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YouTube-Dl Site Goes Offline as Hosting Provider Enforces Court-Ordered Ban
- demorilo 3y agoI heard they are trying to ban tor too, is it true?
- branon 3y agoIt's laughable how symbolic and ultimately meaningless this is. GitHub has already proven themselves to be a good actor in this particular fight, so not only is the repo online, but we also have http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ The Uberspace provider is appealing the decision as well. Even with the site down, this looks incredibly positive from where I sit. Rightsholders and litigators get stuffed, we always win!
- d0mine 3y agoMicrosoft is the freedom fighter? That it is indeed laughable.
- sgjohnson 3y agoMicrosoft has largely stopped giving a fuck about piracy of their consumer products. py-kms is freely available on GitHub, and so are Windows Activation Tools. While arguably py-kms doesn’t violate anything, as it’s a cleanroom implementation of the KMS server, Windows Activation Tools definitely does. Either way, MS could eradicate all of those repositories, they aren’t doing it.
- pengaru 3y ago> Either way, MS could eradicate all of those repositories, they aren’t doing it. yet
- autoexec 3y agoMS has done a good thing by defending youtube-dl but their lax enforcement concerning windows piracy is a bit different. MS turns a blind eye to windows piracy for the same reasons malware authors don't care if their software is spread on GitHub or P2P sites. Microsoft cares much more about getting their hands on all your personal data than they care about the money they'd get from an OEM license. People can download an ISO for Windows 11 for free from microsoft.com and simply never activate it.
- pessimizer 3y agoI don't think so. I think the real reason is that a pirated Windows install is not Mac or Linux, and will probably, eventually, become a legal Windows install. Imagine telling a bunch of possibly talented and/or ambitious poor people that they should use another (better) operating system. Instead, let them become Windows experts and ultimately make Microsoft more money.
- sitzkrieg 3y agoindeed, even if never a valid purchase, still a valuable datapoint for 99% of those "non tech savvy didnt block all the telemetry domains in their personal pihole, but managed to activated w massgrave" crowd
- skeaker 3y agoIt's also because MS makes way, way, way more money on business licenses than they do on individual consumer ones. They don't have much incentive to care about individuals not giving them a sale. Meanwhile, businesses are actively audited if they're suspected of violating license agreements.
- stu2b50 3y agoThe rise of SaaS has made piracy much less of a threat to revenue. Can’t pirate it if you need a server to do anything.
- TillE 3y agoIt is remarkable how easy they've made it to cleanly pirate Windows recently. You don't even need to run your own KMS thing, there are several public servers, and you just type in three terminal commands. Totally different from the Vista/7/8 era where activation required real cracking software. It's an explicit signal that they don't really care about consumer licensing.
- kzrdude 3y agoYoutube didn't care about piracy and copyright at all either. In their audience growth phase.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoMicrosoft did not face a court order, if they did they would surely immediately comply. They faced a seemingly fraudulent DMCA takedown notice, as takedowns are not designed to target circumvention tools. They did a good thing restoring youtube-dl, but I'd hardly say it puts them in "freedom fighter" territory, more so compared to Uberspace who are actively fighting for youtube-dl.
- em-bee 3y agoi'd rephrase that, rightsholders should not get stuffed, but these are not rightsholders because their rights are not being infringed by the mere existance of youtube-dl
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago[flagged]
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoI'll take that trade
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI would too. But i am saying if we are okay with gun manufacturers enabling death and murder, then by all means ytdl can and should stay up.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago> gun manufacturers enabling death and murder, then by all means ytdl can and should stay up. I assume you're referring to arms makers selling weapons that are obviously not for hunting game to the civilian market, rather than overall, because (such as it is) countries generally need defence-forces, and those forces do need arms.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoWell, of course I am referring to the obvious one. Humanity isn’t ready for the other one.
- b59831 3y ago[dead]
- tempodox 3y agoThe site is online, but the download link (https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl) is borked: Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.
