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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

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 Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them.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.
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    There's actually a potential line of attack that rose due to two SCOTUS decisions a few years ago. The Eldred and Golan cases essentially established that fair use is constitutionally necessary in order for copyright to coexist with the 1st amendment. If the DMCA is found to hinder the effective exercise of a fair use right, it could be struck down (either facially or in an as-applied challenge)
  - rusk 3y ago
    Thank you. I've been away from HN for a while, but you really could not get this kind of illumination anywhere else x
  - AnthonyMouse 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. But that's kind of a solution, isn't it? Suppose the law prohibited circumvention but only when the copy made is an actual infringement and not fair use. And didn't prohibit tools, or at least tools with a substantial non-infringing use. For example you couldn't sell a satellite descrambler that solely allows the customer to watch without paying, but you could sell a device that allows a paying customer to make a fair use copy. Something like that. So you comply with the treaty without the catastrophic overreach of the existing DMCA 1201.
actionfromafar 3y ago
I wonder if a cassette deck connected to the computer is also a copy protection circumvention tool. I suppose it is?
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  1201(a)(2) prohibits selling tools that are either... - Only capable of breaking copy protection - Have minimal commercial utility other than to break copy protection - Are advertised as being able to break copy protection If you sold someone an aux cord with the marketing slogan "Copy music off Spotify and stop paying for your subscription", that'd violate 1201(a)(2) because of that third prong[0]. There's also plenty of copy protection circumvention tools that DON'T trip 1201(a)(2) because they aren't marketed as such and have noninfringing uses. For example, Google Chrome. You can use it to bypass right-click blockers because it lets you open Devtools without right-clicking. However, browsers have loads of commercial utility outside of this, and they don't specifically advertise their ability to get around annoying right-click scripts, so they're legal. We don't normally contemplate this sort of thing because most DRM is specifically designed to be both obvious and separable from other permissible behavior. You cannot accidentally write a DVD decryptor that doesn't trip 1201(a)(2). This has led to people mistakenly assuming that the DMCA requires encryption to be involved or something for a copy protection circumvention tool to be illegal. [0] I've actually seen this happen. There was someone selling VGA cables marketed as a way to copy Netflix.
  - jameshart 3y ago
    Surprising then that Apple launched iTunes with the ‘rip. mix. burn.’ slogan in 2000 right after the DMCA was introduced.
    - px43 3y ago
      There was no copy protection being bypassed in that era, and ripping CDs was just a normal thing that people did to listen to music on their computer without having to worry about scratch discs etc.
nadermx 3y ago
Posted this in the other thread, but this thorny topic is up for appeal in the US Second Circuit https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-recording-industry-association-of-america-inc/#entry-93 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-rec...
indymike 3y ago
> youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool Wait until they find out that Microsoft has been providing tools like COPY and XCOPY with their OS for decades...
- veave 3y ago
  COPY and XCOPY are okay as long as they aren't written to intentionally bypass DRM (they aren't)
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  COPY and XCOPY cannot copy a copy protected program. The Amiga's X-COPY, on the other hand...
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Maraude it Professional.
Aaargh20318 3y ago
> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?
- cookiengineer 3y ago
  Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online. Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid. Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically relevant cases. It is gonna take years to unfuck this. * duh, they don't even know differences of encoding vs encryption...
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    They must have the same lawyers and be getting the same judges as anti-2A groups. The level of misinformation and lack of understanding about the topic in contention feels similar.
  - Aaargh20318 3y ago
    They base64 encode the video files? Why? That doesn’t do anything except increase the bandwidth needed.
    - cookiengineer 3y ago
      It's not the video files but the m3u playlist iirc that is base64 encoded and contains the urls+tokens for all the chunks of the videostream
  - dataflow 3y ago
    > Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. [...] The lawyers are this stupid. The law has other things listed beside encryption. Did they really call this "encryption" as you're claiming (citation?) or did it fall under another bucket?
akira2501 3y ago
> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool "(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work" The argument would seemingly be that youtube is in no way "effectively controlling access to a work." And none of the peculiar details of it's implementation are designed to operate in this capacity. Quite the opposite, it's technology is designed to broadcast, for the purposes of inserting ads, content to anyone who merely requests it. Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site and has nothing but an ad-hoc system with limited availability that takes action only after content is uploaded. As there are many videos that are past copyright protection or have been explicitly released into the public domain, and they make no distinction in the "technical measures" used in those videos, that they aren't effectively controlling access, and the tools aren't circumventing them for this purpose.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  > Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site Of course it is. That's the whole point of the three strike system.
