I’m confused by their obsession with youtube-dl. I don’t really know anyone that pirates music, seems like streaming has really solved that with ad-supported listening. The common cases for using youtube-dl, as I understand, is for archival (mostly non-music), watching videos content out of the browser (also mostly non-music), and derivative works purposes.
It's about control. As a user agent, youtube-dl acts in our behalf in order to do what we want and protect our interests. That's why they hate it. It's the antithesis of everything they want: something that acts on their behalf, does what they want and protects their interests.
If something gives us any power at all, they'll sue it into oblivion.
This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. I think a simpler explanation might be that they either don't understand that youtube-dl isn't a threat to them, or that OC is wrong and it actually is a threat in some way. I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do".
Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.
The more likely explanation is that they originally formed teams to address this problem, teams that are now left with a choice between twiddling their thumbs and this.
Yeah, they really jumped the shark with that release. The meta has been changing drastically, and I don't know if the dev team really is interested in patching it back up.
Corporations have no minds and have no hands. They cannot think, decide, or act. Every action undertaken by a corporation was performed by a human being (or programmed by a human being).
Corporate "speech" is still just human rights to free expression. Corporations have nothing to say without humans.
I'm really interested in this view. I suspect that at a large enough size, organisations can absolutely have an emergent... "nature", which is not only characteristic of that organisation, but largely independent of its constituents (the humans). I introduce into evidence the Roman Catholic Church. It is so large, so entrenched in its ways, that it is extremely highly unlikely that an individual within it (including the pope) can substantially change the character of the organisation.
I have a personal belief that humans are to very large organisations (incl. nation states) as cells are to higher-order creatures. Once a large enough organisation has "matured", humans entering the organisation adapt themselves to it (probably subconsciously), and the organisation's unique culture survives.
It's different from culture. A culture makes everyone think in a similar way, there is one role: a participant of it. A corporation doesn't have to make everyone think the same, because it has many roles and written processes and KPIs which modulate anyone taking a role into a gear that rotates accordingly to the big schema. Corporations may have culture and it may be definitive, but it's not only that.
You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology.
If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
I'm not actually curious about definitions out there. And it's not HN trend, it's me. I see and experience both everyday cultures and everyday corporations, whatever meaning these words have for me, and compare them to each other. It doesn't require anything special beyond comparison skills. If you don't agree, fine, if you don't want to message a key mistake I maybe made, okay. If you want to take a complex definition and stretch it over a non-phd one to get my non-phd answer, okay. But you should know that patronizingly referencing to "lots of work" never works in a discussion or as an explanation. Maybe there is a work on such discussions, if you actually care.
But anyway, I just googled it:
- the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
- the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
- all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation
- an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups
It has little in common with what I described, namely written (managed, on purpose, situational) processes and KPIs, which force people to act as they do, and are not inherent to them.
If you have a specific interest, you should just research it. The world is a very big place and lots of smart people have already gathered evidence to answer questions about pretty much anything. Talking on a forum is fun but collectively, we're idiots and we're not going to teach you much of anything.
It's great that you have questions, but you actually have to follow it up with research and learning if you care. From the comments you posted, I get the impression you haven't spent 1 hour googling answers to your questions. That sends me the impression, you don't really care, you just like hearing yourself think.
Maybe, but it's more complicated than that. I was pissed off yesterday, sorry if my tone sounded worse than it should have been.
My reluctance against your suggestion is based not on my interest or lack thereof^. I've had this sort of discussions many times before, and usually people split into two categories: those who correct or argue directly, in short and precise argument, and those who refer to unnamed sources throughout the thread. From the first group you learn quickly, and consistently, and they leave no aftertaste, even if you feel "defeated", because their argument sends a strong educational message. The second is a potential time spoil. I've read "some works" before, and in most cases (or it's perceived as such) it turned out that that guy meant just a slightly different meaning, or an interpretation of that author, which is different from a common sense around a specific term, or simply they missed a big chunk of a message and pressed on a non- point, or were primarily just a narcissist troll. I can remember the last time I constructively "just went" and read a book on some Buddhism downstream, after an argument with one guy who claimed that it's very rational and isn't just a cool story (the topic was that one of their prophets arrived in my country). I downloaded it, read a preface and 20 minutes later it already narrated magic forest experiences and spirits who messaged truth to the prophet. Same story with Islam followers, sometimes they are talking nonsense and refer to Qur'an, which I've already read in seven translations, including interpreting one, with cancelled ayat remarks, and often I know surah and ayat range they're talking about right away. (Edit: I just noticed that both cases are about religion, which is known to be "hot", but it doesn't end with religion, it just happens to bring brightest examples.)