- codetrotter 3y agoThey can resolve that by not using absolute URLs maybe
- Sinescape 3y agoShame it merely responds with HTTP 403 and not 451.
- tempodox 3y agoTrue, that would have been most appropriate.
- eastbound 3y agoI wish it weren’t seen as a battle against rightholders. It’s a big burden for freedom of expression. When there is a lie spread by actual journalists, it’s extremely important to be able to download the video, criticize it, show the moment the journalist lies, reupload it. Otherwise we become like DDR Germany where the people in power never get criticized or held accountable for what they say. The shareholder rights are collateral damage, not the main damage. We’re not mainly using youtube-dl to copy copyrighted material.
- zlg_codes 3y agoIt seems fitting that it was a German court who handed down the braindead ruling.
- white_dragon88 3y ago[dead]
- skyyler 3y agoAs noted in the article, the project still has a page on github: http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ I've moved on to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp anyways. But this is still an infuriating move. youtube-dl wasn't doing anything infringing on its site, was it?
- charcircuit 3y agoyt-dlp is not youtube-dl
- xeromal 3y agoThey said they moved on to yt-dlp
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoI would run any such binary in a container og some sort anyway
- throwbadubadu 3y ago[flagged]
- HumblyTossed 3y ago[flagged]
- somat 3y agoThe main difference in the fork is that yt-dlp uses the android interface and youtube-dl uses the web interface.
- boomboomsubban 3y agoHuh? Both have command line interfaces.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boomboomsubban 3y agoUberspace deserves a good amount of praise for this, I can't imagine what incentive they have for fighting this battle.
- westmeal 3y agoThe RIAA can get fucked
- LordShredda 3y agoThere's a song, fuck the RIAA. See if you can find it on the pirate bay
- hbn 3y agoWeird Al released a parody "charity song" in 2006 called Don't Download This Song that poked fun at them too. > Oh you don't want to mess with the RIAA > They'll sue you if you burn that CDR > It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven year old girl > They'll treat you like the evil, hard bitten criminal scum you are He also ironically hosted links on his website to download the song DRM-free!
- ozzmotik 3y agoI believe the song you are referring to is "Fuck the MPAA" by Futuristic Sex Robotz
- Espionage724 3y agoYep that'll encourage content creation :p Never mind RIAA became a thing because of content creators.
- pessimizer 3y agoContent brokers.
- kmeisthax 3y agoThe RIAA is not a thing because of music artists[0], they were created by music labels to represent their interests. The biggest mistake people make when talking about anything to do with copyright or the creative industry is to assume that, because publishers of creative works represent or hire authors, that we can just collapse authors and publishers down into a single entity and treat any copyright related argument purely as a struggle between artists getting paid and the public wanting free shit. Of course, publishers do not have interests aligned with those of authors and artists. This is, at minimum[1], a three-sided war between publishers, authors, and customers. Artists want to be paid but need to go through a publisher to sell[2], while customers want to watch/listen/read but need to buy through a publisher. Publishers have massive incentives to screw over artists by reducing or diluting their take in favor of whatever keeps the machine fed. While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work, they tend to disagree heavily on who should own those rights and how long they should last. Artists want to sell the thing they made, but publishers want assets: they want a brand that can neatly fit on a marketing schedule or an accounting statement. The former only requires short term copyright owned by individual artists while the latter requires infinity-minus-one-day terms, four companies that own the world's culture, and increasingly expansive interpretations of DMCA 1201 that invent DRM out of things never intended to be DRM. [0] Let's not call them "content creators" [1] We can subdivide these groups further still, of course, but three groups is enough to make my point. [2] As per [1] we are treating distributors and publishers as part of the same group of middlemen. For example, while Amazon Kindle self-publishing does not do some of the same marketing or promotion that a traditional book publisher might, they are still intermediaries between authors and readers.