  - backtoyoujim 3y ago
    Why is there yet another legal framework with basis for legal jurisprudence being a rule from a child's game ?
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      The question is whether youtube connects the authority of the copyright owner with particular videos. It obviously does. The copyright owner is the entity that receives ad revenue, and the entity that can strike videos that violates its copyright.
Delk 3y ago
I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is? I remember that in Finland, it was debated in courts whether breaking DVD CSS encryption using readily downloadable software was infringement upon an effective copy protection scheme or not. An appeals court decided it was (i.e. CSS was deemed "effective"), but the requirement that the copy protection scheme be "effective" in order for circumvention to be considered illegal is still there in copyright law. (The legislation is based on whatever the EU-wide regulation is and includes provisions somewhat similar to the DMCA such as the prohibition of circumvention.) I doubt that "copy protection" that can be circumvented by reading the YouTube web page source code would be deemed effective under that law. Does the DMCA not have a similar limitation? Or is the RIAA just trying to play the lobbying and rhetoric game despite having weak legal grounds? (Wouldn't be surprising.)
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  This sounds like a transposition[0] and translation error. The word "effective" has two meanings: - Is strong enough to keep you from copying the thing - Has the effect of keeping you from copying the thing Congress intended the latter meaning and US courts adopted that. The first meaning would be self-defeating: once someone figured out how to break a copy protection system, it would no longer be effective, so you'd only be able to prosecute the first person to break the system. If effective meant "is strong enough" I don't think DVD CSS would count because they specifically used export-grade encryption. The rule (part of ITAR, AFAIK) was that 40-bits was the max entropy you could have, specifically so the NSA could break foreign-operated encryption systems. But this is kind of silly - computers are getting faster all the time, so it seems odd that a measure considered copy protection yesterday would stop being copy protection today just because we can crack passwords faster. [0] Transposition is the concept of copying EU regulations into member state law. I'm using the term slightly broader than EU law. While WTO rules don't have a direct transposition requirement, USTR conditioned lots of trade deals on transposing DMCA 1201 into local law.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
mpalmer 3y ago
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. I'm not a lawyer but how does youtube-dl fit any one of these criteria? despite the name, it's not "primarily designed to circumvent copyright", nor is copyright circumvention its only use (though "commercial significance" seems to be doing a lot of work here).
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  It's not "circumventing copyright", it's circumventing copy protection. The RIAA alleges that YouTube rotating their URLs is a copy protection measure. If that's true[0] then youtube-dl would fit plainly in category (A), since downloading YouTube videos is all it does. Category (B) is there to prevent someone from selling, say, a "DVD decrypting can opener" and then arguing that the can opener part makes the DVD part legal. Category (C) is there to prevent people from selling you the analog hole. My objection to the RIAA's copy protection argument is that they did not actually create the copy protection measure. They are alleging that some third party's product feature happens to look close enough to copy protection that it should count as such. Would they be able to sue YouTube if they were to stop rotating their URLs? Do social media platforms suddenly have an obligation to continue to maintain features that accidentally frustrate illegal copying of text? Do I have to reimplement spacebar heating?[1] Another potential objection would be that rotating URLs are not copy protection. This may work, but keep in mind: 17 USC 1201 has no bounds on the scope of copy protection beyond "it has to somehow stop you from copying a thing protected by copyright". Encryption and scrambling systems are explicitly named, but the way the law is currently drafted, anything can be a copy protection measure. There's a lot of language defining existing copy protection systems they wanted to grandfather in (e.g. Macrovision) but nothing limiting the scope of future systems. [0] If accepted, this would be the widest reading of DMCA 1201 that I've seen accepted by a court of law (as a non-lawyer). Yes I am counting the printer cartridge and garage door opener shenanigans of yesterdecade. Those were bog-standard "designing the product to commit three felonies a day" kinds of copyright abuse and the courts smacked them both down. [1] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
kristopolous 3y ago
Am I the only one that finds it hard to engage with the RIAA as good faith actors? It feels similar to patent trolls whose business strategy is simply to leverage the court by exploiting poorly executed legislation.
- porkbeer 3y ago
  As a musician who has dealt with them, no. They are for the big labels and distributors, not the artists.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  No, they're not good faith actors, far from it. However, the sorts of bad faith actions they engage in are not violations of the law. "Implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" is a provision of contract law, not copyright law.