I'm not saying that you're not right, but it's statistically nonsensical to follow your vague suggestions to go read on a field. That is why it will never work, and you will think that these lazy careless STEM guys portray some trend. It's a trust issue, not an issue with my desire (or lack of it, which is the case) to learn something regardless of who my opponent is. I simply can't trust few hours of my life to every other guy on the internet, if they don't provide a good enough argument to do that.
^ which I already claimed non-existent, it feels like you don't like to read comments at all
Humans have no nucleus, no mitochondria, no golgi apparatus. They cannot transcribe RNA or respirate or activate neurons. Every action undertaken by a human was performed by a cell (or an agglomeration of cells) within it.
Human "action" is just the emergent properties of cells. Humans can do nothing without cells.
There is a fundamental difference in the concept of an entity that exists as a whole, and a legal construct that is purely an economic allocation abstraction.
There is an interesting talk 'Dude, You Broke the Future'[0] in which speaker compares corporations to 'paperclip maximizer' AI which could destroy us with their sole gole of maximizing profits (or paperclips)
A group of people takes on a hive mind aligned with the interest of the corporation and the corporate bureaucracy manages the hands that act on its behalf with an incentive structure.
This constitutes a separate person, legally, with liability that is not on the individual because they cannot individually control the agenda and actions of the larger corporation.
But a corporation is a legal construct, and ownership of one isn’t anymore a right than having a drivers license. I believe it’s totally within the governments rights to regulate them differently than the individual citizens comprising the corporation.
Most people in a corporation aren't doing what they personally would like to do, but what's on the interest of the corporation and what the corporation incentives then to do. This might be at odds with the personal preferences. People's livelihood depends on the rest of the corporation remaining positive towards them and thus this bar gets moved quite far over time.
This is an oversimplified take, and completely glosses over macro social effects beyond "individual choice".
This is the social science equivalent of reasoning about human behavior and focusing on the behavior of individual neuron connections, or the behavior of an OS by focusing entirely on the I/O drivers - wrong scope of analysis.
I think there is a naive assumption to it that nothing other than humans had ever been proven (smarter && autonomous && self-sustaining) than a human, thus a corporate cannot be alive. I’m not sure how is this proposition remains supported and for how long.
> I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do".
That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process.
> With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser.
They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.
If you download the videos, they can’t inject ads into them, they don’t get ad revenue, earnings decline, shareholders sell their stock, value of the stock decreases, shareholders get even more upset, stock price decreases further, execs can’t take out loans against their stock because it’s not worth enough … the cycle continues.
I don’t really think it’s about control—it’s about increasing the value of the corps stock so employees and shareholders with stock can sell it or use it as collateral for loans to buy nice things.
Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.
It does justify what they are doing for their shareholders, which they’re legally beholden to.
I’m not debating wether it’s moral or ethical, but if you were in their shoes trying to juice revenue to increase the value of your equity, you’d either charge a monthly fee for users to remove ads or fight like hell against people who are trying to download videos without ads.
That’s exactly what YouTube is doing.
FWIW, I can’t stand ads and I think it’s complete bullshit that they’re suing to take down youtube-dl, but they’re acting complete rational for the incentives they’re optimizing for. The problem is that optimization is at odds with users like ourselves.
This is just a conjecture, but I suspect that the number of people using YouTube DL is a tiny fraction of those using YouTube proper. Like less than 1%. The potential for revenue recovery here is tiny. And the corporate execs are surely aware that most people who use YouTube DL are likely running adblock. So I disagree that this is about revenue and support the notion that this is about control and sending a message.
This is about whether it's moral and ethical though. You can maximize revenue selling drugs, it's a quite effective method I might add. Nobody considers that acceptable.
I think copyright, advertising and surveillance capitalism are completely unacceptable practices that ought to be banned straight up. They are directly and indirectly responsible for everything that's ruining computer and internet freedom today. If we can't ban them, we should all be aiming to minimize their revenue so that they cease and desist on their own. I'd rather have the entire copyright and advertising industries implode than cede control of my computer to them.
That's what's at stake here. Computing freedom. They need to own our computers in order to stop us from doing basic things like copying and deleting data. If we don't stop them, we will lose something I think is far more valuable than a bunch of industries. We will lose computing freedom.
