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Google removed our website from search because it uses YouTube-dl
- davikr 4y agoI don't see why a single DMCA would take down an established company's whole business off Google Search, without even a chance to 'comply', if it didn't benefit Google to do so.
- johnebgd 4y agoGoogle has become the baddies. I assume this is just them abusing their power to hurt companies that their customers (advertisers) complain about.
- frognumber 4y agoI feel like submitting a swarm of DMCA take-down notices for copilot, which stole my AGPL code.
- stevewatson301 4y agoIt's interesting to see this statement. When it comes to Copilot, many HNers share the sentiment that it has copied code from open-source projects without their permission. However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, the same people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
- aero-glide2 4y agoNo reason to believe they are the same people.
- speedgoose 4y agoThey are not necessarily the same people commenting but I agree HN can feel a bit egoistic.
- bmacho 4y agoIt's interesting to see this statement. When it comes to Copilot, many people share the sentiment that it has copied code from open-source projects without their permission. However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, also many people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
- teddyh 4y agoNo, I feel the same about both projects.
- frognumber 4y agoThe Fair Use test has four prongs: - Purpose and character of the use - Nature of the copyrighted work - Amount and substantiality - Effect upon work's value I feel like that provides a valid ethical framework in both cases. For example, if my AGPL code is taken and ends up in another open-source project, just without attribution, I'm okay with it. If it's used for a father-son duo making an awesome thing for Burning Man, unaware of where it came from, I'm fine with that too. If it's used by a large commercial organization to compete with my open0source project, I'm not okay. I don't feel bad using SD at home for personal use. It's a lot of fun. I would feel bad, for example, using it to make advertisements or Hollywood films. I don't feel bad about most non-commercial and educational settings. Your line might be a different place, but there's a line somewhere, and it's not all-or-none.
- quadrifoliate 4y agoAre these truly the exact same people commenting? HN has a wide range of interests, so I think it's possible that you're combining two different groups of HNers into "the same people". I, for example, have some views about Copilot, and think that there's a case for saying that it violates copyleft code licenses. I...do not have a view about art, mainly because I literally have no idea how copyright works in the art world, or if there's something similar to copyleft; so I usually don't comment on the AI-generated art stuff that seems to be popping up left and right.
- geraldwhen 4y agoYou should. What’s the point of licenses if big companies ignore them? Personally I’ve only ever released source as MIT, knowing it could be resold or used for nefarious things, or kept source private. I don’t trust ransoms on the internet to respect posted licenses, so anything I post publicly I post with as much permission as possible.
- Kiro 4y agoHow is your comment relevant to this?
- chrismorgan 4y ago> my AGPL code To repeat what I keep saying in these cases: there’s nothing special about the particular license you use, if it still has pretty much any condition. If Copilot is subject to copyright restrictions, MIT-licensed code is affected just as much as AGPL-licensed code: Copilot is still not meeting (and cannot meet) the condition of the license, attribution. Copilot depends entirely upon exemption from copyright restrictions under “fair use” exceptions. But still, you’re quite welcome to issue takedown notices, though I don’t know if the regular process is actually appropriate (given that it’s a GitHub project rather than a project hosted on the GitHub platform). Their reaction might be interesting, though I expect they will just declare the notice invalid because of fair use exemptions and ignore it.
- frognumber 4y agoThat's a very mechanical view of licenses. I'll approximate: Contract violations are okay if they result in no damages. Courts determine damages by harm done. This comes down to a lot of detailed issues, including things like intent. Licenses are more complex, and I'll ignore issues like statutory damages. A lot of licenses are GPL-compatible because although the terms differ in phrasing, the GPL has provisions which are substantively the same (e.g. attribution versus copyright notice). Courts won't care. MIT signals one intent, and AGPL signals another. That's a big difference. I have code under AGPL, GPL, and MIT, and in the case of the AGPL code being ripped off by copilot, it undermines a lot of the purpose of having licensed the code as AGPL if others can use it without that license. For the MIT code, a lack of copyright notice+attribution would typically be mild annoyance at best. A court would pick up on that, and act accordingly.
