17 ms·

Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

694 points by luu 3y ago

jwilk 3y ago
The TorrentFreak article discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089545 (> 220 comments)
musicale 3y ago
Nearly 40 years after Betamax, they've basically succeeded at banning video recording. As noted elsewhere, section 1201 should not apply to non-infringing uses.
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/BzXVx https://archive.is/BzXVx
throw99ii 3y ago
streamable.com just removed a random video of mine for “community guidelines” I use the site to save random Twitter and Youtube videos. They aren’t publicly shared. Kind of disheartening to see a random video removed without knowing which one. And all for paying $108/year for a simple convenience. Definitely downloading all of them and canceling.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  I selfhost https://github.com/alexta69/metube https://github.com/alexta69/metube I have it sitting on a URL and I have an iOS share shortcut to throw any URL at it and it downloads the video. Copy-paste from my ansible setup if you're interested, shouldn't be that hard to convert to docker-compose. - name: Build metube options separately, avoids inline JSON in metube setup ansible.builtin.set_fact: metube_ytdl_options: postprocessors: - key: FFmpegEmbedSubtitle - key: SponsorBlock categories: - sponsor - key: ModifyChapters remove_sponsor_segments: - sponsor subtitleslangs: - en - "-live_chat" verbose: true writeautomaticsub: true writesubtitles: true - name: Create metube container community.general.docker_container: container_default_behavior: "no_defaults" name: metube image: alexta69/metube:latest restart_policy: always env: UID: "{{ plex_userid }}" GID: "{{ docker_users_groupid }}" DELETE_FILE_ON_TRASHCAN: "false" DOWNLOAD_DIRS_INDEXABLE: "true" DOWNLOAD_DIR: /downloads TEMP_DIR: /metube-tmp STATE_DIR: /config TZ: "{{ timezone }}" YTDL_OPTIONS: "{{ metube_ytdl_options | to_json }}" mounts: - type: bind source: /stacks/metube/config target: /config read_only: false - type: volume source: metube_tmp_location_volume target: /metube-tmp - type: volume source: plex_metube_volume target: /downloads labels: "traefik.enable": "true" "traefik.http.routers.metube.middlewares": "authelia@docker" "traefik.http.routers.metube.service": "metube" "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.rule": "Host(`metube.home.domain.com`) && (PathPrefix(`/favicon`) || PathPrefix(`/add`))" "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.service": "metube" "traefik.http.services.metube.loadbalancer.server.port": "8081" ports: [] dns_servers: - "{{ docker_network_ipv4_bridge_dns }}" # adguard networks: - name: bridge_ipv4
  - ec109685 3y ago
    With YouTube premium being so convenient, it seems like the need to rip YouTube videos would have gone down. This does look pretty slick though.
    - porkbeer 3y ago
      How does that protect agains videos being taken down?
Tao3300 3y ago
Flashbacks to me waiting for 2Pac - Changes to come on so I could hit the record button on the tape deck.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  Plot twist, it was "The way it is" by Bruce Hornsby.
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    That would have been funny, but we already had that one around somewhere.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Considering that many countries take a copying fee -- which is intended to cover lost revenue from exactly this use case -- for cassettes, harddrives and other storage media, yes yes it should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
- hiccuphippo 3y ago
  I'll gladly pay a % of what I pay to download yt-dl
  - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
    brew install yt-dlp alias vget=yt-dlp alias aget='vget --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 4' # https://opencollective.com/homebrew # https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Collaborators.md#collaborators
    - jamilton 3y ago
      They're just making a joke that they don't pay for yt-dlp, so of course they'd be willing to pay a tax of some percent of 0.
      - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
        thank you
        lib-dev 3y ago
        Thank you for the script. Very helpful.
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      > --audio-format mp3 Of course, up to you, but most youtube videos are actually an AAC (m4a) codec and thus by asking for mp3 you're going to get a transcoding ffmpeg subprocess in between the bytes and the file in your directory. I would be stunned if whatever your ultimate consuming player is doesn't support aac/m4a/mp4 playback $ yt-dlp -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k... 139 m4a audio only 2 | 1.47MiB 49k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 49k 22k low, IOS, m4a_dash 140 m4a audio only 2 | 3.90MiB 129k https | audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, IOS, m4a_dash 249 webm audio only 2 | 1.54MiB 51k https | audio only opus 51k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 | 2.02MiB 67k https | audio only opus 67k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 | 3.95MiB 131k https | audio only opus 131k 48k medium, ANDR, webm_dash 599 m4a audio only 2 | 950.46KiB 31k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 31k 22k ultralow, ANDR, m4a_dash 600 webm audio only 2 | 1.06MiB 35k https | audio only opus 35k 48k ultralow, ANDR, webm_dash
Cypher 3y ago
I do it, come arrest me. I'd download a petrol car too if I could - Come at me tomato soup throwers!
- asddubs 3y ago
  i would download an electric car probably unless the tracker only had petrol ones
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago
  but would you seed?
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    Seed or ban.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kmeisthax 3y ago
The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market. To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions[0]. That ban would work regardless of fair use. This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law, BTW - your access to copying tools should not evaporate because of a lack of ability to enforce copyright on you. [0] How this ban is actually implemented is immaterial, but perhaps radios can't have detachable speakers or audio out ports to hook a tape deck into, or tape decks have to only have an integral speaker and no audio in ports. This wouldn't stop home recording of radio but it'd be significantly worse.
- rusk 3y ago
  This is a DMCA concept that is presumably recongised by various international treaties … but is it widely implemented and enforced?
