  About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...
  - Qub3d 6y ago
    I would argue this happened in spite of their efforts. The music industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the streaming world for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that with centralized platforms, artists have no reason to use labels for "discovery" purposes any longer. Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did. Ironically, the fragmentation of those ecosystems is bringing it back. Piracy is the ultimate invisible hand on the entertainment distribution industry.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Labels were never about discovery. They were about promotion, production, and all of the expensive stuff you need at scale. For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.) But they're all signed to major labels now, because touring is expensive, and the scale of exposure you get with a label is very different from what you get on your own, and the income correspondingly increases as well. In many (but not all) cases, the artists usually also get lump-sum advances against new albums or singles which removes the financial risks for creating new music. Piracy was never about discovery. It was simply about people being too cheap to pay for other people's work. Sometimes, as with Adobe and Microsoft, they were okay with it because that just locked in their market dominance and created more future customers. But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy has a notable impact on creator's earnings.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
Only if ICE contracts ticked off the GitHub CEO as much...
jjones2 6y ago
Always host software outside of US or *eyes jurisdictions. Think Truecrypt.
- Quarrelsome 6y ago
  What happened to Truecrypt? Isn't that the one with the fundamental flaw that means everything it encrypted is trivial to unlock today? EDIT: this is a genuine question, I thought it had been unmaintained for ages and vulnerabilities had been found. My memory betrays me?
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Isn't that the one with the fundamental flaw that means everything it encrypted is trivial to unlock today? Has this been substantiated?
    - Quarrelsome 6y ago
      Sorry I thought it was canon. I remember seeing something suggesting it _years_ back. Truecrypt is unmaintained now, isn't it?
      - Koliakis 6y ago
        Truecrypt was mysteriously shutdown out of nowhere. Rumours abound that it was because of a national security letter or some other governmental interference. TC was never proven to be fundamentally insecure, but the original developers abandoned the project with the incident and the project was forked by others as VeraCrypt, which is now the recommended solution for local encryption (on Windows at least). audit: http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/ http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/ final audit summary: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/04/02/truecrypt-report/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/04/02/truecryp...
        Quarrelsome 6y ago
        Thank you. This was the correction I was looking for.
thway15269037 6y ago
Asking developers to remove code is ridiculous. It reads more like "Bad cop/good cop" routine rather than genuine help.
- Koliakis 6y ago
  It's not like any of us are going to be able to change the DMCA overnight and people rely on this tool for all kinds of purposes. Do we wait for somebody to magically fix the DMCA or do we make minor fixes to youtube-dl to make it less susceptible to bullshit DMCA notices like this? I assume most people just want the original repo to go back up and for normal development to continue before functionality breaks because of changing websites.
  - the8472 6y ago
    There are other options, e.g. hosting somewhere where automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing and the RIAA would have to go through a proper court process.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      Why add a circumvention method in the first place. If record labels want to stop users from downloading their content, that's more than fine. It's a giant attack vector for such a small net benefit.
      - the8472 6y ago
        > Why add a circumvention method in the first place. To support legal use-cases such as archival?
    - Koliakis 6y ago
      I think it's not feasible to continue the project as long as this issue isn't resolved appropriately. I've seen at least one contributor already dealing with letters from the RIAA because of a minor contribution years ago. That's going to significantly hinder community development of youtube-dl if it becomes more commonplace to harass anybody who's contributed anything to the project. Most people simply don't have the time or money to deal with this kind of thing. Most people don't want to deal with this kind of thing at all.
boogies 6y ago
To me the most interesting (and new to me) part is §Cease and Desist Notices: > Following our initial coverage, we learned that the pressure against YouTube-DL had already started weeks earlier in Germany. Law firm Rasch, which works with several major music industry players, sent out cease and desist orders in the hope of taking YouTube-DL offline. > Hosting service Uberspace was one of the recipients. The company hosts the official YouTube-DL site and still does so today. Instead of taking the website down, Uberspace replied to the notice through its own lawyer, who said that the hosting company hasn’t don’t anything wrong. [emphasis added] > When the cease and desist notice was filed, yt-dl.org wasn’t even hosting the tool, as all download links pointed to GitHub, the company informs us. [But the site does host the tool now, and Uberspace still doesn’t appear to have taken it down] > “The software itself wasn’t hosted on our systems anyway so [but IIUC it is now], to be honest, I felt it to be quite ridiculous to involve us in this issue anyway – a lawyer specializing in IT laws should know better,” Jonas from Uberspace says.
- Macha 6y ago
  It's probably worth mentioning that Uberspace is based in Germany, not the United States, so may not feel the same risk from not obeying the DMCA as a US company.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chmod775 6y ago
    I run a service based in Germany, and yes we don't care about DMCAs per se. However German laws are essentially: "Once you are notified of copyright infringing/illegal content, you have to remove it, lest you lose your protection as a service provider and become responsible for the content." A DMCA takedown notice would be such a notification. On the upside you don't need to do anything if you don't have reason to believe the content is illegal in any way (unlike with DMCAs where you pretty much always have to remove first). On the downside it's a bit easier to get into trouble as a provider if you chose to let something stay online.
shmerl 6y ago
> One of the most creative responses we’ve seen was posted to Twitter by @GalacticFurball who encoded YouTube-DL into images that can be easily shared, encouraging others to share these as well. Reminds me Free Speech Flag story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag All this highlights what an unconstitutional monstrosity DMCA 1201 is. You reap what you sow RIAA. Hopefully this will trigger the push to repeal this trash altogether.
LockAndLol 6y ago
I mean, it's nice that the Github CEO doesn't agree, but if the solution is to get it back on Github, then it isn't really a solution. Smaller projects won't get this kind of attention. What this whole episode should do is make it more common place to use tools like git-bug and mirror repos. Maybe someone will even write a tool to do so easily. But what I see happening is people just wanting the status quo to stay. Until we learn to decentralize our code and write the tools to do so, this will keep happening. Maybe in 10 years we'll have learned our lesson, but it seems we're just doomed to repeat our mistakes.