- belorn 4y agoDMCA take-down notices only works if the platform that receives them want to act on them. Unless you got power and influence, nothing will happen.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoWell, supposedly, the next step is suing them ? This of course still requires some power and influence, but if the violation is egregious enough you generally can find a rights defence association willing to help you. (Of course the DMCA is still problematic for grey areas and spurious claims, like here.)
- belorn 4y agoOne can sue, but it won't resolve the problem of double standards. As far as I know, you can't sue google for automatically acting on DMCA claims when they are sent by certain people of power and influence and leaving all other claims to the courts.
- dchest 4y agoJoin my copyright pool! https://dchest.com/2022/08/24/ai-licensing/ https://dchest.com/2022/08/24/ai-licensing/
- sschueller 4y agoMonopolies abusing their power. Until congress does something this will continue and only get worse. I wouldn't be too sure that AT&T would be broken up today as it was back in 1982.
- encryptluks2 4y agoThis is like robocallers complaining that phone companies are making it more difficult for them to use the phone networks to robocall people.
- LAMike 4y agoAn open sourced Electron/Desktop app for editing videos sourced from Youtube might be successful, but everything runs in the browser and it's more universal. With WASM, things get more interesting because the capabilities will get closer to "native" apps over the next 3-5 years
- encryptluks2 4y agoI'm not excited about WASM. It seems like we've come full circle. We already have frameworks to isolate apps, we don't need the browser to do it nor do we want our privacy and security completely obfuscated from the source.
- maven29 4y agoWouldn't that imply that first-party appstores must remain the only app delivery mechanism? I don't think the economics of write-once-run-anywhere are going to change anytime soon. so WASM is a welcome shift closer to the metal, I'd say.
- encryptluks2 4y agoNo, it would imply that authors that want to create cross-platform apps would learn how to actually create cross-platform apps or create PWAs which are already cross-platform.
- maven29 4y agoPWAs are a real tragedy of the commons with no platform owner willing to extend first-class UX flows due to competing interests as well as adverserial risks from bad-faith actors. From a security/privacy perspective electron-esque apps are no different from native apps, and divorced from the browser UX, PWAs only inherit the trust they cultivated while running in the browser. They are just webapps with some quality-of-life sprinkled on top, after all.
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- schappim 4y agoGoogling for Kapwing shows them #1 in the search for me (currently in the UK).
- encryptluks2 4y agoI'm not justifying Google here as I am a fan of youtube-dl and the variants, but if you are creating a product or business that relies on Google servers and uses software that could be considered abuse (especially for commercial purposes) then I'm not completely surprised. You could have got an API key which is probably the correct route to go once you want to commercialize something like this.
- hnbad 4y agoThis is what struck me as well. Giphy doesn't exist to scrape full videos from YouTube. Kapwing offers to scrape full videos from YouTube and then reupload them to other platforms. That not only likely violates YouTube's terms of service but also directly contradicts YouTube's business interests. I'm not sure the DMCA claim is legitimate (and Google seems to have walked back on it, which seems odd) but this feels more like a ToS violation that would justify an IP ban or strongly worded legal letter than an obvious DMCA case.
- account42 4y agoThis stance would make sense if Youtube had decided to block them. That is not what happened.
- kjeetgill 4y agoMistakenly googling kawping even auto-corrected to kapwing so I'm guessing they've since been fully reinstated ... (Tinfoil hat) if they were ever even taken down.
- ALittleLight 4y agoI still kapwing and this post on Google search. I did look at one of the blog posts the author mentioned and tried googling random strings from that blog post and found it did not show up in a google search (though was the first result on Brave search).
- jenthoven 4y ago[This is Julia, Eric’s cofounder] 317 Kapwing webpages were taken down, but we still have others (including this blog post) that show up on Google Search. As the article explains, our home page, blog, and EDU page are among those that are de-listed
- heinrichhartman 4y agoThe case is more nuanced than it looks from the outset. In this case YTDL is executed on the provider's premise not on the users machines. So you are not distributing a tool, you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube. I still think that a DMCA takedown should not apply (and the regulation is BS) but this looks to be a different case. E.g. I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
- boredpudding 4y agoI agree with this, but I also feel Google should sue them for this feature, instead of removing them from Google Search. I feel like the second is an abuse of their massive power on the internet.
- belter 4y agoThe EU is rubbing their hands...