  - ssklash 3y ago
    It's also quite hard to be in violation of a law you more or less wrote and passed.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Oh, copyright monopolists are a million times worse than patent trolls. Patent trolls don't make the laws, they just exploit them. Copyright monopolists literally make the laws and then complain that the whole world isn't following them. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on lobbyists and essentially buy whatever laws they want. Leverage courts? Copyright monopolists will literally leverage the might of the US government and military to enforce US laws overseas. Look up US Trade Representative reports on "notorious markets" which is all about getting foreign countries to enforce US copyright law as if they had nothing better to do than police imaginary american property. It's packed full of language like "stakeholders" which is code for these monopolists. It's like they're the bosses of the US government.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
verisimi 3y ago
> This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been. For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.) The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good? Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.
- musicale 3y ago
  The primary error seems to be in applying the anti-circumvention ban to fair use and non-infringing use, and tools used for same. Because most video is encrypted, this effectively reverses Betamax and bans home video recording with DVRs without authorization from the copyright holder. It's particularly disappointing that the copyright office has flatly refused to authorize 1201 exemptions for non-infringing format-shifting or space-shifting.
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  If what you wrote is true, you should have a good answer to this: What special interest is served by laws against murder? One's "heart" is at least as exploitable as a democratic law system.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    Great question. In the case where someone kills another (murder is a legal term) and the cases of many other 'crimes' eg stealing, abusing children, etc, these are immoral acts. One's heart knows this. In general, what people refer to as 'common law' is more or less in line with morality - I don't object to that so much. Now, if you wanted to impose a legal system (an external authority of morality) that doesn't cover these cases, you will fail - people will not accept it's authority and will see it for what it is. The legal system has to encompass these overt, actually immoral cases as bait, in order for the individual to swallow the hook. But, the legal system is not determining right or wrong, it is merely echoing what you already know. Things like intellectual property rights, speed limits, licensing, tax, etc, are the hook. They are nothing to do with right or wrong. They are merely cash machines for the entities that write the legislation. They could be right, had entered into a contract, where government provided such-and-such a service with explicit agreement. But no one ever did..
yieldcrv 3y ago
time to upload the source and compilation instructions on ipfs
- mdaniel 3y ago
  a friendly reminder that (a) ipfs is only as alive as there are seeders and (b) seeders ips are public just like bittorrent There was a recent Cult of the Dead Cow release that claims "encrypt all the things, Tor but for phones" or some such but I haven't studied it to know how much is aspirational https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    yes, but checkout the redundancy that filecoin nodes offer, they basically pin IPFS for free, not intentionally its just turning into a killer app for filecoin https://web3.storage https://web3.storage competes with the web 2.0 SaaS pinning services like Pinata
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      I readily admit I haven't looked super deeply into Filecoin but I thought they were trying to cryptocurrency the pinning problem, and thus not "for free" right?
      - yieldcrv 3y ago
        filecoin has a coin. I don't know where the burden is for consumers. a third party service https://web3.storage https://web3.storage built a file storage tool on the permissionless network that uses filecoin nodes to pin IPFS links, so it doesn't matter? this third party service tries to make a business model and has overhead costs, and that currently involves a 5gb free tier with unlimited bandwidth. Used to be 100gb. Still cheaper than Pinata and other pinning services that don't use filecoin. And all of that is cheaper than company run centralized file storage because those charge by bandwidth and cant be compared. This discussion isn't really about whether the service provider has costs, its about a solution for consumers the same way we would talk about a VC subsidized centralized service that happens to be free, for now.
Sparkyte 3y ago
I didn't think either was fair use. I think fair use applies to the utilization not the acquisition of. For example if I bought a movie and I used it with the intention to discuss it with clips, I can recode it because I physically own the medium. The fair use chimes in when the clips are in use. However when I download something with a tool from Google (YouTube) I'm violating their ToS. I might also be violating something in the middle that opens up some legal issues. So when you go to use a video only for fair use, you should ask the poster or the source for an unencrypted one. Also they should do the responsible thing and provide it.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Fair use applies to neither acquisition or utilization. It applies to publication. Copyright only starts to matter when you (re)-publish a work.
austin-cheney 3y ago
In almost every case stupidity is never a defense for violating the law, but stupidity is a valid legal defense against questions of intent. Breaking copy protection is a question of intent.