- Tainnor 3y agoSomewhat relatedly: I've been using Uberspace for years now to host some personal stuff (e.g. my Nextcloud instance). It's really cheap (you can start for as low as 5€/month), and I don't know any other shared hoster that allows so much flexibility in what you run on your account. The docs are also superb. I can only recommend it.
- ta8645 3y agoThank you for mentioning this. Haven't heard of them before, but I really love the ethic they're advocating (and demonstrating in their pricing and payment options). https://uberspace.de/en/ https://uberspace.de/en/
- grousewood 3y agoAgreed. Will be doing a closer look later. “Cash payment through mail” is a gutsy offer.
- Tommstein 3y agoUberspace sounds pretty great, but I don't think I would host anything within the jurisdiction of this stupidass German court.
- account42 3y ago5€/month is cheap for low end shared hosting now? You can get a VPS at that price.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago> While Uberspace didn't host the open source software, it was held responsible for the website linking to the software hosted on developer platform GitHub. Is Google, Bing, and DDG next?
- charcircuit 3y ago>Is Google, Bing, and DDG next? You already can send a DMCA takedown for the links
- account42 3y agoDMCA takedown notices are for taking down content you own. The music industry doesn't own youtube-dl.
- croes 3y agoThey already target DNS resolvers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36878867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36878867
- nektro 3y agothis paves the way to make archiving illegal, is that what germany wants?
- blooalien 3y agoIt's what our corporate overlords and their pet politicians want, and they ain't gonna stop fighting until George Orwell spins in his grave, and prolly not even then.
- carrotcarrot 3y agoWe already had mass censorship of wrongthink on social media coerced by federal agencies. This is petty by comparison and Orwell has been spinning for years now.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoTo control the future, control the present; to control the present, control the past...
- em-bee 3y agoworse, it's about making download tools illegal, even if the download itself is legitimate.
- Pulcinella 3y agoIts basically the VCR recording uSA Supreme Court case all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
- mrguyorama 3y agoYeah but for some reason in the 90s American Judges decided to throw that whole "justice for everyone" thing out the window and now explicitly empower ONLY certain giant rightsholders to have any rights. I'm waiting for a judge to accept an argument that web browsers should be illegal because they allow you to look at infringing content.
- hiatus 3y ago> Speaking with TorrentFreak, Uberspace owner Jonas Pasche says that his hands are tied. Failure to comply with the order would either result in a massive fine, or worse, a prison sentence. Prison? Presumably for contempt?
- qingcharles 3y agoYeah, that's how they get you. Criminal contempt for failure to follow a court order.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lylejantzi3rd 3y agoIs apple in on this too? The apple security signing for running my local copy of yt-dlp started failing about an hour ago.
- echelon 3y agoThis is why Apple and Google need to hold less power.
- Espionage724 3y agoNo, people need to stop letting Apple and Google have so much power; such silly victim mentality! There's plenty of software and means to host your own video platforms.
- echelon 3y ago> There's plenty of software and means to host your own video platforms. There's plenty of ways people can start their own countries and currencies too.
- Espionage724 3y agoOk I'm curious; how can a person start their own country and currency? Video hosting is as easy as hosting Piwigo, GNU mediagoblin, Lychee, Zenphoto, or tossing something together in PHP. All that is free and open-source.
- jpc0 3y agoHosting the software isn't free, neither is storing the content to be served, neither is serving the said content. I think you vastly underestimate the amount if bandwidth video takes.
- Espionage724 3y agoYou can host videos on any bandwidth and hardware you can get your hands on; old laptops from landfills, SBC Raspberry Pis, $80 decommissioned Optiplex from businesses, and even Android phones and TV sticks if you set the servers up through Termux. You can also use the cheapest VPS option for like $5/month, but that kind of negates not using YT at that point. It's free in the sense of all the software being available to do so for free (OS, webserver, php, media software), and free as long as you have something to run it on; chances are anyone reading this can use the same device to run the server. Whether or not the people watching the videos from the server will have a good experience is something different :p But even a low-speed broadband connection in the US today has enough upload to handle small sites and I can vouch for this on measly 1MB/s upload (I've self-hosted videos over years with all the mentioned software). YouTube is a provider that has the resources to allow people to upload videos, and watch them for free. It's their platform, and they have usage rules.