- danbulant 4y agoBut again, GIPHY has the exact same feature, and I can find Giphy just fine
- namdnay 4y agoMaybe GIPHY negotiated something with Google? Or the fact that it's only short extracts means they don't see it as scraping?
- masswerk 4y agoHum, isn't copyright about publication? The mere act of downloading doesn't necessarily imply this, and there's still legitimate cause for publication as in fair use. Also, wouldn't a DCMA complaint have to concern specific material? (To me, this doesn't make much sense.)
- szundi 4y ago
- megamix 4y agoI can still see your website listed in Google search. You can always rely on DuckDuckGo to list :D. What can we say about a totalitarian search engine?
- IshKebab 4y agoCan't you just submit a counter-notice for DMCA take-downs?
- izacus 4y agoThan can be hard if you're actually in the wrong because you took copyrighted content while stripping its monetization.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoYes, but then Google will notify the copyright holder, Google, and they will have ten days to file a lawsuit. If they don't, Google gets to decide if they put the material back up. The DMCA really seems to fall apart when the host and the copyright owner are the same entity.
- IshKebab 4y ago> If they don't, Google gets to decide if they put the material back up. No they don't. If Google decides not to sue (which frankly seems likely given the precedent it risks setting), then they have to put the material back up.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoDoes Google have to index anything? I don't think so. It'd be an interesting lawsuit to say the least.
- brokenmachine 4y agoIn Australia they have to scrape selected newspaper sites, and pay them for the privilege, thanks to Murdoch and our amazing government.
- maven29 4y agoIt doesn't look like Giphy actually downloads from youtube, it seems like it does a lookup in their content library using the video page metadata.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago> currently, even if you search for kapwing on Google, kapwing.com does not show up in the results This is false. My first result in Firefox is https://www.kapwing.com/tools https://www.kapwing.com/tools
- pommersche92 4y agosame for me in chrome... https://www.kapwing.com https://www.kapwing.com › tools
- croes 4y agoTechnically that's not kapwing.com. Search with bing and the first result is https://www.kapwing.com https://www.kapwing.com
- ur-whale 4y agohttp://www.yandex.com http://www.yandex.com ftw Almost as good as Google in search quality but, more importantly, unencumbered by all the legal US BS such as DMCA. https://yandex.com/search/?text=kapwing https://yandex.com/search/?text=kapwing
- BlueTemplar 4y agoWhile I speak out a lot against and try to boycott (many of) US companies, Russian (and Chinese) companies are even worse (especially if let to have the same market share).
- blfr 4y agoObviously, this tool does circumvent YouTube's mechanisms to download and edit a video. The user kinda accepts the risk (how many of them even read that privacy policy?) but there is no verification that they have any rights to the video. Which is imho as it should be. It's neither wrong nor illegal to download someone's video and edit it. It's explicitly allowed in many jurisdictions under fair use. However, OP seems to accept complaint's framing. Speaking of youtube-dl, there's an excellent fork, yt-dlp[1], which circumvents the newer speed limiting features YouTube implemented. (From what I gather, they use APIs for older devices.) [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
- Freak_NL 4y agoDoes yt-dlp circumvent the age check for videos classified as not suitable for minors as well? From what I've seen the loopholes for that type of video seem to have gotten closed this year.
- blfr 4y agoI don't really download anything edgy and don't know how to easily find an age-gated video. If you provide a link though, I'll check.
- Freak_NL 4y agoThanks. Oh not even edgy (well, not too edgy). Something like this Rammstein music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZcUAPRRac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZcUAPRRac I can't even tell why this one specifically is age-gated, but something as explicit as their Deutschland video isn't. I guess there must be a boob in this one somewhere.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWorks in NewPipe
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
- Hitton 4y agoIt's funny that even though the main page kapwing.com is removed, their tools page with big "YouTube Video Downloader" link is still first when searching the name.
- grey_earthling 4y ago> has essentially been erased from the internet > This post is a cry for help to Google to stand up for smaller web developers You perceive Google removing you from their Search service as being essentially erased from the internet, which means you understand they're effectively a monopoly. And when they use that monopoly power against you, your response is to… beg them for mercy? Not even a little questioning their monopoly status, as a treat? It's fair enough to argue your case that you didn't break the rules. It just seems weirdly sinister to not even mention that your fundamental problem here is that the rules are capriciously enforced by what authors in the 1990s would have considered “a bit farfetched even for a hypercapitalist dystopia”.