- mmcdermott 6y ago
  I've been fiddling with Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org https://fossil-scm.org) lately and the fact that it includes Wiki, forum and bug lists in the core source control project is looking better and better with all of this.
  - cookiecaper 6y ago
    Fossil is great, highly recommended.
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
    I checked it out and am kind of on the fence about one file = one repo - especially SQLite. It's mostly because I remember filesystems from my university time and trying to implement one in a file myself. Continuously adding data is fine, but when you remove data either you leave a "hole" in the file and have to keep track of the "empty" blocks, or you shift everything to fill the hole. Off-by-one errors corrupt files. Those are all resolved problems for filesystems, but additionally, I learned the hard way (performance) that SQLite wasn't good as a production db. The situation here is different of course (db access isn't very frequent), but I can't quite shake it. Maybe I'll dig into the internals to understand what kind of optimisations they made. The wiki and bug-tracking are definitely a plus though.
    - audience_mem 6y ago
      https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html
Santosh83 6y ago
In this entire story what I find more concerning than Youtube-DL itself is the almost crippling dependence developers over the Internet (that is, OSS devs) have upon GitHub right now.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  I don't see how that is true, we can move at any time. There is no dependency, only addiction.
  - donmcronald 6y ago
    It's true. Look at all the tooling and workflows that depend on GitHub. Issues, pull requests, code review, etc.. Combine it with integrated services that require GitHub to run like Actions (CI) and Codespaces (dev env) and you start to see how it works. In a few years it'll be normal for new developers to view a software project and a GitHub project as the same thing because the entire process from creating the project to publishing it (on Azure most likely) will happen via GitHub. Saying that no one is dependent on GitHub is like saying a mechanic isn't dependent on their tools. Moving away from GitHub is like a mechanic walking out of the garage with a single crescent wrench (the git repo). Then you find out no one else sells any of the tools you know how to use and that the only option is to rent them from someone else (Atlassian or GitLab).
    - kzrdude 6y ago
      This is a good point; my projects don't depend on actions and codespaces (only PRs), so I haven't seen it. Random "good thing" addition: If CI and other features create more of a github lock-in, maybe they could implement cross-git features (like pull requests from gitlab) without that being a disruptive feature that reduces their monopoly situation.
- TobTobXX 6y ago
  True, but doesn't solve the DMCA issue. Every git provider in the US would be liable if they refuse DMCA takedown notices.
Cloudef 6y ago
Would it be possible to capture video by using headless browser and rendering the video element & audio to file? Of course, this will induce some quality loss if encoded to lossy format again. But would effectively be "legal" as the tool would run the youtube's "DRM" and be not distinct from normal browser in any way. I guess the headless browser could maybe perhaps just download the stream to disk as well.
- mlaci 6y ago
  Yes, but in that case you need to reencode every video in realtime at playing. Maybe you speed up the process with capturing the different parts of the video in parallel and concatenating the parts in the end, but if you want good compression then you need to reencode the whole video again. This is far from just getting a video file from a CDN server. If you want to try it, just few line of code with MediaRecoder API in any browser.
AshamedCaptain 6y ago
The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost. The problem is that the project may not survive this. Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will be relegated to 3rd party repos. They will lose users, they will lose contributors. And how long until YT's (and/or the other supported websites) HTML changes more rapidly until the remaining manpower can't keep up?
- jk700 6y ago
  As someone who uses youtube-dl for all the videos online, it's presence in any repos isn't as important as it may seem, because it breaks from time to time for some websites and you need to update it in order to keep using it, which is only easy if you keep it in your home directory so you can just run youtube-dl -U once it breaks.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    I completely disagree. I have been using for example NewPipe from FDroid which is autobuild regularly as native Android program. I would no longer expect FDroid now to keep doing this if they risk a DCMA letter that takes out their entire repo. And I would assume a shitton of users use yt-dl code through another GUI application, rather than directly through an EasyInstall/virtualenv/whatever. And will most py repos still dare to host/link this code if the risk is a DMCA letter to their ISP?
    - cyphar 6y ago
      NewPipe doesn't use youtube-dl, they have their own implementation of the stream extraction code[1]. Unless that codebase also has test cases which specifically try to download RIAA content, they would need to find a different justification for a DMCA takedown. [1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor
tookiwooki 6y ago
yes indeed
CreepGin 6y ago
Do those German firms hold a monopoly on copyright claims or something? Years ago I noticed all the Recent records on Chilling Effects (now Lumen) were originated from German. I dug a little deeper and found out one of the firms were generating thousands of records per day and some of the claims were simply mistakes because they used simple string matching algorithms to automatically report massive amount of google search results. After some email exchanges, their CEO admitted to me that they only generate 5% wrongful claims and somehow he's proud of it...
- onli 6y ago
  It's Germany. Institutionally zero tech knowledge, but a very pro copyright legislature and political caste (that, at a high level, is also very corrupt. Think Wirecard and add Kohls schwarze Kassen). Even with its own evidently corrupt court that always sides with copyright holders, regardless how absurd the claim and even if the law does not agree with the judges at all. Of course that's a country where law firms like that can prosper.
kelvin0 6y ago
Takedown attempts on the web are the equivalent of trying to remove urine from a public pool using a net.
varispeed 6y ago
I hope that the ytdl gets reinstated and thanks to RIAA action it gets much more popular. I know a number of artists personally and they hate RIAA and the labels that are essentially a cancer on the artists back.
offtop5 6y ago
Someone else needs to reimplement it, in Rust cause that's what all of you want . Then never include a test case with music videos. I was using it to download public domain videos, if certain video producers want specific drm then that's fine.
- ilugaslifk 6y ago
  Despite its name, half the value of `youtube-dl` is that it Just Works on every (free-as-in-beer, and non-DRMed) video site known to man. Every obscure Youtube alternative, every local news station's dogshit CMS, every porn site, Twitter, Twitch, HGTV, you name it. The far bigger part of the job would be rewriting all 800 custom extractors, then perpetually maintaining them against constant, silent, often adversarial breaking changes in each one. Using Rust instead of Python would cut the very fat long tail of contributions that makes most of this viable, and would doom this project more than most.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Rust was a bit tongue in cheek. My point was someone needs to basically rebuild the tool as a completely seperate repo. Breaking DRM is a really bad idea