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0]. Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you live in North Korea or Russia, DMCA 1201 applies to you. Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them. At worst, a few countries would demand some horse trades[1]. Practically speaking, however, democracies are bad at protecting against small harms exacted against large numbers of people[2], so this never happens. Europe has the Pirate Party but the most successful national iterations of it have had to adopt broader Green[3] and technolibertarian agendas in order to have any semblance of electoral viability. In the US, first-past-the-post is an insurmountable hurdle despite the fragility and incompetence of our two major parties. Here, political issues don't so much form new parties as much as they infect the shambling corpses of existing ones. Barring that, if only one country decided to repeal their anti-circumvention laws I imagine there'd be a lot of grumbling from the US or Japan, potentially new tariffs, but no outright sanctions. The weird part about world trade is that a lot of these provisions are only enforceable on very poor countries. China blatantly violates WIPO all the time and we, practically speaking, cannot quit them. There is no international leviathan capable of, say, rolling tanks on Beijing and demanding market access and copyright enforcement. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering [1] Term of art for "unrelated and usually minuscule things used to bargain for a larger purpose" [2] e.g. how Intuit got the US government to not provide tax preparation services or software to the public for a decade and a half so they could sell their own offering. It's a thing that annoys people but not enough to get voters to flip sides. [3] including German "Green", i.e. "nuclear is bad, so we shut down all our nuke plants and started burning lignite[4] instead" [4] What's lignite? Lignite balls.
deltree7 3y ago
The hypocrisy of download defenders is exposed when re-distribution is the concern. Most content producers and publishers are fine with downloading as long as you don't re-distribute (which is theft), but we have no way of preventing that, so they are forced to close the download gate
- kstrauser 3y ago
  That’s historically wrong. The story of DRM is littered with claims that reasonable things like format shifting are immoral and theft. Also, unauthorized distribution is unauthorized distribution, not theft. Theft has a special legal meaning, and that isn’t it.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  You neglected to state what the "hypocrisy" is here. Cite the passage that promotes downloading and redistributing.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > so they are forced to close the download gate They don't get to do that. Also what's the hypocrisy?
- stcg 3y ago
  That is not theft. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts [footnote]. To "steal" means to physically take someone's property without their consent. Instead, you seem to mean a violation of copyright. Copyright exists "to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." "The main purpose of the Copyright Act is the public good of use and access to works of art, even if such a public good comes at the expense of the author of the work." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._v._Aiken#Implications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._...). And then my opinion: In this age, copyright fails at that. It even has the opposite effect of resulting in less use and less access to works of art. I think it would benefit the public if copyright were abolished (or at least shortened to 20 years, similar to the amount of years that a person gets from a patent to exclusively produce and sell their invention before anyone may do that). I do think however that it should be a duty to mention the source or original author when sharing a work. [footnote]: but you can neglect to mention the source, or uncover and share information someone wants to keep private
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
For anyone with self-respect, it is. Come get me, media-conglomerate scumbags. Remember how they whined against DAT and basically had it killed (abetted by Congress), claiming that "perfect digital copies" would destroy their business? Meanwhile, everybody on the planet knew that essentially all "piracy" took place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. And sure enough, even when "piracy" went digital, it was in the form of lossy MP3s... far from perfect. So their story was a lie from top to bottom... but we've seen our "representatives" abet ever-greater crimes against consumers at their behest. The absurd tax on blank media, and the DMCA (and even more-egregious proposals since) stand as disgraceful examples. Do you remember when Circuit City or Best Buy offered "every CD $10.99 or less?" The idea was to bring people into their stores, where they'd buy other stuff. But all of a sudden that deal disappeared. It turns out that the record companies threatened those retailers with financial sanctions (by withholding cooperative advertising funds) if they continued to offer those prices. The record companies were sued for this behavior, which prosecutors said ripped off consumers for $400 million. Gee, this is the same figure that the record companies whined that Napster cost them. Karma is a bitch. I still have the stub of my $13 settlement check from these assholes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Buttons840 3y ago
I want a machine learning enhanced analog loop. I want to be able to point a device at a screen and have the machine learning clean everything up and restore high quality sound and video. Training data would be easy. Take a bunch of videos, play them on a screen, record the screen. You now have the input and the output, x and y. It's just supervised learning from there. I know there are better options currently, but in the end we have this, unless they take away general purpose computing (but that would a huge blow to our economy).
- amelius 3y ago
  This only works as long as the silicon used for deep learning cooperates.
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    They can just tattoo all celebrities with EURion constellations on their faces. Don't worry, it's only a short-term measure until the replacement models are fully trained.
    - tdullien 3y ago
      I support this.
eye-robot 3y ago
"should be"....
gamblor956 3y ago
This is actually correct, since recording a song from the radio by itself generally doesn't fall under fair use. The purpose of the copy is what makes it fair use, for example, as a sample played in a classroom, or for reference for readers/viewers as part of a critical work.
fortran77 3y ago
I didn't think recording a song from the radio was "fair use" either.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Learn the new "meta". Just collect the songs and then run your own commentary on top of them. Thus instantly turning them something legal. Even if you just post them to place no one listen to.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  It doesn't fall under fair use. It's otherwise protected, though, most likely by the Audio Home Recording Act: https://www.songtrust.com/music-publishing-glossary/glossary-audio-home-recording-act-of-1992#:~:text=An%20act%20passed%20by%20Congress,use%20without%20committing%20copyright%20infringement https://www.songtrust.com/music-publishing-glossary/glossary....
doublepg23 3y ago
It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.
- userbinator 3y ago
  Corporate greed knows no bounds. If they could erase your brain of "their" IP, they advocates would.
- jrm4 3y ago