- qingcharles 3y agoThis is why I'm setting up a reverse proxy on another host in front of my web site, in case I get some fake takedown request from a competitor that causes my host to delete my account. At least if I use a proxy I can spend a small amount of time setting up a new proxy. I used to have a competitor who would email PayPal every couple of weeks to tell them our web site had CP on it just so PayPal would instantly shut off our payment gateway while they investigated and then several days later cleared us and put us back online. It's too easy for people to make fake requests to take your business down.
- can16358p 3y agoSo PayPal's policy is "guilty until proven innocent". Nice, hope they go bankrupt.
- stu2b50 3y agoThat’s pretty much how all payment processors work. The issue for them is that letting fraudsters continue making payments will lead to big Ls for the payment processors, since they end up being on the hook for the money that card networks will clawback or liability from regulations and money laundering laws.
- vkou 3y agoYou're free to try running a payment processor with a mantra of "Innocent until proven guilty." You'll be a honeypot for every scammer, fraudster, and con artist ready to take advantage of that policy, your processing fees will be through the roof because of chargebacks, and the only people who will use your platform will be the aforementioned scammers, fraudsters, and conmen. I'm sorry for the GP poster's situation, but there's really no way to make everyone happy, here.
- waithuh 3y agoSee: crypto. Marvelous technology. Ruined in the public's eye because of the amount of scams in it. Those same scams were used as justification for strict KYC laws. Which did not do much to stop the fraudsters really, hurt legally operating investors' privacy instead.
- mellosouls 3y agoDiscussion on the RIAA attack from a couple of years ago mentioned in the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911 The github reversal at the time, including a link to evidence received in support: https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/ https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo...
- backtoyoujim 3y ago"it’s good enough to signal to average users that downloading content from YouTube is not permitted." that sure seems like doublespeak. i have to download the video to watch it.
- netsharc 3y agoIt's probably "download" (legal definition) and not "download" (technical definition), and Mr. Judge will only care about the legal definition.
- digging 3y agoYes it seems obvious to me that "download" here means "store outside the browser in a format that can be viewed in any player and copied indefinitely". of course my browser is downloading a video I watch but not in a form that is useful to me outside of viewing it on that site in that browser.
- 0x_rs 3y agoSince it's mentioned, I'd like to remind the continued existence of the so called "District Court" of Hamburg should be an embarrassment to the state of Germany. Their purpose seem to be simply coming up with the most inane judgments as proven repeatedly in the past.
- expertentipp 3y agoAmerican predators and their German tools. Repeatedly, every time reliable assholes.
- blackfawn 3y agoThe weird capitalization on this headline in HN had me thinking "youtube-di? is that another fork like yt-dlp?"
- 999900000999 3y agoSuch a complex topic. On one hand YouTube has tons of public domain content which should be free to download. On the other hand, YT DL had explicit test cases for downloading music videos with specific DRM. Don't poke the bear.
- widowlark 3y ago> Don't poke the bear We should kill the bear.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>On one hand YouTube has tons of public domain content which should be free to download. technically, yes. Because you can upload anything, and at this point everyone has uploaded everything. But on the other hand, you also can simply go to the respective websites to download such media if it is indeed public domain.
- superkuh 3y agoIt's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics can allow someone to think you can watch a video without downloading it. Lawyers live in a world very unlike reality.