    - salawat 6y ago
      >a really bad idea That's a funny way to spell "a moral imperative."
cannabis_sam 6y ago
RIAA is a fucking cartel. Why would anyone support them..?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Cartels often mint money.
  - cannabis_sam 6y ago
    Of course, for their owners. It OBVIOUSLY reasonable to have three private corporations owning the majority of modern musical output... and they even have a little club where they discuss pricing! How quaint... The outrageous thing is why the fuck we as a society defend these corporations, when they have a literal monopoly on what they’re selling, and the monopoly is guaranteed by the government of every western country
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Durable cartels are effective and useful --- generally to at least their members and some class of politicians. Copyright / media cartels have long been closely affiliated with politics and politicians, of all stripes, and in the US of both parties. Media offers money, exposure, glamour and/or star power, spectacle, distraction, attention, and manipulation, all of interest to politicians. Much of recent copyright law, and the DMCA specifically, was largely driven by Democrats.
wallacoloo 6y ago
> By now it is clear that the RIAA’s takedown notice backfired badly. With the ‘Streisand Effect’ in full swing, there are now probably more copies of YouTube-DL online than there ever were. Did it though? Sure, the Streisand effect caused more distribution of youtube-dl, but that's never really been an issue. Open source software as widely used as youtube-dl is mirrored in a hundred different places. The issue here is what does future development of youtube-dl look like? It sounds like the rolling cipher stuff is going to have to go if development is to remain on Github, and that's a win for RIAA.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Github hosting is not the be all and end all of open source software development. There are alternatives, ranging from hosting on one of the Chinese public clouds, using 'bulletproof' hosts that cater to such things as phishing groups, cutting a deal with the Russian mob to host development in Russia, hosting on an .onion site, or making connections with the Pirate Bay folks.
  - edgarvaldes 6y ago
    So the alternatives are groups associated with authoritarian regimes, pishing groups and mobs?
    - userbinator 6y ago
      "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom." This isn't all that different from the fact that sites which prominently support free speech attract all the extremists, because that's the only place they have.
      - craftinator 6y ago
        Hah I came to post with that quote in mind. But really, if the legal system is abused to remove tools that are legal but the rich and powerful don't like, they'll migrate to places where the law can't touch them.
agilob 6y ago
I put youtube-dl on IPFS just for fun if anyone is interested https://agilob.gitlab.io/random-thoughts/random/yt-dl-on-ipfs/ https://agilob.gitlab.io/random-thoughts/random/yt-dl-on-ipf...
ineedasername 6y ago
The source code amounts to instructions that could be used to violate copyright. So there's a distinction here: Is it illegal to tell people how to violate copyright, when that method has other uses? If so, what about a blog post telling you how you can use your cell phone camera to record a youtube video?
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Downloading / recording YouTube videos is NOT a copyright violation.
kuon 6y ago
I have been thinking about leaving github for a while. It is a very good platform, but as time passes, I realized I wanted to be more in control of my projects. Yesterday, I moved about 250 repos away to a gitea instance. Transition required a bit of tinkering (a few scripts) but went smoothly. The good sides are: - very fast, a lot faster than github for pushing/pulling but also the web UI is a lot faster - I'm in total control, I can change the look of the UI, create as many orgs as I want to organize my repos… Now the cons: - No social network effect, I don't know how contributions to my projects will evolve - Subject to DDoS and the like, I need to keep my instance accessible because I moved my FOSS projects on it Maybe more, it's been one day only. I am not suggesting all project should move out of github, it is a very good tool, but I think it wouldn't be bad to rely less on it.
- exciteabletom 6y ago
  Couldn't you retain the social aspect by mirroring the repos on Github? Linux does this.
  - kuon 6y ago
    Yes, I am thinking about this.
- nickflood 6y ago
  If your hosting provider is in a country with DMCA-like laws, they can be targeted the same way GitHub was and would probably comply the same way as well. So was there really a point?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    As can any developers in counties with DMCA anti-circ-like law.
  - kuon 6y ago
    The difference being that if this happens, I can spawn an instance elsewhere and just change the DNS. I have hourly ZFS based backups to my own server, it would take a few hour max to restore everything.
Keverw 6y ago
I really wish they'd start prosecuting copyright trolls to the fullest extent of the law. Sure you can download this and download music videos, but there's legal cases such as downloading a political campaign ad, and using small parts of it to fact check them them under fair use. Our local news station in fact did something like that. Also there is a rep not far from here, where she was doing vlog style videos for her campaign and the guy running against her downloaded her videos and put them in his own ad. Using it to backup your own content or public domain content is another use case too. However if it's your own account I believe YouTube let's you download a mp4 of it from the creators studio but been a while since I've played with it since the redesign.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xvilka 6y ago
Another way to help is to improve IPFS and Federation protocols, for example for Gitea[1][2] or GitLab[3][4]. Or just sponsor them[5]. The source code for ForgeFed[6][7] might be also of interest for improvement. [1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612 [2] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/9045 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/9045 [3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 [4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/33665 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/33665 [5] https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea [6] https://forgefed.peers.community/ https://forgefed.peers.community/ [7] https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed
xvilka 6y ago
Not a long time ago Microsoft itself tried to take down the wgetpro[1] project precisely for the same reasons. [1] http://wgetpro.sourceforge.net/ http://wgetpro.sourceforge.net/
luxcem 6y ago
Is it illegal in the US to download copyrighted material?
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=77pnVFLkUjM&t=39s https://youtube.com/watch?v=77pnVFLkUjM&t=39s
nojvek 6y ago
A huge portion of the software industry with most of open source projects hosted on GitHub isn’t a good thing. GitHub is closed source and the metadata (pulls/issues/projects) is also not in the git decentralized database. Sure in this instance GitHub CEO is helping. However GitHub could kick you or the repo out any second. We ought to build a more resilient internet.
- nojvek 6y ago
  I just learned gitea exists https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea. Holy moly, this is amazing.
garfieldnate 6y ago
Why is this any different from recording a TV broadcast? It seems to me that the same reasoning which made that legal (and there was a fight to do so!) should also allow anyone to record anything that is sent to them on their personal device.

