5 ms·

Is Youtube-dl here to stay? Or are they forever going to fight legal battles.

by mastrsushi 6y ago

fibers 6y ago
the only reasonable alternative if gitlab gets dmca'd again is to use gitee based in china.
- nomdep 6y ago
  To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion.
  - fibers 6y ago
    i don't understand? this is a pretty simple solution since these large megacorps are quick to enforce their own will on the FOSS community for bs IP reasons.
  - mariuolo 6y ago
    > To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion. How? It's not like China has the greatest respect for intellectual property.
    - Santosh83 6y ago
      That's not the point. It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee.
      - pengaru 6y ago
        > It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee. Maybe that's the point. If all the valuable engineering projects leave the West because the West's laws are that dysfunctional, maybe the West will be forced to reevaluate them.
- jlokier 6y ago
  It's not actually necessary to use a Git hosting service. Git itself works just fine without one. There are many other project hosting alternatives as well. E.g. Canonical's Launchpad, GNU Savannah, etc.
  - fibers 6y ago
    the dmca's were a result of 'intent' which the law is more than willing to enforce imaginary IP laws. this becomes an eternal cat and mouse game where the foss community will tend to lose against these leeches.
  - jpeeler 6y ago
    It's not technically required with direct pulls, but practically there has to be some way of coordinating patch exchanges. Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown. Also, aren't both Launchpad and Savannah both code hosting repositories too?
    - rovr138 6y ago
      >Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown. But my inbox, and everyone's inbox that participates in it, would have a copy. I think mailing lists solve A LOT of problems that we are having now.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Or https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org or https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/ or just a bog-standard git repo served over HTTPS on https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/.
contravariant 6y ago
Well, maybe, but a DMCA doesn't really give the RIAA any legal means to request the takedown of something they don't own the copyright to (i.e. youtube-dl's source-code). Not sure what RIAA's endgame is though. I'm somewhat fearing that they are coordinating with Youtube in an attempt to prevent any organised effort against youtube's next obfuscation or something.
- dTal 6y ago
  I have already encountered a video that the latest version of youtube-dl fails on.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    It has never been perfect, there have always been some uploaders where some of there very long videos would fail for me. I suspect if I toyed with the formats requested it would work, but generally just don't try.
krick 6y ago
Not sure about "legal battles", but I don't think it will be quite as it was. It was always wise to keep existence of youtube-dl sort of public secret, since our, ehm, data sources were never keen of it in the first place. Even promoting it on a large platforms like HN or reddit was pretty sketchy. But now basically everyone knows about it, user base is going to grow even more, which will be even more of a problem for sites like youtube. And, consequentially, there will be more pushback. And, yeah, by the way: let's not forget that it's youtube and the likes of it who are actually the enemy of youtube-dl. All these RIAA notices and stuff are just tools.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Youtube-dl enables things that should just be allowed across the internet. The "hope it doesn't get noticed" strategy is optically terrible and generally set up to fail. Even if you are against these downloads, there are laws that let you prohibit such downloads by using DRM. Ignoring those laws or trying to claim that publicly available links count as DRM means these programs should be allowed.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    The concept of streaming always seemed a bit dumb to me, in terms of environmental costs and just plain efficiency. The constraint on the majority of cases is bandwidth, not storage. For mobile, that is not necessarily true, I concede. From a purely technical perspective, streaming makes little sense. This is really a manifestation of legal constructs.
chug 6y ago
My guess is that RIAA will pursue it until they either win legally or exhaust and frighten everyone away from it and it becomes a much less powerful tool. It's not like DMCA notices are their only option after all (and I'm not sure the DMCA notice sent to GitHub is really even a DMCA notice anyway). I would imagine they're either already in the process of or are ramping up to also go after the individuals involved as maintainers and (major) contributors. I think that could actually be a really interesting legal case to see if something like youtube-dl is found to be something more like a VCR or more like Napster, but I don't know if RIAA would ever take the chance of letting that happen on the chance that they lose. I think the more typical strategy for them would be to start sending everyone they can track down the real identity of scary letters and maybe drag a few into court and settle so the rest run away. I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).
- bxk1 6y ago
  > but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.
  - chug 6y ago
    That's a good point. I definitely have too much of a US-centric view on this as I'm not very familiar with the project and was assuming at least a few of the major people involved are living in the US or a country friendly enough with the US that the RIAA has major reach. Russia is a member of a few major international copyright agreements, but I have no idea how that will play out practically speaking. I'm not sure to what extent various member countries actually cooperate. Maybe the RIAA will just give up after they get GitHub and GitLab and any other major platforms with a US presence to stop hosting it if the main people are in a country that's enough of a speed bump for them.