I don’t see a lot of ads these days, but I do find it intriguing where this technology-economy disconnects go. It feels like the triad of freemium, ad-support revenue model and adblock is slowly causing obsolescence of currency-quantized measurement of value.
Maybe this is just me getting old, maybe this is just I finally realizing the obvious that is that currency was always proof of stake and never were value representations of goods. But kind of interesting and worrying.
It's not just about ads, it's also about marketing data and privacy: if people are able to watch a local copy whenever they want, they don't even know how often it's viewed, or by whom. (Unless they're watching on a TV that has automatic content recognition turned on.)
They totally can, just not at a moments notice. Putting a car ad into a car video-> works. Shoutout to sponsor -> works.
Putting the scam ad of the day -> doesn't work (or needs some effort).
I draw the line before SponsorBlock though. While they are repetitive and irritating after a while (if I was going to join skillshare I'd have done so some time ago, kindly bugger off, etc.):
* They do directly pay the people making the content
* That income can't be taken off them by the medium (youtube usually) deciding to demonetize the content
* YT isn't even taking a cut, in fact
* Those ad placements aren't trying to stalk me around the Internet and storing every tiny bit of information about me they can glean
* Sponsorship bit are usually there because they have at least some tentative relevance to the content and the people consuming it, without the need to stalk us as we travel around the Internet
At least until such time as the video carries like youtube start inserting ads directly into video streams, then I'll reconsider. I don't block ads to block ads: I block adds as a side effect of blocking stalking behaviours, wasted bandwidth from auto-playing video, 3rd party code on otherwise half-reputable sites trying to access my camera & mic, slowing my devices via poorly optimised animations, pop-ups that may interrupt other app use away from the browser, pop-unders too, battery drain from CPU use when mobile, being forced to interact because I can't just look around or scroll past as the ad is over the content, ... If the stalky inserts start to happen then I'll react by using sponsorblock or similar.
Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default.
This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients.
If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons.
Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.
The "Evil AI" description is more accurate. Of course, individual humans aren't in a board room being evil -- but the incentives in place -- high paid lawyers, little targets that won't fight back, the ability for the little wormy people inside to show off "wins," and no clear incentive not to.
The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."
Is it so far fetched that there are people, especially in groups, who act in extreme ways? I’m sure they are saying exactly “ We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do”, because it is optimum for them to do so.
I mostly use youtube-dl for archival of public videos (predominantly some educational material and sometimes rare old tunes of performers passed away many years ago). I do that, because somehow youtube has become the de-facto storage for such material (i.e. people don't host it on their own webistes), yet often some videos/playlists disappear. This is quite annoying, because as you said I have no control on the availability of said content. To me it feels like e.g. someone accidentally or intentionally deleted all Feynman lectures from planet earth as if they never existed. So I as well ask my self what the agenda of the plaintiff may actually be and which of their short and long term interests are being harmed. One hypothesis is that there is increased migration of videos from youtube to other platforms and Youtube wants to diminish that, however they don't want to take the PR negatives for suing youtube-dl, hence somehow encourage the music industry to do this dirty job instead (the latter already has a big track record).
> To me it feels like e.g. someone accidentally or intentionally deleted all Feynman lectures from planet earth as if they never existed.
Yeah. It's like a global mass gaslighting. One day there's a video, the other day it's just gone, no mention is ever made of it again and you're expected to just accept it.
> in order to do what we want and protect our interests
Letting everyone do things in their own self interest, unchecked, is rarely found in stable societies. For example, one persons interest (getting music for free) may not align with another's (the starving artist's).
The "starving" or small time artist is an excuse that is useful for corporations when they want to manipulate public opinion. No music label cares even the slightest bit about individual artists or their fair payment, they care about megahits and big sellers.
If you want to support your favourite artist that isn't already a millionaire or multi-millionare paying for spotify isn't it.
To actually support "starving artists" visit their shows, buy some merch (however even this isn't the case anymore for some) or look for independent artists on bandcamp (bandcamp takes 15% of a sold album).
If all you do is pay for spotify or something like that you are not supporting a "starving artist" any more than someone downloading the songs, maybe even less because sharing the music on the right filesharing forums might at least lead to some of the sales (merch/concert) above.
To add to that: Big labels hurt small time artists immensely. If you are an artist on youtube getting hit with a (false) copyright claim by a large label is a constant threat to you. It even happens to people with songs with millions of views [1]. We have reached a point where using certain chords or chord progression can get you stomped by music labels.
Music labels are not in any way friends or allys to "starving artists", only to millionaire artists.