  I love the precision with which you've said this - but I also I really need to feel like we need a better "general public" way to say it? I haven't figured this out yet.
  - ssklash 3y ago
    I've always thought that reality has made their business model obsolete and untenable, so instead of adapting, they lobby and get laws written to protect it. Essentially "rejecting reality, and substituting their own".
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Creating the content is much harder than delivering it. The rent seeking is to encourage creation.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public. The issue is with how far this rent seeking goes, and where the balance between social good and private good falls. I'm very firmly in the camp that most IP law has, in the modern day, gone too far. But I do think that conceptually it is beneficial to have and maintain some level of rent seeking.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Mastodon without Javascript enabled: https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/embed https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/embe...
- 38 3y ago
  ... also without comments. I appreciate the idea, but without the discussion its basically Twitter since they also hide replies with anonymous requests.
  - BentonE 3y ago
    In principle, if you want the post and comments without JS you can just pull the underlying ActivityPub document (application/activity+json). I made a command-line browser based on this idea: https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor
    - userbinator 3y ago
      That's unfortunate. Sites used to not need JS to show static content.
      - BentonE 3y ago
        Yep, the web used to be for distributing documents, but now it is becoming/has become more of an application VM [1]. But ActivityPub is a nice format for the document distribution use-case; it is a superset (in terms of features) of semantic HTML [2] and RSS and has higher level semantics (comment sections, profiles, etc) and no server-provided scripting nor styling. [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... [2]: any plain HTML page can be represented as an ActivityPub Article
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago
Ekaros 3y ago
My understanding is that people purely downloading are very rarely if never prosecuted or even part of civil suite. So it is not very big issue and likely is "fair use". Entirely different question is does offering a tool for this process constitute as fair use as well. Specially if there is DRM involved. Or does tool need to work in specific way to qualify? For example you could record video on your own machine while watching it, but could not directly download a copy?
userbinator 3y ago
There's technically no difference between downloading and streaming, and in fact nearly all of the videos I "download" from YouTube don't get retained after I watch them --- I'm just doing so in order to be able to use alternative software that respects my freedom. Since we're talking about video, I think a better analogy would be using a VCR to record broadcasting, and there was certainly a legal battle over that too.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  A VCR is not circumventing anything. It’s more like the DeCSS code required to watch a DVD in VLC. The solution is to host the software in a country that doesn’t have laws against distributing circumvention code, this is how VLC does it. If you host on GitHub then you’re at the mercy of US law.
slowhadoken 3y ago
Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?
- StanislavPetrov 3y ago
  > Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis? You mean, "hasn't yet been enforced on a person by person basis". If history has proven anything, it is that the government and their corporate masters will do everything they can to expand their powers by passing new laws and enacting new regulations so that they can extract every dollar they can.
  - slowhadoken 3y ago
    If history has proven anything it's that any lock that can be made can be broken.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      The purpose of all these schemes is not to make copyright 100% enforceable, but to make it costly and/or risky enough that the majority simply won't bother.
hrdwdmrbl 3y ago
Singing in the style of another singing should be as legal as training an AI to do it.
mkl95 3y ago
A ton of history and literature has been basically wiped out over the centuries. That fact alone should make downloading media and storing it privately a natural right, just like monks copied writings in the middle ages to preserve them. Distribution is an entirely different topic.
hackernewds 3y ago
Downloading video = Downloading a song Recording a video = Recording a song Either case distribution should be protected.
ShamelessC 3y ago
You wouldn’t download a car
IceHegel 3y ago
Agree, sharing is what should be restricted.
quickthrower2 3y ago
That is it, I am going to record youtube videos onto VHS.
jedberg 3y ago
It's important to keep a few things in mind: - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore) - Your copy was a lot worse quality than what you could otherwise buy - You could at best distribute it to a few hundred or maybe even 1000 people if you were really well connected. With videos on YouTube you can: - Get an unaltered copy - In exactly the same quality as the original - Which you can easily redistribute to millions It's not exactly an equal comparison. An equal comparison would be copying on VHS from analog broadcast TV. Which was also legal.
- bensecure 3y ago
  > - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore) If such adulteration was sufficient to prevent my listening to the recording, than I wouldn't listen to the radio in the first place. Radio is at least no better than my recording if it always contains such effects. > With videos on YouTube you can: > - Which you can easily redistribute to millions Which platform might I use to perform this redistribution? And how am I to compete with the copy retrievable from the bands own youtube page?
- cornfutes 3y ago
  The similar comparison would be doing a screen recording of the video versus downloading the byte stream.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  To save bandwidth, Youtube does lossy compression that drastically reduces the video quality (especially for SD videos) compared to the original file.
bitwize 3y ago
Recording a song from the radio is not fair use. In Sony v. Universal, the usage of the VCR was justified based on a very narrow, very uncommon use case: if there were a TV show that aired exactly once, and for some reason you wanted to see it but couldn't, and it would never air again, you had the legal right to record one copy for later viewing. (I'm not sure if you had to destroy the copy after viewing it.) On that basis, and that basis alone, was the VCR ruled to have a legal use case. Otherwise it was pretty much a copyright violation device. Justice Blackmun, in his dissent, was clear that even making a single copy for personal use violates copyright law. Fair use covers making excerpts of a work, not copying a full work, for purposes of reporting, criticism, parody, and the like. If you record or download a full song or video without permission, YOU ARE INFRINGING ON COPYRIGHT.