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.
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  There's actually a potential line of attack that rose due to two SCOTUS decisions a few years ago. The Eldred and Golan cases essentially established that fair use is constitutionally necessary in order for copyright to coexist with the 1st amendment. If the DMCA is found to hinder the effective exercise of a fair use right, it could be struck down (either facially or in an as-applied challenge)
- rusk 3y ago
  Thank you. I've been away from HN for a while, but you really could not get this kind of illumination anywhere else x
- AnthonyMouse 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. But that's kind of a solution, isn't it? Suppose the law prohibited circumvention but only when the copy made is an actual infringement and not fair use. And didn't prohibit tools, or at least tools with a substantial non-infringing use. For example you couldn't sell a satellite descrambler that solely allows the customer to watch without paying, but you could sell a device that allows a paying customer to make a fair use copy. Something like that. So you comply with the treaty without the catastrophic overreach of the existing DMCA 1201.

actionfromafar 3y ago

I wonder if a cassette deck connected to the computer is also a copy protection circumvention tool. I suppose it is?

kmeisthax 3y ago
1201(a)(2) prohibits selling tools that are either... - Only capable of breaking copy protection - Have minimal commercial utility other than to break copy protection - Are advertised as being able to break copy protection If you sold someone an aux cord with the marketing slogan "Copy music off Spotify and stop paying for your subscription", that'd violate 1201(a)(2) because of that third prong[0]. There's also plenty of copy protection circumvention tools that DON'T trip 1201(a)(2) because they aren't marketed as such and have noninfringing uses. For example, Google Chrome. You can use it to bypass right-click blockers because it lets you open Devtools without right-clicking. However, browsers have loads of commercial utility outside of this, and they don't specifically advertise their ability to get around annoying right-click scripts, so they're legal. We don't normally contemplate this sort of thing because most DRM is specifically designed to be both obvious and separable from other permissible behavior. You cannot accidentally write a DVD decryptor that doesn't trip 1201(a)(2). This has led to people mistakenly assuming that the DMCA requires encryption to be involved or something for a copy protection circumvention tool to be illegal. [0] I've actually seen this happen. There was someone selling VGA cables marketed as a way to copy Netflix.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Surprising then that Apple launched iTunes with the ‘rip. mix. burn.’ slogan in 2000 right after the DMCA was introduced.
  - px43 3y ago
    There was no copy protection being bypassed in that era, and ripping CDs was just a normal thing that people did to listen to music on their computer without having to worry about scratch discs etc.

nadermx 3y ago

Posted this in the other thread, but this thorny topic is up for appeal in the US Second Circuit https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-recording-industry-association-of-america-inc/#entry-93 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-rec...

indymike 3y ago

> youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool Wait until they find out that Microsoft has been providing tools like COPY and XCOPY with their OS for decades...

veave 3y ago
COPY and XCOPY are okay as long as they aren't written to intentionally bypass DRM (they aren't)
kmeisthax 3y ago
COPY and XCOPY cannot copy a copy protected program. The Amiga's X-COPY, on the other hand...
- snvzz 3y ago
  Maraude it Professional.

Aaargh20318 3y ago

> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?

cookiengineer 3y ago
Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online. Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid. Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically relevant cases. It is gonna take years to unfuck this. * duh, they don't even know differences of encoding vs encryption...
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  They must have the same lawyers and be getting the same judges as anti-2A groups. The level of misinformation and lack of understanding about the topic in contention feels similar.
- Aaargh20318 3y ago
  They base64 encode the video files? Why? That doesn’t do anything except increase the bandwidth needed.
  - cookiengineer 3y ago
    It's not the video files but the m3u playlist iirc that is base64 encoded and contains the urls+tokens for all the chunks of the videostream
- dataflow 3y ago
  > Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. [...] The lawyers are this stupid. The law has other things listed beside encryption. Did they really call this "encryption" as you're claiming (citation?) or did it fall under another bucket?

akira2501 3y ago

> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool "(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work" The argument would seemingly be that youtube is in no way "effectively controlling access to a work." And none of the peculiar details of it's implementation are designed to operate in this capacity. Quite the opposite, it's technology is designed to broadcast, for the purposes of inserting ads, content to anyone who merely requests it. Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site and has nothing but an ad-hoc system with limited availability that takes action only after content is uploaded. As there are many videos that are past copyright protection or have been explicitly released into the public domain, and they make no distinction in the "technical measures" used in those videos, that they aren't effectively controlling access, and the tools aren't circumventing them for this purpose.

sillysaurusx 3y ago
> Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site Of course it is. That's the whole point of the three strike system.
- backtoyoujim 3y ago
  Why is there yet another legal framework with basis for legal jurisprudence being a rule from a child's game ?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    The question is whether youtube connects the authority of the copyright owner with particular videos. It obviously does. The copyright owner is the entity that receives ad revenue, and the entity that can strike videos that violates its copyright.