Probably merch is most effective these days? You can download a mp3, but you are never able to download a T-shirt.
But at same time, merch have higher entry gate. You are unlikely to buy a merch created for someone you don't really know. (Unless it is just good enough that you are willing to just use it like a general T-shirt...etc)
Performing has always (and should always, if you ask me) be the main avenue to make money for musicians. Music can be copied, can be covered, can be mixed etc. Chords can be guessed, copied and stolen.
But the musician herself is irreplaceable. If you want to make money by making music, be sure to develop a relationship with your audience rather than police it in order to ensure you're getting paid.
Yes, and with Bandcamp you can leave a message to the artist when you make a payment. It feels rewarding to sometimes even recieve a personalized thank-you messages from the artist.
Then stop making music for free. Find a way to get paid before you put the work in. Because after it's been made and published, it's already over.
Computers exist and are networked. Data is trivially and infinitely copyable. The clock will not be rewound back to the dark ages where data was a finite product that people could buy and sell. No matter how much the music industry rages and sues, it won't change the fact that YouTube is just sending me data via HTTP and there's absolutely nothing they can do if I decide to redirect that data to my hard disk instead. It's up to them to adapt to their new reality. If they can't, that's their problem.
That's like finding users for your software before telling them why they would actually like to have it — nobody cares for your music before you release it unless your former albums have been real bangers.
No record label in existence would give you any money before you prooved to them somehow that you are able to do the music you want them to finance you for.
As a member of a band myself I don't care when people download our music, rather the opposite, I like it when people dig the music. And if they dig it enough, they will also buy a shirt, the vinyl, or something among those lines.
> As a member of a band myself I don't care when people download our music
I think the difference between me and some others in this thread is, I think you have the right to make that choice. I think you also have the same right to say, "I put effort into this, and I want to limit its distribution to only those that compensated me for it".
> Find a way to get paid before you put the work in.
Do you have an industry/example in mind where this is the case? All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold. I can't think of anything that's sold based purely on promises, without extreme risk being involved. And when this is the case, it seems there's some partial initial payment (and initial debt put on the creator of that something) to mitigate some of that risk, with complete payment after the thing is finished.
Could also be read as “<Find a way to get paid> before you put the work in.” as opposed to “Find a way to <get paid before you put the work in.>”
An employment would be one way.
Demanding things on behalf of “starving artists” otherwise sounds exactly like the “starving FLOSS maintainer” who burns out because nobody will find their work. Unfortunate but it’s on them to find a sustainable business model if they want it as an income stream. A ban on general computing will not save either the artist nor the programmer.
How so? All employment arrangements I've been involved in paid based on time that was previously worked (like, paid monthly for previous month), with the pay being for the clear, partial, progress that is shown during that time that I worked. I've never been paid, in anywhere near full, for time I will work in the future, or progress I will make. I've never seen as employer that pays, in full, for to-be-completed work. This seems extremely risky. Do you have an example?
> Do you have an industry/example in mind where this is the case?
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter where people treat creations as an investment. Patronage platforms like Patreon where people can support creators they like on a regular basis.
Maybe that's the answer. Maybe not. I don't really know. I just know copyright is insane.
> All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold.
That works for physical goods which are naturally scarce. Data is infinitely abundant. Supply is infinite. Price might as well be zero.
The value is the labor that creates the data, not the data itself. The artists, the programmers, these people are valuable. There needs to be some way they can get paid for the act of creating rather than sales of the artificially scarce product of their labor. Because that artificial scarcity was dead the second computers were invented.
I mean eventually it’s gonna be YouTube only sends a DRM video stream and then the problem is done. Okay sure pirates will still exist but casual piracy got harder which is the point. DRM doesn’t try to put the genie back in the bottle, it only makes the path of least resistance going through legal channels.
This is a good point. Yes, in theory chrome and android are big enough now that youtube could add widevine and there won't be a significant impact to their bottom line. Maybe there are still old devices that are running obsolete/frozen versions of youtube devices. Or more optimistically, there are still trace amounts of 'don't be evil' left at google.
Wouldn't they get sued for anticompetitive practices though? If other browsers/devices can't view the content then it seems like they would have a point.
Except the RIAA isn’t a starving artist and the actual artists make practically nothing from streaming services - the starving artist’s needs are already compromised by large corporate interests.
Yeah. We, mere mortals, need to be checked but these corporations? No, they get to have hundreds of years of government-backed monopolies on numbers, they get to buy laws via lobbying, they get to spam us with advertising all day...
