12 ms·

The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the re

by md224 5y ago

The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecomment-894619419 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecom... The legal defense of youtube-dl is premised on the idea that there's no circumvention occurring [0]. I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything... it seems obvious to me that YouTube is trying to put up roadblocks and we're trying to get around them. I would feel better if we could find a way to defend ytdl without the pretense of acting like this cat-and-mouse game isn't going on. [0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...

charcircuit 5y ago
btw that cipher is only on a subset of videos (usually music videos)
MereInterest 5y ago
I thought the most recent legal argument was the 2019 hiQ Labs Inc v LinkedIn Corp[0], in which the Ninth Circuit found web scraping to be legal, and forbid LinkedIn from blocking web scrapers. The exact same argument can be made for accessing YouTube via youtube-dl. The article does indicate that the decision in hiQ v LinkedIn was vacated by SCOTUS following the 2021 Van Buren v United States [0], to be retried by the Ninth Circuit. However, I'm not seeing a way that the decision in Van Buren would change the outcome, as it concluded that the CFAA did not apply to cases where somebody is legally allowed to access a computer at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/supreme-court-hacking-cfaa-ruling/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/supreme-court-hacking-cfaa...
- infogulch 5y ago
  Discussed on HN before: Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking (2020) [1] (probably other discussions as well). My comment on this one: > ... it's the webmaster's own responsibility to "just not serve" if they don't want it to be served, and their failure to implement their own desires as software doesn't suddenly give them carte blanche to claim whatever they want was breaking the law. ... The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738180
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    >The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables This implies that at some point someone would be able to say, we have tried to implement a policy, we have spent this many man hours of engineers, we have had 5 different solutions that were broken through, at some point these things must become hacking.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Are youtube-dl users being charged with CFAA violations?
roastedpeacock 5y ago
> The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here: Can not reply with the entire situation but I would not be surprised if Google does not care enough to stop the project through other means but tries to reduce mindless zombie-bots from sucking up bandwidth all day long. If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. Irrespective of that, the complaining party is the RIAA and not Google or YouTube in name. > I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything I think the optics are a little different when it's a third party internet service as the medium, but 'we' are still arguing what constitutes fair-use of DRM protected physical media. :-(
- icelancer 5y ago
  >> If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. This has been happening more and more recently - seriously slow playback when my Internet access is still ~1gbps on all other sites including fast.com/netflix, or Google Drive.
- seszett 5y ago
  > If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. I'm not sure if that's still the case today, but in my case it used to be because of a dispute between Google and Free/Proxad (a French operator) which led to limited peering for years. I'm pretty sure in your case it's also just anemic peering capacity between your ISP and Google, rather than Google as a whole lacking bandwidth. I haven't noticed anything at all here for example.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
seanp2k2 5y ago
So long as the https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole exists, piracy cannot be stopped. The ever-escalating arms race between content and consumers will go on, but there will be no victory, only collateral damage. If you have content people value but they aren't willing to pay for it, find out why. Maybe it's because you're charging too much, running too many ads, making it hard to cancel, or they just don't actually value it all that much. In YouTube's case, I would say that for the vast majority of content and the vast majority of users on the site, the content is worth approximately $0.00 to them, and the content is not so crucial that a few unskippable ads in a row will have most users just saying "forget it" and finding something else to do. Yes, pointing a camera at a monitor is more work and worse quality than getting the original video with best-quality-possible [compressed] audio, but no amount of laws can prevent people from doing that if they really value the content highly.
- 14 5y ago
  You gave me an idea if someone was to design a small display attached to a camera paired specifically to capture high quality video not just someone propping up a camera but where external light was blocked and the image size and camera are perfectly matched with an audio input as well they may have a market.
  - dento 5y ago
    Why not skip the display completely and just go with a capture card? They are cheap and have none of the issues with lights and timings.
    - 14 5y ago
      I was just thinking with vendors making hardware more hostile and if they made that not a possibility where an external camera defeats that. If a capture card works then that seems even easier and if youtubedl is under attack maybe that is how people will do it but one thing is for sure, people will do it.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
stuu99 5y ago
>I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23 years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take input/output control away from the user, this required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and windows 11 are the beginning of you not being able to run or play files or exe's over the next 20 years as youtube, netflix, the game industry update their software to use TPM. This was from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_pc_ms/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_... Here is a paper explaining what the future of files/broadcasts will be like: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and other software companies will control. They are removing ownership of our devices and they needed microsofts help to do that. We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via update. Many UWP games only work on certain versions of windows. See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link) https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was also pushing forced internet connection hard for home users.
- r3muxd 5y ago
  I just wish something could be done about it all.
  - CactusOnFire 5y ago
    Use linux? My next PC I am making the switch.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      Dual boot on your current PC, no time like the present. Bonus: you add years to the useful life of the machine, because most Linuxes fly even when Windows chugs.
gizmo686 5y ago
As I read that post, the circumvention applies only to a throttling control, not an overall access control. Since it should have been just as easy (if no easier) to simply block unofficial clients instead of throttling them, it seems like a clear argument that Google does not intend to block 3rd party Downloader, but merely give preferential treatment to first party ones. If you by that argument. Then bypassing the protection might be illegal, but would not be a copyright issue, and Google would be the only one with standing to sue.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Maybe it's a compromise because they still have their own legacy versions of the client that can't support the new scheme and yet need to remain at least semi-functional?
- foo_barrio 5y ago
  The throttling is so severe it is effectively blocking. The throttling goes down to 50KiB/s on my PC trying to download a basic youtube video. That around 0.4mbps which puts you barely around the bandwidth needed to stream a very low quality 360p/480p video. For reference, this video is about 2 minutes long and that's how long it took me to download it via the last version of youtube-dl: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVRInek075g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVRInek075g
reshie 5y ago
it is practically a wget for web videos and can be forwarded to like mpv. you should look at the supported sites it is quite extensive and youtube being a humble beginning.
agilob 5y ago
>The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video My Android One phone has camera app which has "stream to YouTube" functionality that stopped working in late 2020
feanaro 5y ago
We're not being a little too cute. If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl, given all of those are HTTP clients. Saying otherwise would be setting a dangerous precedent of trying to legislate which HTTP clients are allowed and which are disallowed.
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Surely things like Widevine show that that precedent has already been set? There are many online things that cannot be consumed by unblessed clients.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Surely the fact that a single blemish exists does not imply that we should just curl up in a hole and admit defeat. The fact that Widevine exists does little to damage the core of the above argument.
    - lelandfe 5y ago
      My point is that this is fundamentally not a viable argument anymore: > If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl Were this an axiom, services like Netflix simply could not exist. We're defeated whether we admit it or not – browser DRM is not being yanked from browsers anytime soon. That's not even talking about its forebears, like Silverlight, Flash, Applets, etc.
      - feanaro 5y ago
        The difference is DRM is a technical-only measure in most countries. The services employing DRM are scumbags, but they're welcome to try it. That doesn't mean that ridiculous positions such as trying to legally forbid access to a website other than through a handful of sanctioned browsers is going to fly.
- 5y ago
blowski 5y ago
I'm sceptical there is a long-term solution for people to have all the content available on YouTube (and similar services) accessible by the freedoms we experienced in 1995-2005. You choose either the range of content, or the freedom of choice in how you access it.