Delk 3y ago

I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is? I remember that in Finland, it was debated in courts whether breaking DVD CSS encryption using readily downloadable software was infringement upon an effective copy protection scheme or not. An appeals court decided it was (i.e. CSS was deemed "effective"), but the requirement that the copy protection scheme be "effective" in order for circumvention to be considered illegal is still there in copyright law. (The legislation is based on whatever the EU-wide regulation is and includes provisions somewhat similar to the DMCA such as the prohibition of circumvention.) I doubt that "copy protection" that can be circumvented by reading the YouTube web page source code would be deemed effective under that law. Does the DMCA not have a similar limitation? Or is the RIAA just trying to play the lobbying and rhetoric game despite having weak legal grounds? (Wouldn't be surprising.)

kmeisthax 3y ago
This sounds like a transposition[0] and translation error. The word "effective" has two meanings: - Is strong enough to keep you from copying the thing - Has the effect of keeping you from copying the thing Congress intended the latter meaning and US courts adopted that. The first meaning would be self-defeating: once someone figured out how to break a copy protection system, it would no longer be effective, so you'd only be able to prosecute the first person to break the system. If effective meant "is strong enough" I don't think DVD CSS would count because they specifically used export-grade encryption. The rule (part of ITAR, AFAIK) was that 40-bits was the max entropy you could have, specifically so the NSA could break foreign-operated encryption systems. But this is kind of silly - computers are getting faster all the time, so it seems odd that a measure considered copy protection yesterday would stop being copy protection today just because we can crack passwords faster. [0] Transposition is the concept of copying EU regulations into member state law. I'm using the term slightly broader than EU law. While WTO rules don't have a direct transposition requirement, USTR conditioned lots of trade deals on transposing DMCA 1201 into local law.
boomboomsubban 3y ago

mpalmer 3y ago

No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. I'm not a lawyer but how does youtube-dl fit any one of these criteria? despite the name, it's not "primarily designed to circumvent copyright", nor is copyright circumvention its only use (though "commercial significance" seems to be doing a lot of work here).

kmeisthax 3y ago
It's not "circumventing copyright", it's circumventing copy protection. The RIAA alleges that YouTube rotating their URLs is a copy protection measure. If that's true[0] then youtube-dl would fit plainly in category (A), since downloading YouTube videos is all it does. Category (B) is there to prevent someone from selling, say, a "DVD decrypting can opener" and then arguing that the can opener part makes the DVD part legal. Category (C) is there to prevent people from selling you the analog hole. My objection to the RIAA's copy protection argument is that they did not actually create the copy protection measure. They are alleging that some third party's product feature happens to look close enough to copy protection that it should count as such. Would they be able to sue YouTube if they were to stop rotating their URLs? Do social media platforms suddenly have an obligation to continue to maintain features that accidentally frustrate illegal copying of text? Do I have to reimplement spacebar heating?[1] Another potential objection would be that rotating URLs are not copy protection. This may work, but keep in mind: 17 USC 1201 has no bounds on the scope of copy protection beyond "it has to somehow stop you from copying a thing protected by copyright". Encryption and scrambling systems are explicitly named, but the way the law is currently drafted, anything can be a copy protection measure. There's a lot of language defining existing copy protection systems they wanted to grandfather in (e.g. Macrovision) but nothing limiting the scope of future systems. [0] If accepted, this would be the widest reading of DMCA 1201 that I've seen accepted by a court of law (as a non-lawyer). Yes I am counting the printer cartridge and garage door opener shenanigans of yesterdecade. Those were bog-standard "designing the product to commit three felonies a day" kinds of copyright abuse and the courts smacked them both down. [1] https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

kristopolous 3y ago

Am I the only one that finds it hard to engage with the RIAA as good faith actors? It feels similar to patent trolls whose business strategy is simply to leverage the court by exploiting poorly executed legislation.