772 points by ikeboy 6y ago

jarbus 6y ago

Really good to see Nat Friedman working towards resolving this issue.

Sephr 6y ago
Asking the project authors to remove features that are covered by fair use isn't exactly what the authors want. It's better than no action, but not by much.
- ev1 6y ago
  I'm wondering whether any legal team or similar have donated some time to figure out whether this is actually fair use or to set a precedent, because looking from the outside in, it clearly looks like an implementation meant to circumvent some form of intentionally-obfuscated protected handshake or access control. From a strictly code based POV, it is intended to download protected objects with tests to ensure that protections are circumvented and the correct material can be retrieved. At the same time, removal of this code probably disables downloading of the majority of YouTube, and on top of that if there is no official collaboration on it, it'll be outdated within days.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    That code is protection for YT TOS, not copyright law. If YT want's to use dcma in this way it should claim copyright of all posted material and see how that works out for them. Even if it the video's were copyrighted, it could be still be downloaded for fair use purpose rather than infringement. RIAA is using takedown's to protect google ad money, which is not the intended purpose of that legal action.
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      Youtube is not the copyright holder, the RIAA's members are. They have licensed their content to Youtube. Youtube stores cache files to a user's computer, obfuscated so they can't be easily copied or accessed, most likely as part of the terms of their license. That is legally sufficient to constitute a copyright protection scheme.
      - thatcat 6y ago
        Material is covered by fair use and can be used legally in that way. Takedowns are for copyrighted material being distributed to provide immediate relief, the yt-dl projects code is not owned by riaa therefore riaa is abusing the legal mechanism.
rndgermandude 6y ago
I disagree. This looks more like pandering than anything else. Friedman has nothing to lose by making public statements of support, but a lot of reputation to gain if people buy into it. Instead of taking it down in the first place, Friedman should have told the RIAA to shove it, deliberately opening Github up to liability with the intent to defend this in courts and create precedent should the RIAA file suit. Even losing - and losing a few million in legal fees and damages in the process - and losing is far from certain - would create precedent that would create a lot more certainty of what goes and does not go with the current law, and give activists and lobbyists concrete jurisprudence to point to when approaching law makers and Library of Congress for changes. Now that would have been real support. A somewhat risky move indeed, but also a necessary move if Friedman really thinks youtube-dl is an important piece of technology (with important policy implications). Instead, he essentially left the developers, which lack the deep pockets of Github/Microsoft, to fight on their own, going even so far to suggest to budge to the RIAA's claims that youtube-dl contains a "circumvention" technology without challenge and remove the offending bits. But at least he publicly stated he is "annoyed" by the RIAA. Talk is cheap. This is like showing up and telling David that "well, tough shit, Goliath is annoying but a lot bigger than you and will win, so you better capitulate, and I can help with that!". (Yes, Microsoft being a RIAA member complicates things; Microsoft should in my humble opinion leave the RIAA; being a member of RIAA isn't compatible with their "we're the good guys now" image they are trying to foster regardless of the youtube-dl fiasco)
- johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  Furthermore, if you view the IRC logs in question, he is only willing to reinstate the project if they remove the code the RIAA alleges violates Section 1201.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cookiecaper 6y ago
  I'm not a lawyer but afaik the DMCA takedown process is prescribed by statute, and platforms must comply to qualify for the legal protections that make hosting user-generated content possible. Friedman would certainly be removed by Microsoft if he jeopardized GitHub's legal protections by defying the mandated process, to say nothing of the potential of creating personal legal liability, both criminal and civil. youtube-dl remains freely available off-GitHub (not to mention on the local disk of anyone who ran `git clone`). I just used it 10 minutes ago. There is no public good served by defying the law here, and there is no reason to put the whole kit and kaboodle on the line over it. tl;dr, ignoring the DMCA process isn't just a "somewhat risky move". If we're going to break out the pitchforks, let's at least point them in the right direction: write your Congresscritters and tell them you want to see copyright law reform.
OzzyB 6y ago
I guess you didn't open and read the screenshot from the IRC chat. At the bottom of the image; after being asked what needs to be done, he says: "Just the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to get the copyrighted material" (emphasis mine). He's essentially echoing the main talking point that YTDL isn't a scraping tool that acts as a User-Agent (which is legal), but an illegal tool that "circumvents technological measures" because it "decrypts" and runs some JS code just like any browser would. It's what we call being "yeah, yeah yeah'd" -- I don't expect much from GitHubHQ at this point other than trying to save face and maintain their position as the "developers friend".