Is Youtube-dl here to stay? Or are they forever going to fight legal battles.

fibers 6y ago

the only reasonable alternative if gitlab gets dmca'd again is to use gitee based in china.

nomdep 6y ago
To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion.
- fibers 6y ago
  i don't understand? this is a pretty simple solution since these large megacorps are quick to enforce their own will on the FOSS community for bs IP reasons.
- mariuolo 6y ago
  > To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion. How? It's not like China has the greatest respect for intellectual property.
  - Santosh83 6y ago
    That's not the point. It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      > It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee. Maybe that's the point. If all the valuable engineering projects leave the West because the West's laws are that dysfunctional, maybe the West will be forced to reevaluate them.
jlokier 6y ago
It's not actually necessary to use a Git hosting service. Git itself works just fine without one. There are many other project hosting alternatives as well. E.g. Canonical's Launchpad, GNU Savannah, etc.
- fibers 6y ago
  the dmca's were a result of 'intent' which the law is more than willing to enforce imaginary IP laws. this becomes an eternal cat and mouse game where the foss community will tend to lose against these leeches.
- jpeeler 6y ago
  It's not technically required with direct pulls, but practically there has to be some way of coordinating patch exchanges. Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown. Also, aren't both Launchpad and Savannah both code hosting repositories too?
  - rovr138 6y ago
    >Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown. But my inbox, and everyone's inbox that participates in it, would have a copy. I think mailing lists solve A LOT of problems that we are having now.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
Or https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org or https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/ or just a bog-standard git repo served over HTTPS on https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/.

contravariant 6y ago

Well, maybe, but a DMCA doesn't really give the RIAA any legal means to request the takedown of something they don't own the copyright to (i.e. youtube-dl's source-code). Not sure what RIAA's endgame is though. I'm somewhat fearing that they are coordinating with Youtube in an attempt to prevent any organised effort against youtube's next obfuscation or something.

dTal 6y ago
I have already encountered a video that the latest version of youtube-dl fails on.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  It has never been perfect, there have always been some uploaders where some of there very long videos would fail for me. I suspect if I toyed with the formats requested it would work, but generally just don't try.

krick 6y ago

Not sure about "legal battles", but I don't think it will be quite as it was. It was always wise to keep existence of youtube-dl sort of public secret, since our, ehm, data sources were never keen of it in the first place. Even promoting it on a large platforms like HN or reddit was pretty sketchy. But now basically everyone knows about it, user base is going to grow even more, which will be even more of a problem for sites like youtube. And, consequentially, there will be more pushback. And, yeah, by the way: let's not forget that it's youtube and the likes of it who are actually the enemy of youtube-dl. All these RIAA notices and stuff are just tools.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
Youtube-dl enables things that should just be allowed across the internet. The "hope it doesn't get noticed" strategy is optically terrible and generally set up to fail. Even if you are against these downloads, there are laws that let you prohibit such downloads by using DRM. Ignoring those laws or trying to claim that publicly available links count as DRM means these programs should be allowed.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  The concept of streaming always seemed a bit dumb to me, in terms of environmental costs and just plain efficiency. The constraint on the majority of cases is bandwidth, not storage. For mobile, that is not necessarily true, I concede. From a purely technical perspective, streaming makes little sense. This is really a manifestation of legal constructs.

chug 6y ago

My guess is that RIAA will pursue it until they either win legally or exhaust and frighten everyone away from it and it becomes a much less powerful tool. It's not like DMCA notices are their only option after all (and I'm not sure the DMCA notice sent to GitHub is really even a DMCA notice anyway). I would imagine they're either already in the process of or are ramping up to also go after the individuals involved as maintainers and (major) contributors. I think that could actually be a really interesting legal case to see if something like youtube-dl is found to be something more like a VCR or more like Napster, but I don't know if RIAA would ever take the chance of letting that happen on the chance that they lose. I think the more typical strategy for them would be to start sending everyone they can track down the real identity of scary letters and maybe drag a few into court and settle so the rest run away. I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).

bxk1 6y ago
> but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.
- chug 6y ago
  That's a good point. I definitely have too much of a US-centric view on this as I'm not very familiar with the project and was assuming at least a few of the major people involved are living in the US or a country friendly enough with the US that the RIAA has major reach. Russia is a member of a few major international copyright agreements, but I have no idea how that will play out practically speaking. I'm not sure to what extent various member countries actually cooperate. Maybe the RIAA will just give up after they get GitHub and GitLab and any other major platforms with a US presence to stop hosting it if the main people are in a country that's enough of a speed bump for them.