Yes. All data, all computer files, are fundamentally just numbers. Really big numbers. You can even figure out how big they are.
decimal_digits = ceil(bits * log10(2))
A 10 KiB picture is a 24,661 digit number. A 2 GiB video file is a 5,171,655,946 digit number.
It might take hard work and a ton of money to discover that number, but once it's known it can be trivially copied. Copyright is about creating artificial scarcity for numbers. That's how insane it is.
If that's insane, why not share all your keys and passwords in your profile? It's just numbers. A footage of what you're doing in your room is just a number. Even entire you are a number, to some precision, under some angles.
The key fact here is that numbers are just the means of content delivery in a digital world. To be clear, personally I'm not fond of Copyright status quo, but this particular logic makes zero sense.
No. Keys, passwords, all of that data is private. Not shared. It's not like I'm publishing this data for the whole world to see and then trying to regulate access to it. And if I do publish anything, I will do so with the understanding that once it's out there it's out of my control. Complete opposite of what these copyright people want which is public data that they are still able to control.
In cryptography there should be exactly one copy of a private key in the entire universe. When your keys leak due to a mistake or whatever, you invalidate it and make a new one, you don't sue anyone who might have a copy in order to get them to delete it.
By talking about privacy you clearly present that you are aware of and agree with the concept of the law. Once you're on the street it's also out of control, but we have some enforced rules of behavior on them, so you don't get murdered for your keys. Copyright contract isn't any different than any other law, and numbers and their copy-ability have nothing to do with that, because you also have natural murderability, which someone could freely exercise. It's a contract, not the law of nature, which you must respect. If you think otherwise and still expect relative safety on the street, isn't that just a one-sided view?
The social contract behind copyright used to be we'd pretend the works of creators are artificially scarce so that they could make their money for a few years. Then the work would enter the public domain.
When was the last time you ever saw that happen? Some work you grew up with enter the public domain? These companies have already made untold fortunes, several times over. So why doesn't it happen?
They altered the deal. Unilaterally. The money people paid them? They used it to hire lobbyists to change the law and rob people of their public domain rights. These monopolistic protections were meant to be limited, they had an expiration date. The corporations managed to extend copyright duration to the point it might as well be infinite. There exists a public domain but no work ever actually ascends to this mythical place. Fair use? Nobody without an army of lawyers would ever dare try for fear of being sued.
Is this the social contract you want people to respect? The one where they get everything and we get nothing? You say my view is one-sided? These corporations are the most one-sided monopolists there are.
The second people stop pretending artificial scarcity is real, it will be the end of them. Look at how Sci-Hub is shaking up the academic journals. Their end literally can't come soon enough.
I agree with all of these questions and points, this is a huge problem and not "just numbers" argumentation anymore. Also, you're speaking only of a "hot" part of this market, corporations and patent trolls. Copyright is otherwise fine, especially if you want to sell your software yourself, even if it doesn't claim any patents. Why wouldn't I respect e.g. blizzard who gifted me with starcraft, or rake in grass for jets-n-guns, or some saas whose guys worked hard but leaked their "numbers" to the internet somehow. You can't just throw them out with the bathwater.
The Great Gatsby just entered the public domain last year. The whole system stopped for many years, nothing was entering the public domain, and then just last year IIRC it started up again.
> All data, all computer files, are fundamentally just numbers.
That's a misconception.
To get a data-representation for stuff (like numbers, documents, songs, videos, pictures, text, etc.), we have to encode it. Then if we want to retrieve the thing, we'd have to decode it. It's not a number until decoded as such -- and you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it.
I appreciate that you're mostly just trying to object to laws restricting data, it's just that the bit about data-being-numbers may detract from it by starting with a misstatement.
---
If it helps break the mental-association: even if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian? For example, is "1000" 8 or 1?
Or, if we insist that unsigned binary-integers are the fundamental encoding, then how could non-terminating numbers be stored, e.g. 1/3 or pi? Or even just non-integers or negative-integers, e.g. 1/2 or -1? Or, if we argue that data for those numbers isn't numbers until decoded as such, then why should we say that other data is numbers before decoding?
(Not that each point would need to be addressed, just, different thought-experiments that might help break out of the misconception.)
It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
Thanks for your interesting reply. I think it's the first time someone took this idea seriously and addressed it.
I don't see how it's a misconception. All data is a sequence of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers expressed in base 2. How could I be wrong here?
> you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it
> if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian?