Multicomp 6y ago

At some point all these exceptions to the dmca section 1201 do at some point indicate to me that we need to have the law updated to be more narrowly tailored rather than continuously apply exceptions to it which can later be taken away.

whatsmyusername 6y ago
Never happen unless the RIAA pays for it to benefit them or we see another full sweep of the house, senate, executive.
Zak 6y ago
I think given that it is entirely ineffectual for its nominal purpose of preventing piracy, there's no legitimate argument against a complete repeal.
ehsankia 6y ago
Absolutely, especially with all the mess on Twitch recently, and with Youtube for the past few years, it's very clear that DMCA needs to be updated. I do like Tom Scott's comprehensive video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
VonGuard 6y ago
Speaking as someone who worked to get a 1201 exemption, and who personally shit in the MPAA, RIAA, and ESA's Cornflakes, I can confirm the 1201 process is stupid. Mainly because the RIAA,MPAA, and ESA always show up tp fight the exemption even when they know literally NOTHING about the exemption being asked for. We petitioned for an exemption to allow museums and libraries to reboot old MMOs in closed rooms with no network connections. That's because we couldn't get anything more from the Copyright office. Still, the RIAA's lawyer was there to lie and not understand a god damn thing we said, and accuse us of making tools that could be used to pirate any MMO. I begged for them to tell me where to find such tools, as it would make life so much easier. Their lawyers were complete imbeciles who seemed never to have touched a computer, yet here they were telling a group of game programmers what they could and could not do with their programs. Fucking horrible people, all of them.

jimktrains2 6y ago

> GitHub’s CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won’t be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material. Which is frustrating. Isn't the information needed to do this provided by youtube themselves? This isn't some private key that wasn't supposed to be public; it's literally given out every time you view a video using it. Also, the "examples" were tests that used a given algorithm, as there may be different methods used on different videos.

jk700 6y ago
Luckily they don't need to consider what some rich capitalist CEO thinks and don't need to return to MicrosoftHub and hopefully they won't. Especially given there are plenty of easy options available: self host gitlab outside of US, use something non-US, like gitea, etc. But in case they do something that stupid, there will be forks. I will probably even make one fork myself with removed code reinstated. EDIT: what the downvotes are for? Do you really want youtube-dl to appease Microsoft, RIAA or something?
- edgyquant 6y ago
  You’re on a pretty “capitalist” website and I assume that’s what downvotes are for.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  I downvoted you for putting false information that countries outside of the US don't have similar anti circumvention laws, FWIW.
  - jk700 6y ago
    Too bad, because there was no false information. Plenty of countries don't have not just anti-circumvention laws for copyright, but also DMCA-like laws and may even require you to obtain a court order before you can get something taken down. Except for a couple of countries, most countries could make it significantly harder to take down youtube-dl under such obviously false pretenses. Some countries are even particularly hostile and ignorant towards copyright-related demands from other countries.

hyperbovine 6y ago

For me the best part of this article is the final subhead: > RIAA Efforts Backfire Basically every story written about RIAA since the Clinton administration :-)

benologist 6y ago
About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...
- Qub3d 6y ago
  I would argue this happened in spite of their efforts. The music industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the streaming world for a variety of reasons, among them the fact that with centralized platforms, artists have no reason to use labels for "discovery" purposes any longer. Its long been known that the way to defeat piracy is to offer a better service. Its what Steam did, its what Netflix did. Ironically, the fragmentation of those ecosystems is bringing it back. Piracy is the ultimate invisible hand on the entertainment distribution industry.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    Labels were never about discovery. They were about promotion, production, and all of the expensive stuff you need at scale. For example, Justin Beiber, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, were all discovered independently due to their own efforts and had decent success on their own. (Farther back in time, the Beatles and most classic rock bands similarly got signed to labels after demonstrating success.) But they're all signed to major labels now, because touring is expensive, and the scale of exposure you get with a label is very different from what you get on your own, and the income correspondingly increases as well. In many (but not all) cases, the artists usually also get lump-sum advances against new albums or singles which removes the financial risks for creating new music. Piracy was never about discovery. It was simply about people being too cheap to pay for other people's work. Sometimes, as with Adobe and Microsoft, they were okay with it because that just locked in their market dominance and created more future customers. But for fad-driven and taste-driven industries, privacy has a notable impact on creator's earnings.

rubyn00bie 6y ago

Only if ICE contracts ticked off the GitHub CEO as much...

jjones2 6y ago

Always host software outside of US or *eyes jurisdictions. Think Truecrypt.

Quarrelsome 6y ago
What happened to Truecrypt? Isn't that the one with the fundamental flaw that means everything it encrypted is trivial to unlock today? EDIT: this is a genuine question, I thought it had been unmaintained for ages and vulnerabilities had been found. My memory betrays me?
- gruez 6y ago
  >Isn't that the one with the fundamental flaw that means everything it encrypted is trivial to unlock today? Has this been substantiated?
  - Quarrelsome 6y ago
    Sorry I thought it was canon. I remember seeing something suggesting it _years_ back. Truecrypt is unmaintained now, isn't it?
    - Koliakis 6y ago
      Truecrypt was mysteriously shutdown out of nowhere. Rumours abound that it was because of a national security letter or some other governmental interference. TC was never proven to be fundamentally insecure, but the original developers abandoned the project with the incident and the project was forked by others as VeraCrypt, which is now the recommended solution for local encryption (on Windows at least). audit: http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/ http://istruecryptauditedyet.com/ final audit summary: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/04/02/truecrypt-report/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/04/02/truecryp...
      - Quarrelsome 6y ago
        Thank you. This was the correction I was looking for.

thway15269037 6y ago

Asking developers to remove code is ridiculous. It reads more like "Bad cop/good cop" routine rather than genuine help.