- Espionage724 3y agoI can listen to music on the radio, but it's a whole different issue when I pick specific songs to pirate for my own personal listening :p But that's not where the caring comes in; it's the tools I can use to pirate songs; hence youtube-dl going down and not the users who used it. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a TOS clause about videos on YT not being your property and that you can't export them off the platform unless you own the rights to the specific video. People that watch videos on YT are using someone else's platform; don't like it, don't use the platform, and tell the content creator to upload somewhere else. Nobody is entitled to bypass intentional blocks by YT and use 3rd-party tools to download other people's videos. Personally I only used youtube-dl to pirate songs from HQ videos :p I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage.
- agloe_dreams 3y agoBut then again, in the US at least, it is perfectly legal to record TV and watch it any time you want. That was a good ruling. Thanks, Mr. Rogers.
- Espionage724 3y agoI wonder how specific that ruling is; nowadays you'd have to break HDCP if you want to record from most devices with something in-between, and it seems like that wouldn't be as-legal with bypassing copy-protection
- pessimizer 3y agoIn order to watch these videos, your computer downloads the videos. Your radio doesn't have to download a copy of the song to play it. > I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage. My usage is usually no less legitimate than youtube's usage. I'm usually downloading things that were uploaded without permission from the copyright holders from a platform that is distributing them without permission from the copyright holders.
- ldehaan 3y ago[dead]
- javajosh 3y agoHow are people supposed to produce videos that include other Youtube clips without a tool like this?
- tamimio 3y agoWait few months and you will have youtube “studio premium” feature so you can edit these videos there, mockery.
- Espionage724 3y ago[flagged]
- eastbound 3y agoAudiovisual material is the public forum of modern times. It’s important to be able to review and criticize a movie and reupload it on public forums. Imagine not being able to show the Nuremberg Trial to pupils in class, because it would be copyrighted. It would give free hands to war criminals. Imagine not being allowed to show negative footage of Biden because it’s copyrighted and the White House doesn’t grant the right to anyone.
- joemi 3y agoBut youtube isn't a public utility. The public can use it, sure, but they're supposed to abide by the TOS, because it's a privately owned company. Downloading things from Youtube isn't the solution. Turning Youtube into a public utility is what's needed, in this case. Or even simpler: people need to start using archive.org instead of youtube.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>Imagine not being able to show the Nuremberg Trial to pupils in class, because it would be copyrighted. the Nuremberg trials were an international affair, they made it public so no one country could do that. If it was a german or american exclusive trial it would have 100% been done off the record, and maybe be uncovered decades later like some declassified CIA document. >Imagine not being allowed to show negative footage of Biden because it’s copyrighted and the White House doesn’t grant the right to anyone. yes, that is the first amendment, the government cannot overstep a citizen's freedom of press. So that makes sense. Just like how military soldiers don't get the same rights as private citizens, private companies don't need to care about freedom of press.
- shermantanktop 3y agoI've used it to pull the audio off videos of live jazz performances, so I can run slow-down tools and play along to learn. I could do the same by recording the audio out of my laptop. That type of thing is not the majority use case for youtube-dl, but for any type of digital media there are plenty of individual, educational use cases that do not involve "pirate" activity (i.e. further distribution). Whether or not that's officially ok or not, I'd assert it is morally ok. As an aside, if YouTube is the only or canonical source for some material, getting it from the distribution channel (YT) and getting any access to the media in question are now one and the same problem. But let's not get confused about the value YouTube is providing - they are just a distributor, not a creative originator.
- tamimio 3y agoDownloading videos now from youtube is illegal!? What’s next, you can’t save this webpage too!?
- appleflaxen 3y ago> “[T]he average user must recognize that YouTube content, unlike media content on other websites, cannot be downloaded with a simple right-click and must be aware that this is achieved using technology on YouTube and that youtube-dl ‘overrides’ this protection. It is therefore to be assumed that the average user acts in bad faith,” the Hamburg Court wrote. I don't think this is a good ruling.