pers0n 3y ago
Whats to stop me from playing a video full screen while I have a screen recorder? There are plenty of sites out there that can already convert youtube to mp3s
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  At least with some services/apps, screen recording only captures a black box around the video you want.
elif 3y ago
Copyright is just one of the impractically odious pillars of capitalism buckling under the stresses of late capitalism. Trying to "make it work" is a temporary measure at best, but I think more relaxing of the restrictions at least behind the advancement of technology by at least a couple of decades will be the only chance it has to remain relevant. The laws that stopped people from running bootleg vinyl presses are laughable when applied to copying a file from one of my computers to another. The current experiment of seeing how many $10-$20 corporations consumers are willing to pay monthly ends either with monopoly/oligopoly of art or a new golden age of piracy.
pickingdinner 3y ago
Before even download, can we at least acknowledge that Youtube is the greatest copyright infringement platform on the planet? Whatever the "excuse" of the uploaders and the host of those uploads (youtube), the sheer number of copyright protected material uploaded in clear sight should be the main concern of any copyright enforcer, not those who download.
a-dub 3y ago
"downloading a video" probably sounds almost as weird to a gen-z as "recording a song from the radio" sounds to a millennial. pretty wild when you think about it.
- mike31fr 3y ago
  You're shooting yourself in the foot with this example. Millenials did record songs from the radio to audio tapes. I did it (I was born in 1985), my little sister did (she was born in 1990), etc.
- djhn 3y ago
  But then again TikTok has a 'save video' feature (yet another small example of how it's a better product than YouTube, whether you're a power user or not) which exports videos into you filesystem.
classified 3y ago
It's the law, logic doesn't enter.
_trampeltier 3y ago
Of course it should be. Special this was a german court and we pay for private copys on every medium (tape, cd, hdd) Private copying levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
EchoReflection 3y ago
I make no claims as to the presence of malware (or lack thereof) in the links in this comment, and I'm not condoning or endorsing anything, nor am I stating an opinion on the ethics of downloading YouTube videos for any purpose, but for the sake of adding information to the table, there are still options available: https://newpipe.en.softonic.com/android/download?utm_source=SEM&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=EN_US_DSA_Desktop_General&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1N-zp7PbgAMVPBqtBh3pDQceEAAYASAAEgJ5wPD_BwE https://newpipe.en.softonic.com/android/download?utm_source=... and, https://yt3-music-downloader.en.softonic.com/android https://yt3-music-downloader.en.softonic.com/android https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ and: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-download/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-... And I'm sure many others. I guess as long as the situation is such that it is not stupidly easy to figure out how to get around the restrictions that "prevent" downloading YT videos, workarounds and options will continue to be available. Information is very hard to lock away if it is on the internet and available to the public to some degree. I imagine he situation is considerably different in more totalitarian countries like China and North Korea, where content and online activity is scrutinized/monitored by the government more "thoroughly". It seems hard to find a line in the sense that recording technology is becoming more and more common, as is the trend of social media companies wanting the masses to "share" their experiences on social media. Hypothetically, if I record a concert with Snapchat spectacles and then upload the snap to YouTube, am I committing some kind of copyright infringement or am I simply sharing an experience with my "followers"? I have actually had videos of concerts that I recorded on my phone taken down from YouTube, even though it wasn't like I recorded with a professional camera or even that the recording sounded particularly good, but I guess some content management stoolies on YouTube (and I imagine Vimeo and maybe LBRY/Odysee/elsewhere) are paid to try to take down content that appears to be bypassing the creators' ability to collect money for their material.
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
Well "it should be" implies we have no leverage to implement this and we're merely daydreaming about alternate universes. Catching someone in an inconsistency is not a path to winning anything in business and politics. They don't care if they're consistent.
villgax 3y ago
If it's not behind a paywall then no point whining about it
dontupvoteme 3y ago
The youtube-dl ruling was at the Hamburg level, does anyone know if they can appeal to the federal courts in Germany? Apparently Hamburg is nightmare tier for this sort of thing.
JacobSeated 3y ago
Depends on how said material was purchased. E.g. Most YouTube videos would not be okay to simply download, since you did not technically pay money to obtain a copy. However, things you buy on YouTube movies really should be downloadable.
PontifexMinimus 3y ago
This reminds me of about 10-12 years ago when a Republican staffer suggested that party's platform should include legalising file sharing, on the grounds that the RIAA and MPAA align Democrat so there's no point in the Republicans kowtowing to them. At the time it was immediately shot down, but if someone made the same proposal now I suspect it might not be. It would certainly liven US elections up.
tinus_hn 3y ago
Artists should create music for me to enjoy for free! It’s only fair use!
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
I don't normally read articles here, but for some reason this time I did. I'm very disappointed that the fine article amounts to nothing more than a fatalistic tweet. Edit: Fixed the typo in the word "normally".
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Coming from the UK, I was surprised to hear that recording a song from the radio is allowed under 'fair use'. Especially given that I grew up during the time when that was actually relevant, it was drilled into us remorselessly that recording stuff onto tape was basically illegal, even if it was impractical to enforce. It looks as if the law was amended in 2014 to allow for 'private copies', but I think that still excludes copying from the radio, etc.
betimsl 3y ago
Like everybody, I'm also a fan of free (anything). But you did not ask for the waves that pass through you (so you have the right to record it); but, you have to request a file from a server, not the same thing.
aethertron 3y ago
There is no such thing as streaming without downloading. With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls). DRM bad.
tdullien 3y ago
Oh wow, my toot on HN, rated higher than any of the cool things I have done :-)