by md224 5y ago

charcircuit 5y ago

btw that cipher is only on a subset of videos (usually music videos)

MereInterest 5y ago

I thought the most recent legal argument was the 2019 hiQ Labs Inc v LinkedIn Corp[0], in which the Ninth Circuit found web scraping to be legal, and forbid LinkedIn from blocking web scrapers. The exact same argument can be made for accessing YouTube via youtube-dl. The article does indicate that the decision in hiQ v LinkedIn was vacated by SCOTUS following the 2021 Van Buren v United States [0], to be retried by the Ninth Circuit. However, I'm not seeing a way that the decision in Van Buren would change the outcome, as it concluded that the CFAA did not apply to cases where somebody is legally allowed to access a computer at all. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/supreme-court-hacking-cfaa-ruling/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/03/supreme-court-hacking-cfaa...

infogulch 5y ago
Discussed on HN before: Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking (2020) [1] (probably other discussions as well). My comment on this one: > ... it's the webmaster's own responsibility to "just not serve" if they don't want it to be served, and their failure to implement their own desires as software doesn't suddenly give them carte blanche to claim whatever they want was breaking the law. ... The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738180
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables This implies that at some point someone would be able to say, we have tried to implement a policy, we have spent this many man hours of engineers, we have had 5 different solutions that were broken through, at some point these things must become hacking.
tedunangst 5y ago
Are youtube-dl users being charged with CFAA violations?

roastedpeacock 5y ago

> The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here: Can not reply with the entire situation but I would not be surprised if Google does not care enough to stop the project through other means but tries to reduce mindless zombie-bots from sucking up bandwidth all day long. If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. Irrespective of that, the complaining party is the RIAA and not Google or YouTube in name. > I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything I think the optics are a little different when it's a third party internet service as the medium, but 'we' are still arguing what constitutes fair-use of DRM protected physical media. :-(

icelancer 5y ago
>> If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. This has been happening more and more recently - seriously slow playback when my Internet access is still ~1gbps on all other sites including fast.com/netflix, or Google Drive.
seszett 5y ago
> If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes. I'm not sure if that's still the case today, but in my case it used to be because of a dispute between Google and Free/Proxad (a French operator) which led to limited peering for years. I'm pretty sure in your case it's also just anemic peering capacity between your ISP and Google, rather than Google as a whole lacking bandwidth. I haven't noticed anything at all here for example.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