- DarthNebo 4y agoWould running client-side youtube-dl in WASM fix the issue since Kapwing wouldn't be invoking youtube-dl from their backend. YouTube is in such weird spot because they want to maintain free access to content yet limit how people access it without a pay-wall which OTT players like Netflix etc have been doing since long.
- neoberg 4y agoNo because youtube-dl requires a connection that is not limited by CORS.
- zo1 4y agoTinfoil hat mode: CORS enforced in the browser and other such related "privacy" tech were pushed by Google and big tech to prevent stuff like this. Turning the browser into a consumption platform with an encrypted pipe between your screen and the server. As opposed to the browser being an agent acting on the user's behalf.
- kevincox 4y agoI think your Tinfoil hat is misplaced. CORS was a hack added to fix the "bug" that cookies are sent cross-origin by default. Without CORS (and modern per-origin cookie jar policies) evil.example could load up https://facebook.com/api/friends.json https://facebook.com/api/friends.json and get a list of your friends or profile.json to read your profile. CORS was an ugly bandaid to prevent this without breaking existing sites. I agree that CORS is a pain and a mess but it had very clear and non-nefarious benefits when it was introduced. Maybe when all browsers only support origin-isolated cookie jars it can be obsoleted but I wouldn't hold my breath.
- Tajnymag 4y agoI'm not sure CORS would allow such function.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoI still don't see how they can pretend these anti-circumvention takedown requests are legal. The DMCA clearly lays out the path to challenge an alleged circumvention, and it involves a court order barring distribution of the product. Takedown notices are only for violations of copyright.
- epakai 4y agoYou were competing with google (or they are about to enter a similar space), but relied on their platform in some way. The big company crushes and keeps on rolling.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoI don’t get Google’s gripe with youtube-dl. A huge chunk of YouTube content is reaction videos and video responses where snippets of the original video is spliced into the new one for commentary. How are creators supposed to make these kinds of videos “legally” if youtube-dl is not allowed according to Google?
- BlueTemplar 4y agoBy using Google's own shitty, artificially limited tools ? Part of the issue also applies to kapwing BTW : your app in inherently worse when you have to fight the browser's own limitations - one recent example I have seen : a tool that syncs the sound of two videos that had a live discussion... but then doesn't allow you to put then on separate screens, both fullscreen, because it puts them both in the same browser tab, rather than two separate windows !
- emaro 4y agoAlthough generally I totally agree and I think that with the size and relevance of YouTube Google has to allow access to the content with tools like yt-dl (even for businesses), I still wonder why they do not mention the official YT api with one word? Is it to expensive? Why wouldn't they use it?
- rpigab 4y agoWell, obviously, APIs provided by Google can allow app creators to do many things, but not things that are useful. Only Google apps can do useful things, per Google policy. See this SO answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/8081778/12405367 https://stackoverflow.com/a/8081778/12405367 "Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so their API's will not support that." Downloading videos for streaming services makes them cry, Not only Google, Netflix also hates people who go off the grid too. You should be online at all times and feed them data and money, and save your credit card details in-app, ready for compulsive buying. One day you'll be able to buy things while you sleep.
- vorticalbox 4y agoDoes YouTube not have an api for third party applications to allow you access to your uploaded videos?