694 points by luu 3y ago

The TorrentFreak article discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089545 (> 220 comments)

musicale 3y ago

Nearly 40 years after Betamax, they've basically succeeded at banning video recording. As noted elsewhere, section 1201 should not apply to non-infringing uses.

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/BzXVx https://archive.is/BzXVx

throw99ii 3y ago

streamable.com just removed a random video of mine for “community guidelines” I use the site to save random Twitter and Youtube videos. They aren’t publicly shared. Kind of disheartening to see a random video removed without knowing which one. And all for paying $108/year for a simple convenience. Definitely downloading all of them and canceling.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I selfhost https://github.com/alexta69/metube https://github.com/alexta69/metube I have it sitting on a URL and I have an iOS share shortcut to throw any URL at it and it downloads the video. Copy-paste from my ansible setup if you're interested, shouldn't be that hard to convert to docker-compose. - name: Build metube options separately, avoids inline JSON in metube setup ansible.builtin.set_fact: metube_ytdl_options: postprocessors: - key: FFmpegEmbedSubtitle - key: SponsorBlock categories: - sponsor - key: ModifyChapters remove_sponsor_segments: - sponsor subtitleslangs: - en - "-live_chat" verbose: true writeautomaticsub: true writesubtitles: true - name: Create metube container community.general.docker_container: container_default_behavior: "no_defaults" name: metube image: alexta69/metube:latest restart_policy: always env: UID: "{{ plex_userid }}" GID: "{{ docker_users_groupid }}" DELETE_FILE_ON_TRASHCAN: "false" DOWNLOAD_DIRS_INDEXABLE: "true" DOWNLOAD_DIR: /downloads TEMP_DIR: /metube-tmp STATE_DIR: /config TZ: "{{ timezone }}" YTDL_OPTIONS: "{{ metube_ytdl_options | to_json }}" mounts: - type: bind source: /stacks/metube/config target: /config read_only: false - type: volume source: metube_tmp_location_volume target: /metube-tmp - type: volume source: plex_metube_volume target: /downloads labels: "traefik.enable": "true" "traefik.http.routers.metube.middlewares": "authelia@docker" "traefik.http.routers.metube.service": "metube" "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.rule": "Host(`metube.home.domain.com`) && (PathPrefix(`/favicon`) || PathPrefix(`/add`))" "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.service": "metube" "traefik.http.services.metube.loadbalancer.server.port": "8081" ports: [] dns_servers: - "{{ docker_network_ipv4_bridge_dns }}" # adguard networks: - name: bridge_ipv4
- ec109685 3y ago
  With YouTube premium being so convenient, it seems like the need to rip YouTube videos would have gone down. This does look pretty slick though.
  - porkbeer 3y ago
    How does that protect agains videos being taken down?

Tao3300 3y ago

Flashbacks to me waiting for 2Pac - Changes to come on so I could hit the record button on the tape deck.

rzzzt 3y ago
Plot twist, it was "The way it is" by Bruce Hornsby.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  That would have been funny, but we already had that one around somewhere.

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Considering that many countries take a copying fee -- which is intended to cover lost revenue from exactly this use case -- for cassettes, harddrives and other storage media, yes yes it should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

hiccuphippo 3y ago
I'll gladly pay a % of what I pay to download yt-dl
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago
  brew install yt-dlp alias vget=yt-dlp alias aget='vget --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 4' # https://opencollective.com/homebrew # https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Collaborators.md#collaborators
  - jamilton 3y ago
    They're just making a joke that they don't pay for yt-dlp, so of course they'd be willing to pay a tax of some percent of 0.
    - GhostWhisperer 3y ago
      thank you
      - lib-dev 3y ago
        Thank you for the script. Very helpful.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    > --audio-format mp3 Of course, up to you, but most youtube videos are actually an AAC (m4a) codec and thus by asking for mp3 you're going to get a transcoding ffmpeg subprocess in between the bytes and the file in your directory. I would be stunned if whatever your ultimate consuming player is doesn't support aac/m4a/mp4 playback $ yt-dlp -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k... 139 m4a audio only 2 | 1.47MiB 49k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 49k 22k low, IOS, m4a_dash 140 m4a audio only 2 | 3.90MiB 129k https | audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, IOS, m4a_dash 249 webm audio only 2 | 1.54MiB 51k https | audio only opus 51k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash 250 webm audio only 2 | 2.02MiB 67k https | audio only opus 67k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash 251 webm audio only 2 | 3.95MiB 131k https | audio only opus 131k 48k medium, ANDR, webm_dash 599 m4a audio only 2 | 950.46KiB 31k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 31k 22k ultralow, ANDR, m4a_dash 600 webm audio only 2 | 1.06MiB 35k https | audio only opus 35k 48k ultralow, ANDR, webm_dash

Cypher 3y ago

I do it, come arrest me. I'd download a petrol car too if I could - Come at me tomato soup throwers!

asddubs 3y ago
i would download an electric car probably unless the tracker only had petrol ones
GhostWhisperer 3y ago
but would you seed?
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Seed or ban.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kmeisthax 3y ago

The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market. To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions[0]. That ban would work regardless of fair use. This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law, BTW - your access to copying tools should not evaporate because of a lack of ability to enforce copyright on you. [0] How this ban is actually implemented is immaterial, but perhaps radios can't have detachable speakers or audio out ports to hook a tape deck into, or tape decks have to only have an integral speaker and no audio in ports. This wouldn't stop home recording of radio but it'd be significantly worse.