To me this just means all data could be represented as multiple numbers. Mentally, I visualize binary sequences as big endian. It's totally possible that there is another number that represents the same data but with different endianness.
> Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like bags
There must be at least one number that represents it, that much is certain. I'm just not particularly sure how complex that number is because when I made this argument what I had in mind was discrete self-contained files.
I don't think I understand these other possibilities well enough to comment at the moment.
> It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see the distinction. If you can decode data as an integer, it must be equivalent to that integer.
We can come up with [encoding-conventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_number_format ) where any particular bit-string could map to any number. If we assert that decoding to a number under an encoding implies equivalence, then we'd have to say that all numbers are equal to each-other.
It's easy enough to avoid such absurdities by recognizing that data's just data; that, to get stuff like numbers, text, images, etc., we need to decode the data.
People will do that regardless of incentive. It's essentially a basic brain function, it can't be turned off. I'm discovering a new number right now by posting this comment.
People create cool new numbers all the time without worring about royalties and how-am-i-going-to-make-a-living-from-this-diddly-tune. Copyright is a way to commodify something deeply human to allow capitalists to make money from it. Put it this way, in a post-scarcity money-less world, musicians would still make cool new numbers, advertising people would not be creating any advertising numbers, they would probably make music as well.
But they get music for free either way - Youtube and others are broadcasting it. And now they want the legal right to restrict us from recording those broadcasts, no different than stopping us from recording radio.
They broadcast free of charge, and when we don't consume that broadcast in the manner they hoped, they use it to justify taking away our right to run software of our choosing. It's obscene.
If it's truly the starving artist we're all worried about, then it should be fine to pirate an album and mail the artist a check for $25, right? Everyone here who cares about the starving artist is cool with that?
I'm sorry, but you don't have complete "freedom" to achieve your own self interests. I once knew someone who was very interested in a car stereo. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for others who happened to own car stereos, that car stereo was in a car that belong to the police, and he definitely saw an even larger reduction in "freedom" after that.
And, even as a YouTube red subscriber, I like YouTube DL because it lets me create local
Copies of music from great concerts. Many artists release a lot more great live stuff than there are albums for.
What I learned is if you a find concert or something else you’d like to rewatch in the future - download it. Even if it’s legit video on legit yt channel, it could dissapear for number of reasona. And it’s not like - we’re taking it down from yt but you can watch it here for $5 or subscription or whatever. You typically can’t find it anywhere anymore.
That's happened to me so many times I started obsessively downloading the stuff I like. I must be on the way to becoming a data hoarder by now. It's just so incredibly aggravating, the video was right there a day ago and now it's gone. Feels like getting gaslighted. It's sad in an existential way too. The universe worked so hard to create that data and now it's just gone? Not if I can help it.
Comments like these always remind me of a particular time in the early 2010's when I was into 90's UK DnB. Good Looking Records had a bunch of songs published on their channel. I had a playlist with dozens of songs I've enjoyed and couldn't find anywhere else at the time. Then one day, poof all gone.
Granted, since then, a bunch of older DnB songs from this label resurfaced on YouTube, uploaded by various users. But it was a pretty dry couple of years for me. I was only able to find a couple of songs for sale on Discogs at the time, and many more lost because once deleted not even the artist/song name showed up in my playlist so I didn't know what to look for.
This. I use it to download music that is not for sale because they are either original content of small artists or they are covera and instrumentals; even if they fall under fair use, they can disappear forever and for no good reason.
There's a particular video I wanted to watch yesterday that I only remembered the title and that I loved it a decade ago. After 20 minutes of searching I found it was deleted, and the only way I could watch it was a random archive.org snapshot of the YouTube page.
First thing I did was download it and upload it somewhere else.
I was also surprised at this. Despite all the copyright claim controls, I was under the impression that YT was still the biggest source unauthorized music distribution.
This seems to me to be akin to bullying a mouse because bullying the elephant in the room isn't going to pan out.
They do things like this and then turn around and say "X will destroy the recording industry" and are surprised when voters start wondering why it's taking so long and asking if there are any legislative changes or tax incentives that could be used to assist X in its meritorious endeavor.
"Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help." - The front of a Dead Kennedy's tape released in the 80s. The recording industry's been beating the same drum since before I was born.
I don't care about the longevity of the record industry. Music is alive and well, with liberal distribution on the Internet making discovery and independent distribution so much easier. There's more music than ever, and much of it goes straight to YouTube (or Nico Nico).
Don‘t forget that many countries don‘t have spotify or any other streaming service.
These are countries with much lower GDPs, where buying a song for .99 is not an option.