Koliakis 6y ago
It's not like any of us are going to be able to change the DMCA overnight and people rely on this tool for all kinds of purposes. Do we wait for somebody to magically fix the DMCA or do we make minor fixes to youtube-dl to make it less susceptible to bullshit DMCA notices like this? I assume most people just want the original repo to go back up and for normal development to continue before functionality breaks because of changing websites.
- the8472 6y ago
  There are other options, e.g. hosting somewhere where automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing and the RIAA would have to go through a proper court process.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Why add a circumvention method in the first place. If record labels want to stop users from downloading their content, that's more than fine. It's a giant attack vector for such a small net benefit.
    - the8472 6y ago
      > Why add a circumvention method in the first place. To support legal use-cases such as archival?
  - Koliakis 6y ago
    I think it's not feasible to continue the project as long as this issue isn't resolved appropriately. I've seen at least one contributor already dealing with letters from the RIAA because of a minor contribution years ago. That's going to significantly hinder community development of youtube-dl if it becomes more commonplace to harass anybody who's contributed anything to the project. Most people simply don't have the time or money to deal with this kind of thing. Most people don't want to deal with this kind of thing at all.

boogies 6y ago

To me the most interesting (and new to me) part is §Cease and Desist Notices: > Following our initial coverage, we learned that the pressure against YouTube-DL had already started weeks earlier in Germany. Law firm Rasch, which works with several major music industry players, sent out cease and desist orders in the hope of taking YouTube-DL offline. > Hosting service Uberspace was one of the recipients. The company hosts the official YouTube-DL site and still does so today. Instead of taking the website down, Uberspace replied to the notice through its own lawyer, who said that the hosting company hasn’t don’t anything wrong. [emphasis added] > When the cease and desist notice was filed, yt-dl.org wasn’t even hosting the tool, as all download links pointed to GitHub, the company informs us. [But the site does host the tool now, and Uberspace still doesn’t appear to have taken it down] > “The software itself wasn’t hosted on our systems anyway so [but IIUC it is now], to be honest, I felt it to be quite ridiculous to involve us in this issue anyway – a lawyer specializing in IT laws should know better,” Jonas from Uberspace says.

Macha 6y ago
It's probably worth mentioning that Uberspace is based in Germany, not the United States, so may not feel the same risk from not obeying the DMCA as a US company.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chmod775 6y ago
  I run a service based in Germany, and yes we don't care about DMCAs per se. However German laws are essentially: "Once you are notified of copyright infringing/illegal content, you have to remove it, lest you lose your protection as a service provider and become responsible for the content." A DMCA takedown notice would be such a notification. On the upside you don't need to do anything if you don't have reason to believe the content is illegal in any way (unlike with DMCAs where you pretty much always have to remove first). On the downside it's a bit easier to get into trouble as a provider if you chose to let something stay online.

shmerl 6y ago

> One of the most creative responses we’ve seen was posted to Twitter by @GalacticFurball who encoded YouTube-DL into images that can be easily shared, encouraging others to share these as well. Reminds me Free Speech Flag story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag All this highlights what an unconstitutional monstrosity DMCA 1201 is. You reap what you sow RIAA. Hopefully this will trigger the push to repeal this trash altogether.

LockAndLol 6y ago

I mean, it's nice that the Github CEO doesn't agree, but if the solution is to get it back on Github, then it isn't really a solution. Smaller projects won't get this kind of attention. What this whole episode should do is make it more common place to use tools like git-bug and mirror repos. Maybe someone will even write a tool to do so easily. But what I see happening is people just wanting the status quo to stay. Until we learn to decentralize our code and write the tools to do so, this will keep happening. Maybe in 10 years we'll have learned our lesson, but it seems we're just doomed to repeat our mistakes.

mmcdermott 6y ago
I've been fiddling with Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org https://fossil-scm.org) lately and the fact that it includes Wiki, forum and bug lists in the core source control project is looking better and better with all of this.
- cookiecaper 6y ago
  Fossil is great, highly recommended.
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  I checked it out and am kind of on the fence about one file = one repo - especially SQLite. It's mostly because I remember filesystems from my university time and trying to implement one in a file myself. Continuously adding data is fine, but when you remove data either you leave a "hole" in the file and have to keep track of the "empty" blocks, or you shift everything to fill the hole. Off-by-one errors corrupt files. Those are all resolved problems for filesystems, but additionally, I learned the hard way (performance) that SQLite wasn't good as a production db. The situation here is different of course (db access isn't very frequent), but I can't quite shake it. Maybe I'll dig into the internals to understand what kind of optimisations they made. The wiki and bug-tracking are definitely a plus though.
  - audience_mem 6y ago
    https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html https://sqlite.org/lang_vacuum.html

Santosh83 6y ago

In this entire story what I find more concerning than Youtube-DL itself is the almost crippling dependence developers over the Internet (that is, OSS devs) have upon GitHub right now.

