4 ms·

Then again pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so. Technologists with their ability to automate

Then again pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so. Technologists with their ability to automate are at a distinct advantage here again. I'm just waiting for youtube-dl to move development to Tor or i2p or another censorship resistant network - and ship with a built-in client to update from there.

mrtksn 6y ago
Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained to few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. The issue is that anything that scales needs an infrastructure and infrastructures can be extralegal only if they are not worth the time of the guys with the guns.
- pharke 6y ago
  If only there were a decentralized file sharing protocol that anyone can use to distribute source code and binaries...
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    decentralization doesn’t work without a centralized tool. Torrents are nothing more than a clever idea without The Pirate Bay & similar, Bitcoin is worth nothing without the exchanges.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      You can create your own TPB by just crawling the DHT network for torrents and downloading the torrent metadata from active peers. In fact I did this once as a fun weekend project. Also you pretty much gave a counterexample to your own argument by bringing up TPB. The "people with guns" would love nothing more than for it to go away, yet here we are - 17 years and counting.
      - mrtksn 6y ago
        As I said, when it becomes insignificant enough no one cares. As with TPB, it’s blocked in many places and service is down quite often. A few people bother to use it, thus guys with the guns don’t bother. It’s the same situation with your homebrew unlawful stuff. As long as your impact is not worth the attention of the guys with the guns you can do whatever you want.
        chmod775 6y ago
        In fact "the people with guns", as you like to call them, do little else day-in day-out than try to scrub google results and other places, because they do care, yet they are losing badly. As long as one can google "thing" + "torrent" and come up with something in the first few result, it's pretty obvious who isn't winning. Then there's also the actual statistics for torrent usage... Sure they can take down a pirate bay or some other tracker now and again, but at the end of the day for each site they take down there will be 10 new ones. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying "pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so." The best efforts of those people with guns are proverbial drops in the ocean. What always happens when laws and reality aren't in alignment, is that people ignore those laws en masse.
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      > Torrents are nothing more than a clever idea without The Pirate Bay No, there are magnets now. You can send a torrent as a hash. The reason it won't work is because you can just take that hash, log all of the swarm ips, send secret letters to all of the isps to reveal the seeders and leechers, bust in their doors and arrest them, publicize their arrests in every newspaper and on every television channel, interrogate them to expose more of the network, then if the law lags create parallel constructions to convict the most important people as the ringleaders of a copyright-violating cartel, and let the rest languish in jail for a little while before dropping the charges six months later and releasing them after their names have been in the paper.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Has anything like that ever happened?
        Matt3o12_ 6y ago
        In Germany it is quite common to get a fine for that (an adhortatory letter or Abmahnung in German). Media companies monitor torrents, and as soon as they see a new German ip address seeding, they send a letter to the ISP with the IP address and timestamp. The ISPs send the law firm the real user address and then they send you a letter demanding a fine for illegally uploading copyrighted material often between 1000-3000€. If you don't pay up, they take you to court. This is quite common and many people see letters even if they only seed for a few seconds. Apparently the easiest way is to just ignore the letters and pretend you don't live there but I wouldn't be so sure (a friend told me that's what he did and it allegedly worked but I have no experience with either). So this is a lot less drastic but still quite as effective. And it even makes VPNs risky because disconnecting and exposing your real IP for even one second is enough to receive that letter (though not all torrents are monitored and private torrents are usually safe because the German RIAA doesnt have access to it). I recommend you take a look at the Wikipedia about "Abmahnung" how that is even possible when the copyright holders don't sue themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung
- chmod775 6y ago
  > Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways, and they specifically took down the code repository. On top of that youtube-dl is a commandline tool. This is not your typical "google how do I netflix" end-user. You can bootstrap an application that is hosted on tor or i2p with a short bash script: 1. download and start tor/i2p, 2. download the application, 3. run it. youtube-dl already has a built-in updater (youtube-dl -U). You'd just change that to use tor/i2p as well. Anyone who can't get such a script to run wouldn't have been able to use youtube-dl anyways.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    There’s nothing stopping you from writing your own downloader too. It’s not about making video downloads impossible, they are probably gunning to disrupt the development of the project so it would not be able to keep up with the changes of the video websites, make it painful to use, thus eventually insignificant.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    > youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes. For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc. I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else". [1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM
    - ric2b 6y ago
      Those tools are built by developers, which will have no issue with getting access to youtube-dl in more technical ways.
- bathtub365 6y ago
  The lawyers will only move on when they stop being paid.