porkbeer 3y ago
As a musician who has dealt with them, no. They are for the big labels and distributors, not the artists.
kmeisthax 3y ago
No, they're not good faith actors, far from it. However, the sorts of bad faith actions they engage in are not violations of the law. "Implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" is a provision of contract law, not copyright law.
- ssklash 3y ago
  It's also quite hard to be in violation of a law you more or less wrote and passed.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Oh, copyright monopolists are a million times worse than patent trolls. Patent trolls don't make the laws, they just exploit them. Copyright monopolists literally make the laws and then complain that the whole world isn't following them. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on lobbyists and essentially buy whatever laws they want. Leverage courts? Copyright monopolists will literally leverage the might of the US government and military to enforce US laws overseas. Look up US Trade Representative reports on "notorious markets" which is all about getting foreign countries to enforce US copyright law as if they had nothing better to do than police imaginary american property. It's packed full of language like "stakeholders" which is code for these monopolists. It's like they're the bosses of the US government.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

verisimi 3y ago

> This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been. For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.) The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good? Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.

musicale 3y ago
The primary error seems to be in applying the anti-circumvention ban to fair use and non-infringing use, and tools used for same. Because most video is encrypted, this effectively reverses Betamax and bans home video recording with DVRs without authorization from the copyright holder. It's particularly disappointing that the copyright office has flatly refused to authorize 1201 exemptions for non-infringing format-shifting or space-shifting.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
If what you wrote is true, you should have a good answer to this: What special interest is served by laws against murder? One's "heart" is at least as exploitable as a democratic law system.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Great question. In the case where someone kills another (murder is a legal term) and the cases of many other 'crimes' eg stealing, abusing children, etc, these are immoral acts. One's heart knows this. In general, what people refer to as 'common law' is more or less in line with morality - I don't object to that so much. Now, if you wanted to impose a legal system (an external authority of morality) that doesn't cover these cases, you will fail - people will not accept it's authority and will see it for what it is. The legal system has to encompass these overt, actually immoral cases as bait, in order for the individual to swallow the hook. But, the legal system is not determining right or wrong, it is merely echoing what you already know. Things like intellectual property rights, speed limits, licensing, tax, etc, are the hook. They are nothing to do with right or wrong. They are merely cash machines for the entities that write the legislation. They could be right, had entered into a contract, where government provided such-and-such a service with explicit agreement. But no one ever did..

yieldcrv 3y ago

time to upload the source and compilation instructions on ipfs

mdaniel 3y ago
a friendly reminder that (a) ipfs is only as alive as there are seeders and (b) seeders ips are public just like bittorrent There was a recent Cult of the Dead Cow release that claims "encrypt all the things, Tor but for phones" or some such but I haven't studied it to know how much is aspirational https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  yes, but checkout the redundancy that filecoin nodes offer, they basically pin IPFS for free, not intentionally its just turning into a killer app for filecoin https://web3.storage https://web3.storage competes with the web 2.0 SaaS pinning services like Pinata
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    I readily admit I haven't looked super deeply into Filecoin but I thought they were trying to cryptocurrency the pinning problem, and thus not "for free" right?
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      filecoin has a coin. I don't know where the burden is for consumers. a third party service https://web3.storage https://web3.storage built a file storage tool on the permissionless network that uses filecoin nodes to pin IPFS links, so it doesn't matter? this third party service tries to make a business model and has overhead costs, and that currently involves a 5gb free tier with unlimited bandwidth. Used to be 100gb. Still cheaper than Pinata and other pinning services that don't use filecoin. And all of that is cheaper than company run centralized file storage because those charge by bandwidth and cant be compared. This discussion isn't really about whether the service provider has costs, its about a solution for consumers the same way we would talk about a VC subsidized centralized service that happens to be free, for now.

Sparkyte 3y ago

I didn't think either was fair use. I think fair use applies to the utilization not the acquisition of. For example if I bought a movie and I used it with the intention to discuss it with clips, I can recode it because I physically own the medium. The fair use chimes in when the clips are in use. However when I download something with a tool from Google (YouTube) I'm violating their ToS. I might also be violating something in the middle that opens up some legal issues. So when you go to use a video only for fair use, you should ask the poster or the source for an unencrypted one. Also they should do the responsible thing and provide it.

rocqua 3y ago
Fair use applies to neither acquisition or utilization. It applies to publication. Copyright only starts to matter when you (re)-publish a work.

austin-cheney 3y ago

In almost every case stupidity is never a defense for violating the law, but stupidity is a valid legal defense against questions of intent. Breaking copy protection is a question of intent.