kzrdude 6y ago
I don't see how that is true, we can move at any time. There is no dependency, only addiction.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  It's true. Look at all the tooling and workflows that depend on GitHub. Issues, pull requests, code review, etc.. Combine it with integrated services that require GitHub to run like Actions (CI) and Codespaces (dev env) and you start to see how it works. In a few years it'll be normal for new developers to view a software project and a GitHub project as the same thing because the entire process from creating the project to publishing it (on Azure most likely) will happen via GitHub. Saying that no one is dependent on GitHub is like saying a mechanic isn't dependent on their tools. Moving away from GitHub is like a mechanic walking out of the garage with a single crescent wrench (the git repo). Then you find out no one else sells any of the tools you know how to use and that the only option is to rent them from someone else (Atlassian or GitLab).
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    This is a good point; my projects don't depend on actions and codespaces (only PRs), so I haven't seen it. Random "good thing" addition: If CI and other features create more of a github lock-in, maybe they could implement cross-git features (like pull requests from gitlab) without that being a disruptive feature that reduces their monopoly situation.
TobTobXX 6y ago
True, but doesn't solve the DMCA issue. Every git provider in the US would be liable if they refuse DMCA takedown notices.

Cloudef 6y ago

Would it be possible to capture video by using headless browser and rendering the video element & audio to file? Of course, this will induce some quality loss if encoded to lossy format again. But would effectively be "legal" as the tool would run the youtube's "DRM" and be not distinct from normal browser in any way. I guess the headless browser could maybe perhaps just download the stream to disk as well.

mlaci 6y ago
Yes, but in that case you need to reencode every video in realtime at playing. Maybe you speed up the process with capturing the different parts of the video in parallel and concatenating the parts in the end, but if you want good compression then you need to reencode the whole video again. This is far from just getting a video file from a CDN server. If you want to try it, just few line of code with MediaRecoder API in any browser.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

The takedown didn't backfire at all just because some people decided to publish on Twitter a tarball that still happens to be hosted in many other places so there is absolutely no risk of it getting lost. The problem is that the project may not survive this. Major distributions for example will no longer carry the project and likely refuse to touch it even with a ten-foot pole (think media codecs situation). It will be relegated to 3rd party repos. They will lose users, they will lose contributors. And how long until YT's (and/or the other supported websites) HTML changes more rapidly until the remaining manpower can't keep up?

jk700 6y ago
As someone who uses youtube-dl for all the videos online, it's presence in any repos isn't as important as it may seem, because it breaks from time to time for some websites and you need to update it in order to keep using it, which is only easy if you keep it in your home directory so you can just run youtube-dl -U once it breaks.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  I completely disagree. I have been using for example NewPipe from FDroid which is autobuild regularly as native Android program. I would no longer expect FDroid now to keep doing this if they risk a DCMA letter that takes out their entire repo. And I would assume a shitton of users use yt-dl code through another GUI application, rather than directly through an EasyInstall/virtualenv/whatever. And will most py repos still dare to host/link this code if the risk is a DMCA letter to their ISP?
  - cyphar 6y ago
    NewPipe doesn't use youtube-dl, they have their own implementation of the stream extraction code[1]. Unless that codebase also has test cases which specifically try to download RIAA content, they would need to find a different justification for a DMCA takedown. [1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

tookiwooki 6y ago

yes indeed

CreepGin 6y ago

Do those German firms hold a monopoly on copyright claims or something? Years ago I noticed all the Recent records on Chilling Effects (now Lumen) were originated from German. I dug a little deeper and found out one of the firms were generating thousands of records per day and some of the claims were simply mistakes because they used simple string matching algorithms to automatically report massive amount of google search results. After some email exchanges, their CEO admitted to me that they only generate 5% wrongful claims and somehow he's proud of it...

onli 6y ago
It's Germany. Institutionally zero tech knowledge, but a very pro copyright legislature and political caste (that, at a high level, is also very corrupt. Think Wirecard and add Kohls schwarze Kassen). Even with its own evidently corrupt court that always sides with copyright holders, regardless how absurd the claim and even if the law does not agree with the judges at all. Of course that's a country where law firms like that can prosper.

kelvin0 6y ago

Takedown attempts on the web are the equivalent of trying to remove urine from a public pool using a net.

varispeed 6y ago

I hope that the ytdl gets reinstated and thanks to RIAA action it gets much more popular. I know a number of artists personally and they hate RIAA and the labels that are essentially a cancer on the artists back.

offtop5 6y ago

Someone else needs to reimplement it, in Rust cause that's what all of you want . Then never include a test case with music videos. I was using it to download public domain videos, if certain video producers want specific drm then that's fine.

ilugaslifk 6y ago
Despite its name, half the value of `youtube-dl` is that it Just Works on every (free-as-in-beer, and non-DRMed) video site known to man. Every obscure Youtube alternative, every local news station's dogshit CMS, every porn site, Twitter, Twitch, HGTV, you name it. The far bigger part of the job would be rewriting all 800 custom extractors, then perpetually maintaining them against constant, silent, often adversarial breaking changes in each one. Using Rust instead of Python would cut the very fat long tail of contributions that makes most of this viable, and would doom this project more than most.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Rust was a bit tongue in cheek. My point was someone needs to basically rebuild the tool as a completely seperate repo. Breaking DRM is a really bad idea
  - salawat 6y ago
    >a really bad idea That's a funny way to spell "a moral imperative."

cannabis_sam 6y ago

RIAA is a fucking cartel. Why would anyone support them..?

deleted 6y ago
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dredmorbius 6y ago
Cartels often mint money.
- cannabis_sam 6y ago
  Of course, for their owners. It OBVIOUSLY reasonable to have three private corporations owning the majority of modern musical output... and they even have a little club where they discuss pricing! How quaint... The outrageous thing is why the fuck we as a society defend these corporations, when they have a literal monopoly on what they’re selling, and the monopoly is guaranteed by the government of every western country
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Durable cartels are effective and useful --- generally to at least their members and some class of politicians. Copyright / media cartels have long been closely affiliated with politics and politicians, of all stripes, and in the US of both parties. Media offers money, exposure, glamour and/or star power, spectacle, distraction, attention, and manipulation, all of interest to politicians. Much of recent copyright law, and the DMCA specifically, was largely driven by Democrats.