mrtksn 6y ago

Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained to few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. The issue is that anything that scales needs an infrastructure and infrastructures can be extralegal only if they are not worth the time of the guys with the guns.

pharke 6y ago
If only there were a decentralized file sharing protocol that anyone can use to distribute source code and binaries...
- mrtksn 6y ago
  decentralization doesn’t work without a centralized tool. Torrents are nothing more than a clever idea without The Pirate Bay & similar, Bitcoin is worth nothing without the exchanges.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    You can create your own TPB by just crawling the DHT network for torrents and downloading the torrent metadata from active peers. In fact I did this once as a fun weekend project. Also you pretty much gave a counterexample to your own argument by bringing up TPB. The "people with guns" would love nothing more than for it to go away, yet here we are - 17 years and counting.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      As I said, when it becomes insignificant enough no one cares. As with TPB, it’s blocked in many places and service is down quite often. A few people bother to use it, thus guys with the guns don’t bother. It’s the same situation with your homebrew unlawful stuff. As long as your impact is not worth the attention of the guys with the guns you can do whatever you want.
      - chmod775 6y ago
        In fact "the people with guns", as you like to call them, do little else day-in day-out than try to scrub google results and other places, because they do care, yet they are losing badly. As long as one can google "thing" + "torrent" and come up with something in the first few result, it's pretty obvious who isn't winning. Then there's also the actual statistics for torrent usage... Sure they can take down a pirate bay or some other tracker now and again, but at the end of the day for each site they take down there will be 10 new ones. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm saying "pretty much any policy can be made unenforceable if a sufficient number of people decide to make it so." The best efforts of those people with guns are proverbial drops in the ocean. What always happens when laws and reality aren't in alignment, is that people ignore those laws en masse.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    > Torrents are nothing more than a clever idea without The Pirate Bay No, there are magnets now. You can send a torrent as a hash. The reason it won't work is because you can just take that hash, log all of the swarm ips, send secret letters to all of the isps to reveal the seeders and leechers, bust in their doors and arrest them, publicize their arrests in every newspaper and on every television channel, interrogate them to expose more of the network, then if the law lags create parallel constructions to convict the most important people as the ringleaders of a copyright-violating cartel, and let the rest languish in jail for a little while before dropping the charges six months later and releasing them after their names have been in the paper.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Has anything like that ever happened?
      - Matt3o12_ 6y ago
        In Germany it is quite common to get a fine for that (an adhortatory letter or Abmahnung in German). Media companies monitor torrents, and as soon as they see a new German ip address seeding, they send a letter to the ISP with the IP address and timestamp. The ISPs send the law firm the real user address and then they send you a letter demanding a fine for illegally uploading copyrighted material often between 1000-3000€. If you don't pay up, they take you to court. This is quite common and many people see letters even if they only seed for a few seconds. Apparently the easiest way is to just ignore the letters and pretend you don't live there but I wouldn't be so sure (a friend told me that's what he did and it allegedly worked but I have no experience with either). So this is a lot less drastic but still quite as effective. And it even makes VPNs risky because disconnecting and exposing your real IP for even one second is enough to receive that letter (though not all torrents are monitored and private torrents are usually safe because the German RIAA doesnt have access to it). I recommend you take a look at the Wikipedia about "Abmahnung" how that is even possible when the copyright holders don't sue themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung
chmod775 6y ago
> Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways, and they specifically took down the code repository. On top of that youtube-dl is a commandline tool. This is not your typical "google how do I netflix" end-user. You can bootstrap an application that is hosted on tor or i2p with a short bash script: 1. download and start tor/i2p, 2. download the application, 3. run it. youtube-dl already has a built-in updater (youtube-dl -U). You'd just change that to use tor/i2p as well. Anyone who can't get such a script to run wouldn't have been able to use youtube-dl anyways.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  There’s nothing stopping you from writing your own downloader too. It’s not about making video downloads impossible, they are probably gunning to disrupt the development of the project so it would not be able to keep up with the changes of the video websites, make it painful to use, thus eventually insignificant.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  > youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes. For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc. I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else". [1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM
  - ric2b 6y ago
    Those tools are built by developers, which will have no issue with getting access to youtube-dl in more technical ways.
bathtub365 6y ago
The lawyers will only move on when they stop being paid.