- username223 3y agoSo you can only legally watch Youtube videos when and where you have a fast and unlimited internet connection? That sucks... Let's say you only have a cellular data plan, but it has a data cap, or your cell coverage is slow. So when a friend sends you a link to a video, you go to a library or coffee shop to download it to watch later. Is that "acting in bad faith?" I guess it gets in the way of Youtube's "right" to shove ads at your face, but avoiding the ads was not the point. As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, they failed to outlaw VCRs back in the day, so hopefully this nonsense will also get slapped down.
- andai 3y agoThe YouTube app lets you download videos and watch them online, but only with YouTube Premium. Similarly, Google removed any unofficial YouTube apps from the Play Store that supported playing with the screen off, because they want you to pay for it. Tangential (but infuriating): there was a several year gap between them banning apps with background playback, and actually launching that feature (via Premium) in my country...
- pengaru 3y agoWhat I don't understand is why aren't these companies suing YouTube/Alphabet? They're the one's enabling the purported copyright violations. They're the ones profiting. They're the ones with the mountain of money attorneys are generally employed to take from. If anything these attorneys should be supporting youtube-dl/yt-dlp maintenance and using it in support of their claims. What could be more damming of YouTube's negligence than showing the court a silly headless web browser written in python optimized for video sites can leech copyrighted materials from youtube.com? YouTube/Alphabet will only get off their asses and _really_ prevent this activity the moment it costs more than the neglect generates in revenue. Maybe this is some 4D chess, but from where I'm sitting these attorneys look like clowns.
- notquitehuman 3y agoAlphabet has a larger legal budget, which makes them unattractive targets for baseless lawsuits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nomadspiritnet 3y agoThankfully still in the freebsd repos.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Corsome 3y agoI noticed recently that my distro's youtube-dl stopped working (it can't successfully download movies) but thanks to news like this one I found a fix in one of the comments here: > I've moved on to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp anyways Thanks!
- thatsright666 3y ago[flagged]
- KolmogorovComp 3y ago> A German court previously ruled that stream-ripping software bypasses YouTube’s ‘rolling cipher’ download protection. This is seen as a circumvention of technical protection measures, a violation of intellectual property law in Europe.` Does someone know what they mean by 'rolling cipher' here?
- tadfisher 3y agoThey are referring to the "s" query parameter which is a short ID referring to the next piece of video/audio stream. This is a good explanation: https://torrentfreak.com/deciphering-youtubes-rolling-cypher-in-your-browser-is-a-piece-of-cake-201030/ https://torrentfreak.com/deciphering-youtubes-rolling-cypher...
- wackget 3y ago>> “[T]he average user must recognize that YouTube content, unlike media content on other websites, cannot be downloaded with a simple right-click and must be aware that this is achieved using technology on YouTube and that youtube-dl ‘overrides’ this protection. It is therefore to be assumed that the average user acts in bad faith,” the Hamburg Court wrote. This argument seems ass-backwards. Why is it not YouTube which acts in bad faith by not providing the means for users to download videos in the first place?
- digging 3y agoBecause there is no such thing as selling a product in bad faith under capitalism. Except the acts explicitly named as illegal by existing laws. Those are obviously bad faith acts, which is why we made them illegal at the beginning of time. But if an act isn't illegal, and if you believe you'll profit from it, then it is by definition a good-faith act.
- huhtenberg 3y ago... and all this headache will just go away once Chrome's Web Integrity ships and hooks neatly into Protected Media Path and that totally optional TPM in Windows 11 that got stuffed down everyone's throat as a free update from an equally generously free Windows 10. The trap is almost closed, not long now.
- aldenmathewcomp 3y ago[dead]
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y agothe logic of exclusive ownership asserts itself on a cyber-space in which it is not necessary.
- slow_typist 3y agoHopefully some hacker news readers consider Uberspace as a hosting provider for their next side project. From what I see it is all laid out very well. No isolated VPS but ssh access and a ton of well written documentation. On the upside, they are responsible for keeping the base system updated. I’ve been a happy customer for a few months now, with limited requirements and experience, but I like it. Also the legal terms are super fair.