wallacoloo 6y ago

> By now it is clear that the RIAA’s takedown notice backfired badly. With the ‘Streisand Effect’ in full swing, there are now probably more copies of YouTube-DL online than there ever were. Did it though? Sure, the Streisand effect caused more distribution of youtube-dl, but that's never really been an issue. Open source software as widely used as youtube-dl is mirrored in a hundred different places. The issue here is what does future development of youtube-dl look like? It sounds like the rolling cipher stuff is going to have to go if development is to remain on Github, and that's a win for RIAA.

deleted 6y ago
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bleepblorp 6y ago
Github hosting is not the be all and end all of open source software development. There are alternatives, ranging from hosting on one of the Chinese public clouds, using 'bulletproof' hosts that cater to such things as phishing groups, cutting a deal with the Russian mob to host development in Russia, hosting on an .onion site, or making connections with the Pirate Bay folks.
- edgarvaldes 6y ago
  So the alternatives are groups associated with authoritarian regimes, pishing groups and mobs?
  - userbinator 6y ago
    "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom." This isn't all that different from the fact that sites which prominently support free speech attract all the extremists, because that's the only place they have.
    - craftinator 6y ago
      Hah I came to post with that quote in mind. But really, if the legal system is abused to remove tools that are legal but the rich and powerful don't like, they'll migrate to places where the law can't touch them.

agilob 6y ago

I put youtube-dl on IPFS just for fun if anyone is interested https://agilob.gitlab.io/random-thoughts/random/yt-dl-on-ipfs/ https://agilob.gitlab.io/random-thoughts/random/yt-dl-on-ipf...

ineedasername 6y ago

The source code amounts to instructions that could be used to violate copyright. So there's a distinction here: Is it illegal to tell people how to violate copyright, when that method has other uses? If so, what about a blog post telling you how you can use your cell phone camera to record a youtube video?

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Downloading / recording YouTube videos is NOT a copyright violation.

kuon 6y ago

I have been thinking about leaving github for a while. It is a very good platform, but as time passes, I realized I wanted to be more in control of my projects. Yesterday, I moved about 250 repos away to a gitea instance. Transition required a bit of tinkering (a few scripts) but went smoothly. The good sides are: - very fast, a lot faster than github for pushing/pulling but also the web UI is a lot faster - I'm in total control, I can change the look of the UI, create as many orgs as I want to organize my repos… Now the cons: - No social network effect, I don't know how contributions to my projects will evolve - Subject to DDoS and the like, I need to keep my instance accessible because I moved my FOSS projects on it Maybe more, it's been one day only. I am not suggesting all project should move out of github, it is a very good tool, but I think it wouldn't be bad to rely less on it.

exciteabletom 6y ago
Couldn't you retain the social aspect by mirroring the repos on Github? Linux does this.
- kuon 6y ago
  Yes, I am thinking about this.
nickflood 6y ago
If your hosting provider is in a country with DMCA-like laws, they can be targeted the same way GitHub was and would probably comply the same way as well. So was there really a point?
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  As can any developers in counties with DMCA anti-circ-like law.
- kuon 6y ago
  The difference being that if this happens, I can spawn an instance elsewhere and just change the DNS. I have hourly ZFS based backups to my own server, it would take a few hour max to restore everything.

Keverw 6y ago

I really wish they'd start prosecuting copyright trolls to the fullest extent of the law. Sure you can download this and download music videos, but there's legal cases such as downloading a political campaign ad, and using small parts of it to fact check them them under fair use. Our local news station in fact did something like that. Also there is a rep not far from here, where she was doing vlog style videos for her campaign and the guy running against her downloaded her videos and put them in his own ad. Using it to backup your own content or public domain content is another use case too. However if it's your own account I believe YouTube let's you download a mp4 of it from the creators studio but been a while since I've played with it since the redesign.

deleted 6y ago

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xvilka 6y ago

Another way to help is to improve IPFS and Federation protocols, for example for Gitea[1][2] or GitLab[3][4]. Or just sponsor them[5]. The source code for ForgeFed[6][7] might be also of interest for improvement. [1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1612 [2] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/9045 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/9045 [3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/6468 [4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/33665 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/33665 [5] https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea [6] https://forgefed.peers.community/ https://forgefed.peers.community/ [7] https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed https://notabug.org/peers/forgefed

xvilka 6y ago

Not a long time ago Microsoft itself tried to take down the wgetpro[1] project precisely for the same reasons. [1] http://wgetpro.sourceforge.net/ http://wgetpro.sourceforge.net/

luxcem 6y ago

Is it illegal in the US to download copyrighted material?

dredmorbius 6y ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=77pnVFLkUjM&t=39s https://youtube.com/watch?v=77pnVFLkUjM&t=39s

nojvek 6y ago

A huge portion of the software industry with most of open source projects hosted on GitHub isn’t a good thing. GitHub is closed source and the metadata (pulls/issues/projects) is also not in the git decentralized database. Sure in this instance GitHub CEO is helping. However GitHub could kick you or the repo out any second. We ought to build a more resilient internet.

nojvek 6y ago
I just learned gitea exists https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea. Holy moly, this is amazing.

garfieldnate 6y ago

Why is this any different from recording a TV broadcast? It seems to me that the same reasoning which made that legal (and there was a fight to do so!) should also allow anyone to record anything that is sent to them on their personal device.