rusk 3y ago
This is a DMCA concept that is presumably recongised by various international treaties … but is it widely implemented and enforced?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0]. Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you live in North Korea or Russia, DMCA 1201 applies to you. Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them. At worst, a few countries would demand some horse trades[1]. Practically speaking, however, democracies are bad at protecting against small harms exacted against large numbers of people[2], so this never happens. Europe has the Pirate Party but the most successful national iterations of it have had to adopt broader Green[3] and technolibertarian agendas in order to have any semblance of electoral viability. In the US, first-past-the-post is an insurmountable hurdle despite the fragility and incompetence of our two major parties. Here, political issues don't so much form new parties as much as they infect the shambling corpses of existing ones. Barring that, if only one country decided to repeal their anti-circumvention laws I imagine there'd be a lot of grumbling from the US or Japan, potentially new tariffs, but no outright sanctions. The weird part about world trade is that a lot of these provisions are only enforceable on very poor countries. China blatantly violates WIPO all the time and we, practically speaking, cannot quit them. There is no international leviathan capable of, say, rolling tanks on Beijing and demanding market access and copyright enforcement. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering [1] Term of art for "unrelated and usually minuscule things used to bargain for a larger purpose" [2] e.g. how Intuit got the US government to not provide tax preparation services or software to the public for a decade and a half so they could sell their own offering. It's a thing that annoys people but not enough to get voters to flip sides. [3] including German "Green", i.e. "nuclear is bad, so we shut down all our nuke plants and started burning lignite[4] instead" [4] What's lignite? Lignite balls.

deltree7 3y ago

The hypocrisy of download defenders is exposed when re-distribution is the concern. Most content producers and publishers are fine with downloading as long as you don't re-distribute (which is theft), but we have no way of preventing that, so they are forced to close the download gate

kstrauser 3y ago
That’s historically wrong. The story of DRM is littered with claims that reasonable things like format shifting are immoral and theft. Also, unauthorized distribution is unauthorized distribution, not theft. Theft has a special legal meaning, and that isn’t it.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
You neglected to state what the "hypocrisy" is here. Cite the passage that promotes downloading and redistributing.
Dylan16807 3y ago
> so they are forced to close the download gate They don't get to do that. Also what's the hypocrisy?
stcg 3y ago
That is not theft. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts [footnote]. To "steal" means to physically take someone's property without their consent. Instead, you seem to mean a violation of copyright. Copyright exists "to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." "The main purpose of the Copyright Act is the public good of use and access to works of art, even if such a public good comes at the expense of the author of the work." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._v._Aiken#Implications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._...). And then my opinion: In this age, copyright fails at that. It even has the opposite effect of resulting in less use and less access to works of art. I think it would benefit the public if copyright were abolished (or at least shortened to 20 years, similar to the amount of years that a person gets from a patent to exclusively produce and sell their invention before anyone may do that). I do think however that it should be a duty to mention the source or original author when sharing a work. [footnote]: but you can neglect to mention the source, or uncover and share information someone wants to keep private

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

For anyone with self-respect, it is. Come get me, media-conglomerate scumbags. Remember how they whined against DAT and basically had it killed (abetted by Congress), claiming that "perfect digital copies" would destroy their business? Meanwhile, everybody on the planet knew that essentially all "piracy" took place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms. And sure enough, even when "piracy" went digital, it was in the form of lossy MP3s... far from perfect. So their story was a lie from top to bottom... but we've seen our "representatives" abet ever-greater crimes against consumers at their behest. The absurd tax on blank media, and the DMCA (and even more-egregious proposals since) stand as disgraceful examples. Do you remember when Circuit City or Best Buy offered "every CD $10.99 or less?" The idea was to bring people into their stores, where they'd buy other stuff. But all of a sudden that deal disappeared. It turns out that the record companies threatened those retailers with financial sanctions (by withholding cooperative advertising funds) if they continued to offer those prices. The record companies were sued for this behavior, which prosecutors said ripped off consumers for $400 million. Gee, this is the same figure that the record companies whined that Napster cost them. Karma is a bitch. I still have the stub of my $13 settlement check from these assholes.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Buttons840 3y ago

I want a machine learning enhanced analog loop. I want to be able to point a device at a screen and have the machine learning clean everything up and restore high quality sound and video. Training data would be easy. Take a bunch of videos, play them on a screen, record the screen. You now have the input and the output, x and y. It's just supervised learning from there. I know there are better options currently, but in the end we have this, unless they take away general purpose computing (but that would a huge blow to our economy).

amelius 3y ago
This only works as long as the silicon used for deep learning cooperates.
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  They can just tattoo all celebrities with EURion constellations on their faces. Don't worry, it's only a short-term measure until the replacement models are fully trained.
  - tdullien 3y ago
    I support this.

eye-robot 3y ago

"should be"....

gamblor956 3y ago

This is actually correct, since recording a song from the radio by itself generally doesn't fall under fair use. The purpose of the copy is what makes it fair use, for example, as a sample played in a classroom, or for reference for readers/viewers as part of a critical work.

fortran77 3y ago

I didn't think recording a song from the radio was "fair use" either.