- reflexe 4y agoMaybe they should send a DMCA to gboard first since it uses giphy.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agohttps://i.imgur.com/ioNjNmI.png https://i.imgur.com/ioNjNmI.png Okay so their top organic pages were specifically about how to download Youtube videos. I'm assuming this is against Youtube's Terms of Service and considering Youtube is owned by Google this doesn't seem like they were really trying too hard to stay on Google's good side which you need to do when you get millions of monthly organic traffic and want to keep it that way. But anyways according to Ahrefs I'm not seeing any traffic loss (not sure what happened with that big spike but there was a Google update at that time): https://i.imgur.com/r9naQne.png https://i.imgur.com/r9naQne.png
- Hitton 4y agoWhere is the first screenshot from? Looks useful.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoAhrefs
- de6u99er 4y agoI used kapwing once, to cut out a s ction of a YouTube video which I downloaded through some other service and post it on Twitter. I was so positively suprised about the online video editor which allowed me to start editing the video while it was being uploaded, that I created a post on LinkedIn about it. That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if YT has developed a mechanism to detect content that was downloaded through YT-DL and your company is a victim of an automated tool someone at YT has created to make sure those who steal videos from others will make less revenue. E.g.: - IGN pays for content or gets content exclusively - someone else downloads the IGN video puts their own watermark over the IGN one and publishes the video as their own. IGN and the company ask - YT to take those videos down which requires lots of people to waste their time for something that could be automated
- jsnell 4y agoUh, put down the pitchforks. This is not Google taking it down because of not liking the tool. According to the screenshot it's a DMCA request from "BPI", "a UK record label association".
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoGoogle doesn't take down entire domains from DMCA requests. They will remove single pages from their index
- sigmoid10 4y agoWhich is seemingly what they did here: >The DMCA takedown request has resulted in over 300 of our pages being removed from Google Search Note that google regularly removes millions of pages due to DMCA requests. But I can still easily find kapwing.com in google results, so it's not like they removed the domain.
- UncleMeat 4y agoCan't stop the outrage machine though.
- mschuster91 4y agoActually, we should keep up the pitchforks, but redirect them towards the legal frameworks that give private, unaccountable entities the power to unilaterally disrupt infrastructure with almost zero legal recourse.
- ignaloidas 4y agoYou can always do a DMCA counternotice. Then the onus is onto the one who sent the notice in the first place to gather evidence and take you to court. In theory, there's fines for false notices if they can't prove anything. Of course, you better be sure that you are in the right if you're gonna do that though.
- c80e74f077 4y agoIt looks you're back here (or not removed yet) https://imgur.com/yCKetPI https://imgur.com/yCKetPI
- f23f23g2323g 4y agoanother reason to split Google & others into many smaller companies
- I_am_tiberius 4y agoI'm fighting with Google as well. Does anyone know why what "Discovered - currently not indexed" means in detail?
- hsuduebc2 4y agoIt is really heading towards corporate dystopia.
- data_maan 4y agoWhen I search for "Kapwing" it appears in my searches (the post says it doesn't). Does this mean that after a mere 3 hours Google reacted already? This would again point to the highly asymmetrical balance of power where those that succeed in making themselves heard publicly (e.g. by hitting HN front page - not so easy, see my own submissions) get their problems fixes by the internet big ones, while those that don't are left to rot in obscurity. #regulateSiliconValley
- mavhc 4y agoIt's interesting that Youtube allows you to specify your video is Creative Commons, yet provides no way for you to legally do anything with that video except watch it
- unconed 4y agoIt's depressing how shit the internet is now. Youtube has a virtual monopoly on video, effectively making them the public square for rich media. But you're limited in what you can post there, they can remove or deboost or quarantine whatever they want, and they actively prevent you from integrating with them. This is pretty much what every major platform turns into over time. It's the complete opposite of what it was 20 years ago.
- blacklight 4y agoThis is why everybody should stop using Google as their primary search engine, and either use DuckDuckGo/Startpage/Brave or (even better) self-hosted meta-search engines like SearX/SearxNG. I personally opted for the SearxNG option and I haven't looked back at Google for a single search for months. Google decides to remove a website from their engine because of their bullshit reasons? And who cares? Google is only one among ten different sources that contribute to my SearxNG results. Other search engines will probably keep including that website. The best way to stop Google's arrogant monopoly is to ensure that they become just another source among many, and that nobody cares of their search results more than they care about Brave, Ecosia or DDG. Remember that the only reason why Google has so much power over users and businesses is that too many people use it as their sole source of truth.
- behel 4y agoAnd I wondered why we suddenly moved to the first page on google for some queries for our app that we posted on Show HN some time ago that competes with kapwing in a small niche (SavvyCut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28950702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28950702). It seems that someone made some room for us. I guess if you rely on googles monopoly to run your business you should not be surprised if they can remove you at will. For us, a lot traffic originates from competing search engines that show us on their first page even without creating any SEO spam.