Music is culture and important. Yes, it is important to be paid for your music, but it is more important for music to be heard. Piracy should live. Fuck the labels, fuck the whole music industry creating plastic „art“ that has no meaning whatsoever.
Let‘s make art, not money.
> Music is culture and important. Yes, it is important to be paid for your music, but it is more important for music to be heard.
If artists aren't paid for making art, much less art is created. So if music is important to you, you can't just ignore the question of how to pay for it.
It's nice to say "let's make art, not money", great soundbite, but artists are people just like everyone else, who deserve to be compensated for their work. And who can't live without having money to buy food.
I have worked in the music industry for a short time. Most people who claim they are artists, are not.
Let‘s talk about this differently. The impact of real art is way more important than a few plastic pseudo-art creating „i am special“ people not making money to live a life as an „artist“ / influencer on instagram…
Buuut: anyway.
> I don’t really know anyone that pirates music, seems like streaming has really solved that with ad-supported listening.
Someone's told them that "X million songs per year" are downloaded via youtube-dl. They get $Y in royalties per thousand views, and they have some number Z which is the average number of times an individual will listen to a song. There's been a boardroom meeting where these numbers have been presented as "X million songs per year are being pirated, costing us X * $Y * Z / 1000 per year, THIS must STOP!"
Streaming has largely defeated torrents, but anti-piracy people in the record companies want to preserve their jobs. So they've invented a bogeyman of massive stream-ripping going on amongst young people.
Especially since the recording industry has never been a friend to artists. They used to pay musicians a one off fee to come down to the studio and make some recordings, and didn't pay royalties, in the old days. Now they pay pennies on the dollar.
Meanwhile, independent music is thriving thanks to the Internet. Let it burn.
I'll just mention, because it hasn't been mentioned before: this is obviously wrong... We all know that it's wrong, but saying it has some symbolic meaning, right?
Because to find a counterexample you would only need a single artist who has the opportunity to spend more of their time working creatively (rather than their previous civilian job) because they get a royalty cheque every now and then. I personally know four of five such people.
I'm running what basically a prepaid SIM, meaning I don't use mobile data. Thus I do use yt-dlp/youtube-dl to download music so that I can listen to it offline. I'm actually quite proud by the system I've set up.
I've got a playlist called music into which I add music. ^^
On my mobile phone I've got Termux with an add-on that allows you to add widgets that run custom code.
I've written a simple script ( yt-dlp -P ~/storage/shared/Music -i -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --no-restrict-filenames --download-archive ~/music_archive.txt -x --audio-quality 0 <link to the playlist> ). Which is ran whenever I press on the widget. I could use crontab, but since I don't add music that often, I prefer to do it manually. ( The -o is for file name, normally the file would have the same name as the source, but for unknown reason so of my files' names for restricted to ~40 chars, doing it the way you see above solves the issue).
Before this system I used to have a similar script on my PC and crontab running it. The script downloaded music into Google Drive and on the mobile phone I had a program that would sync that folder with music to the phones music folder.
But the current system is far superior, for one it doesn't fill up my Google Drive and secondly it doesn't require multiple devices to work.
Being able to use a terminal on my phone makes me really happy! ^^
youtube-dl is what makes most youtube music ripping sites function. Which are widely used by people who aren't paying for music streaming subscriptions.
Which ruled in favor of Sony, that making personal copies of complete TV shows which you have access to is fair use, and that makers of such devices cannot be held liable as long as there are substantial non-infringing uses.
I suspect that GP didn't pick that example randomly, because youtube-dl is a pretty close analog of a BetaMax.
Which just makes it a generic ripping site because downloading YouTube videos is breaching the usage terms of the website in general.
"You are not allowed to: access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as specifically permitted by the Service; (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders; or (c) as permitted by applicable law;"
You just described youtube in general. As the old saying goes, "content is king". Look at VHS (if you're old enough to remember). As bad of a quality as it was, everyone used it. Pros would complain about how bad it looked, but the mass populace was just fine with it. Youtube is the same way. In the beginning, the quality was soooo bad, but users didn't care because it gave them endless content.
5 movies encoded to fit on a DVD-9 will still look much better than the typical VHS. They will also sound much better. Comparing DVD to VHS will always have DVD winning, unless the content was encoded from VHS.
I use paid youtube music and it seems high quality to me I can't tell a difference. Love having different stuff like Tiny Desk.
But more than the quality for the top 100 pop songs almost all the official music videos they now put in like interludes, breaks, talking over and stuff to cut it up so it's not just the song.