Ekaros 3y ago
Learn the new "meta". Just collect the songs and then run your own commentary on top of them. Thus instantly turning them something legal. Even if you just post them to place no one listen to.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
It doesn't fall under fair use. It's otherwise protected, though, most likely by the Audio Home Recording Act: https://www.songtrust.com/music-publishing-glossary/glossary-audio-home-recording-act-of-1992#:~:text=An%20act%20passed%20by%20Congress,use%20without%20committing%20copyright%20infringement https://www.songtrust.com/music-publishing-glossary/glossary....

doublepg23 3y ago

It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.

userbinator 3y ago
Corporate greed knows no bounds. If they could erase your brain of "their" IP, they advocates would.
jrm4 3y ago
I love the precision with which you've said this - but I also I really need to feel like we need a better "general public" way to say it? I haven't figured this out yet.
- ssklash 3y ago
  I've always thought that reality has made their business model obsolete and untenable, so instead of adapting, they lobby and get laws written to protect it. Essentially "rejecting reality, and substituting their own".
charcircuit 3y ago
Creating the content is much harder than delivering it. The rent seeking is to encourage creation.
MostlyStable 3y ago
Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public. The issue is with how far this rent seeking goes, and where the balance between social good and private good falls. I'm very firmly in the camp that most IP law has, in the modern day, gone too far. But I do think that conceptually it is beneficial to have and maintain some level of rent seeking.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Mastodon without Javascript enabled: https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/embed https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/embe...

38 3y ago
... also without comments. I appreciate the idea, but without the discussion its basically Twitter since they also hide replies with anonymous requests.
- BentonE 3y ago
  In principle, if you want the post and comments without JS you can just pull the underlying ActivityPub document (application/activity+json). I made a command-line browser based on this idea: https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor
  - userbinator 3y ago
    That's unfortunate. Sites used to not need JS to show static content.
    - BentonE 3y ago
      Yep, the web used to be for distributing documents, but now it is becoming/has become more of an application VM [1]. But ActivityPub is a nice format for the document distribution use-case; it is a superset (in terms of features) of semantic HTML [2] and RSS and has higher level semantics (comment sections, profiles, etc) and no server-provided scripting nor styling. [1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... [2]: any plain HTML page can be represented as an ActivityPub Article
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
3y ago

Ekaros 3y ago

My understanding is that people purely downloading are very rarely if never prosecuted or even part of civil suite. So it is not very big issue and likely is "fair use". Entirely different question is does offering a tool for this process constitute as fair use as well. Specially if there is DRM involved. Or does tool need to work in specific way to qualify? For example you could record video on your own machine while watching it, but could not directly download a copy?

userbinator 3y ago

There's technically no difference between downloading and streaming, and in fact nearly all of the videos I "download" from YouTube don't get retained after I watch them --- I'm just doing so in order to be able to use alternative software that respects my freedom. Since we're talking about video, I think a better analogy would be using a VCR to record broadcasting, and there was certainly a legal battle over that too.

zarzavat 3y ago
A VCR is not circumventing anything. It’s more like the DeCSS code required to watch a DVD in VLC. The solution is to host the software in a country that doesn’t have laws against distributing circumvention code, this is how VLC does it. If you host on GitHub then you’re at the mercy of US law.

slowhadoken 3y ago

Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?

StanislavPetrov 3y ago
> Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis? You mean, "hasn't yet been enforced on a person by person basis". If history has proven anything, it is that the government and their corporate masters will do everything they can to expand their powers by passing new laws and enacting new regulations so that they can extract every dollar they can.
- slowhadoken 3y ago
  If history has proven anything it's that any lock that can be made can be broken.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    The purpose of all these schemes is not to make copyright 100% enforceable, but to make it costly and/or risky enough that the majority simply won't bother.

hrdwdmrbl 3y ago

Singing in the style of another singing should be as legal as training an AI to do it.

mkl95 3y ago

A ton of history and literature has been basically wiped out over the centuries. That fact alone should make downloading media and storing it privately a natural right, just like monks copied writings in the middle ages to preserve them. Distribution is an entirely different topic.

hackernewds 3y ago

Downloading video = Downloading a song Recording a video = Recording a song Either case distribution should be protected.

ShamelessC 3y ago

You wouldn’t download a car

IceHegel 3y ago

Agree, sharing is what should be restricted.

quickthrower2 3y ago

That is it, I am going to record youtube videos onto VHS.

jedberg 3y ago

It's important to keep a few things in mind: - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore) - Your copy was a lot worse quality than what you could otherwise buy - You could at best distribute it to a few hundred or maybe even 1000 people if you were really well connected. With videos on YouTube you can: - Get an unaltered copy - In exactly the same quality as the original - Which you can easily redistribute to millions It's not exactly an equal comparison. An equal comparison would be copying on VHS from analog broadcast TV. Which was also legal.

bensecure 3y ago
> - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore) If such adulteration was sufficient to prevent my listening to the recording, than I wouldn't listen to the radio in the first place. Radio is at least no better than my recording if it always contains such effects. > With videos on YouTube you can: > - Which you can easily redistribute to millions Which platform might I use to perform this redistribution? And how am I to compete with the copy retrievable from the bands own youtube page?
cornfutes 3y ago
The similar comparison would be doing a screen recording of the video versus downloading the byte stream.
ndiddy 3y ago
To save bandwidth, Youtube does lossy compression that drastically reduces the video quality (especially for SD videos) compared to the original file.

bitwize 3y ago

Recording a song from the radio is not fair use. In Sony v. Universal, the usage of the VCR was justified based on a very narrow, very uncommon use case: if there were a TV show that aired exactly once, and for some reason you wanted to see it but couldn't, and it would never air again, you had the legal right to record one copy for later viewing. (I'm not sure if you had to destroy the copy after viewing it.) On that basis, and that basis alone, was the VCR ruled to have a legal use case. Otherwise it was pretty much a copyright violation device. Justice Blackmun, in his dissent, was clear that even making a single copy for personal use violates copyright law. Fair use covers making excerpts of a work, not copying a full work, for purposes of reporting, criticism, parody, and the like. If you record or download a full song or video without permission, YOU ARE INFRINGING ON COPYRIGHT.