seanp2k2 5y ago

So long as the https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole exists, piracy cannot be stopped. The ever-escalating arms race between content and consumers will go on, but there will be no victory, only collateral damage. If you have content people value but they aren't willing to pay for it, find out why. Maybe it's because you're charging too much, running too many ads, making it hard to cancel, or they just don't actually value it all that much. In YouTube's case, I would say that for the vast majority of content and the vast majority of users on the site, the content is worth approximately $0.00 to them, and the content is not so crucial that a few unskippable ads in a row will have most users just saying "forget it" and finding something else to do. Yes, pointing a camera at a monitor is more work and worse quality than getting the original video with best-quality-possible [compressed] audio, but no amount of laws can prevent people from doing that if they really value the content highly.

14 5y ago
You gave me an idea if someone was to design a small display attached to a camera paired specifically to capture high quality video not just someone propping up a camera but where external light was blocked and the image size and camera are perfectly matched with an audio input as well they may have a market.
- dento 5y ago
  Why not skip the display completely and just go with a capture card? They are cheap and have none of the issues with lights and timings.
  - 14 5y ago
    I was just thinking with vendors making hardware more hostile and if they made that not a possibility where an external camera defeats that. If a capture card works then that seems even easier and if youtubedl is under attack maybe that is how people will do it but one thing is for sure, people will do it.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago

stuu99 5y ago

>I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23 years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take input/output control away from the user, this required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and windows 11 are the beginning of you not being able to run or play files or exe's over the next 20 years as youtube, netflix, the game industry update their software to use TPM. This was from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_pc_ms/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_... Here is a paper explaining what the future of files/broadcasts will be like: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and other software companies will control. They are removing ownership of our devices and they needed microsofts help to do that. We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via update. Many UWP games only work on certain versions of windows. See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link) https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was also pushing forced internet connection hard for home users.

r3muxd 5y ago
I just wish something could be done about it all.
- CactusOnFire 5y ago
  Use linux? My next PC I am making the switch.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    Dual boot on your current PC, no time like the present. Bonus: you add years to the useful life of the machine, because most Linuxes fly even when Windows chugs.

gizmo686 5y ago

As I read that post, the circumvention applies only to a throttling control, not an overall access control. Since it should have been just as easy (if no easier) to simply block unofficial clients instead of throttling them, it seems like a clear argument that Google does not intend to block 3rd party Downloader, but merely give preferential treatment to first party ones. If you by that argument. Then bypassing the protection might be illegal, but would not be a copyright issue, and Google would be the only one with standing to sue.

Nextgrid 5y ago
Maybe it's a compromise because they still have their own legacy versions of the client that can't support the new scheme and yet need to remain at least semi-functional?
foo_barrio 5y ago
The throttling is so severe it is effectively blocking. The throttling goes down to 50KiB/s on my PC trying to download a basic youtube video. That around 0.4mbps which puts you barely around the bandwidth needed to stream a very low quality 360p/480p video. For reference, this video is about 2 minutes long and that's how long it took me to download it via the last version of youtube-dl: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVRInek075g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVRInek075g

reshie 5y ago

it is practically a wget for web videos and can be forwarded to like mpv. you should look at the supported sites it is quite extensive and youtube being a humble beginning.

agilob 5y ago

>The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video My Android One phone has camera app which has "stream to YouTube" functionality that stopped working in late 2020

feanaro 5y ago

We're not being a little too cute. If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl, given all of those are HTTP clients. Saying otherwise would be setting a dangerous precedent of trying to legislate which HTTP clients are allowed and which are disallowed.

lelandfe 5y ago
Surely things like Widevine show that that precedent has already been set? There are many online things that cannot be consumed by unblessed clients.
- feanaro 5y ago
  Surely the fact that a single blemish exists does not imply that we should just curl up in a hole and admit defeat. The fact that Widevine exists does little to damage the core of the above argument.
  - lelandfe 5y ago
    My point is that this is fundamentally not a viable argument anymore: > If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl Were this an axiom, services like Netflix simply could not exist. We're defeated whether we admit it or not – browser DRM is not being yanked from browsers anytime soon. That's not even talking about its forebears, like Silverlight, Flash, Applets, etc.
    - feanaro 5y ago
      The difference is DRM is a technical-only measure in most countries. The services employing DRM are scumbags, but they're welcome to try it. That doesn't mean that ridiculous positions such as trying to legally forbid access to a website other than through a handful of sanctioned browsers is going to fly.
5y ago

blowski 5y ago

I'm sceptical there is a long-term solution for people to have all the content available on YouTube (and similar services) accessible by the freedoms we experienced in 1995-2005. You choose either the range of content, or the freedom of choice in how you access it.