pers0n 3y ago

Whats to stop me from playing a video full screen while I have a screen recorder? There are plenty of sites out there that can already convert youtube to mp3s

squeaky-clean 3y ago
At least with some services/apps, screen recording only captures a black box around the video you want.

elif 3y ago

Copyright is just one of the impractically odious pillars of capitalism buckling under the stresses of late capitalism. Trying to "make it work" is a temporary measure at best, but I think more relaxing of the restrictions at least behind the advancement of technology by at least a couple of decades will be the only chance it has to remain relevant. The laws that stopped people from running bootleg vinyl presses are laughable when applied to copying a file from one of my computers to another. The current experiment of seeing how many $10-$20 corporations consumers are willing to pay monthly ends either with monopoly/oligopoly of art or a new golden age of piracy.

pickingdinner 3y ago

Before even download, can we at least acknowledge that Youtube is the greatest copyright infringement platform on the planet? Whatever the "excuse" of the uploaders and the host of those uploads (youtube), the sheer number of copyright protected material uploaded in clear sight should be the main concern of any copyright enforcer, not those who download.

a-dub 3y ago

"downloading a video" probably sounds almost as weird to a gen-z as "recording a song from the radio" sounds to a millennial. pretty wild when you think about it.

mike31fr 3y ago
You're shooting yourself in the foot with this example. Millenials did record songs from the radio to audio tapes. I did it (I was born in 1985), my little sister did (she was born in 1990), etc.
djhn 3y ago
But then again TikTok has a 'save video' feature (yet another small example of how it's a better product than YouTube, whether you're a power user or not) which exports videos into you filesystem.

classified 3y ago

It's the law, logic doesn't enter.

_trampeltier 3y ago

Of course it should be. Special this was a german court and we pay for private copys on every medium (tape, cd, hdd) Private copying levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

EchoReflection 3y ago

I make no claims as to the presence of malware (or lack thereof) in the links in this comment, and I'm not condoning or endorsing anything, nor am I stating an opinion on the ethics of downloading YouTube videos for any purpose, but for the sake of adding information to the table, there are still options available: https://newpipe.en.softonic.com/android/download?utm_source=SEM&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=EN_US_DSA_Desktop_General&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1N-zp7PbgAMVPBqtBh3pDQceEAAYASAAEgJ5wPD_BwE https://newpipe.en.softonic.com/android/download?utm_source=... and, https://yt3-music-downloader.en.softonic.com/android https://yt3-music-downloader.en.softonic.com/android https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ and: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-download/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-... And I'm sure many others. I guess as long as the situation is such that it is not stupidly easy to figure out how to get around the restrictions that "prevent" downloading YT videos, workarounds and options will continue to be available. Information is very hard to lock away if it is on the internet and available to the public to some degree. I imagine he situation is considerably different in more totalitarian countries like China and North Korea, where content and online activity is scrutinized/monitored by the government more "thoroughly". It seems hard to find a line in the sense that recording technology is becoming more and more common, as is the trend of social media companies wanting the masses to "share" their experiences on social media. Hypothetically, if I record a concert with Snapchat spectacles and then upload the snap to YouTube, am I committing some kind of copyright infringement or am I simply sharing an experience with my "followers"? I have actually had videos of concerts that I recorded on my phone taken down from YouTube, even though it wasn't like I recorded with a professional camera or even that the recording sounded particularly good, but I guess some content management stoolies on YouTube (and I imagine Vimeo and maybe LBRY/Odysee/elsewhere) are paid to try to take down content that appears to be bypassing the creators' ability to collect money for their material.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

Well "it should be" implies we have no leverage to implement this and we're merely daydreaming about alternate universes. Catching someone in an inconsistency is not a path to winning anything in business and politics. They don't care if they're consistent.

villgax 3y ago

If it's not behind a paywall then no point whining about it

dontupvoteme 3y ago

The youtube-dl ruling was at the Hamburg level, does anyone know if they can appeal to the federal courts in Germany? Apparently Hamburg is nightmare tier for this sort of thing.

JacobSeated 3y ago

Depends on how said material was purchased. E.g. Most YouTube videos would not be okay to simply download, since you did not technically pay money to obtain a copy. However, things you buy on YouTube movies really should be downloadable.

PontifexMinimus 3y ago

This reminds me of about 10-12 years ago when a Republican staffer suggested that party's platform should include legalising file sharing, on the grounds that the RIAA and MPAA align Democrat so there's no point in the Republicans kowtowing to them. At the time it was immediately shot down, but if someone made the same proposal now I suspect it might not be. It would certainly liven US elections up.

tinus_hn 3y ago

Artists should create music for me to enjoy for free! It’s only fair use!

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

I don't normally read articles here, but for some reason this time I did. I'm very disappointed that the fine article amounts to nothing more than a fatalistic tweet. Edit: Fixed the typo in the word "normally".

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago

Coming from the UK, I was surprised to hear that recording a song from the radio is allowed under 'fair use'. Especially given that I grew up during the time when that was actually relevant, it was drilled into us remorselessly that recording stuff onto tape was basically illegal, even if it was impractical to enforce. It looks as if the law was amended in 2014 to allow for 'private copies', but I think that still excludes copying from the radio, etc.

betimsl 3y ago

Like everybody, I'm also a fan of free (anything). But you did not ask for the waves that pass through you (so you have the right to record it); but, you have to request a file from a server, not the same thing.

aethertron 3y ago

There is no such thing as streaming without downloading. With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls). DRM bad.

tdullien 3y ago

Oh wow, my toot on HN, rated higher than any of the cool things I have done :-)