Makes listening harder. for those who come to watch the video too.
If the avg man knew the concept of an adblocker we would live in a different online world. I've seen people sit and watch 2 minute ads and or complain about how cramped pages are, they know they don't want ads and it's annoying but only a small percentage of that google "block youtube ads" and can click their way to install an extension etc.
That's my case - as I know that some music videos/clips will disappear soon or later for any reason (happened in the past), and as I cannot buy+download them then the only option I'm currently aware of is to download them with youtube-dl. It works reliably and it's simple to use.
In my case this often happens "in addition" to buying+downloading the song's mp3 (usually on Amazon).
I'm downloading them so I can listen without being randomly paused by youtube. Also ends up saving bandwidth massively, and mpv --no-video wastes far less cpu than firefox.
I just assume they are about 5+ years behind most of the population because in this kind of media stuff I tend to be about 4 years behind the population and a little over a year ago I decided ah, this using youtube-dl to download music etc. and rip it with ffmpeg and save it to my iphone is sort of a hassle I guess I will get that damn spotify membership like everyone else.
I mean obviously I am not the last person to make this decision, but I have a feeling that the population yet to do so are vanishingly small.
Some websites even make audio streams available separately. You can learn about those with the -F flag, and then select an audio stream with the -f flag. E.g. on youtube, you can use
You may be surprised that Spotify may have rather large holes in its coverage, and these holes are also dynamic: things recently available may become unavailable without notice.
I like to work to classic video game soundtracks. Streaming services are garbage for those, but YT is pretty good. You have to play whack a mole with copyright strikes, but somebody will upload most things. It's also the best way to listen to actual game music (the music designed to help you focus) as opposed to orchestral remasters, remixes, homages, etc.
RIP my most recent favorite Zelda background music vid.
I may have noticed that there are small holes, I suppose most of the things if they became unavailable I wouldn't notice as I practice the one big playlist method.
Schneir talked about putting contraband on the blockchain.
How many copies of youtube-dl and DeCSS and PlayStation 5 private keys and such need to get put onto the blockchain before the Music Industry tries to sue it out of existence?
I use youtube-dl to download Cracking the Cryptic videos. The RIAA does not own those videos. In fact there are quite a few videos on youtube the RIAA doesn't own.
>17 U.S.C. § 1008 bars copyright infringement action and 17 U.S.C. § 1003 provides for a royalty of 2% of the initial transfer price for devices and 3% for media.[20] The royalty rate in 17 U.S.C. § 1004 was established by the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998. This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. The royalty also applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers. Most recently, portable satellite radio recording devices contribute to this royalty fund.
>Thanks to a precedent established in a 1998 lawsuit involving the Rio PMP300 player, most MP3 players are deemed "computer peripherals" and are not subject to a royalty of this type in the U.S.
>Currently, private copy royalties are generated in the US by the sale of "blank CDs and personal audio devices, media centers, satellite radio devices, and car audio systems that have recording capabilities."[21]
Okay, that's a fair comment. However, I've never seen it apply to any device actually sold. Even in 1998, manufacturers just changed the label on blank CDs to evade the royalty.
Romania has something similar as well. If you own a business and want to play even ambiental/lounge music (even free music) you need to pay for a license. Of course the money collected that way doesn't go to the original artists.
While one could, it's not an idiom I (native speaker) have ever heard. I've heard "very few", but never "quite few", and I can see why hearing the latter might cause the listener/reader to mistakenly auto-correct it as "quite _a_ few".
But we don't only speak in idioms. "Quite" and "few" are some the least ambiguous words you can come across in English, "quite few" should be clear so long as you don't add words and substitute in your own meaning as the reader.
I think the idiom "quite a few" is arguably worse to use in a diverse audience since it means the opposite of "a few" and is one of the only times "quite a" is used to negate the meaning of what follows.
Using 'quite few' to mean the opposite of 'quite a few' as a non-native speaker is a terrible idea. It doesn't matter how correct it is, a large portion of native speakers are going to assume you mean 'quite a few' and have misheard or mispronounced it.
It's not like either phrase is wanting for totally unambiguous synonyms.
Perhaps so. But it certainly sounds distinctly odd to me. Fairly confident I have never used or heard the construction myself. (Native speaker, 43, southern UK.)
Don't assume. Not everybody is a native English speaker and able to pick up nuances such as when "quite a few" means "super many, lol" and when it means "a few" or "a bit more than a few".
(EDIT: TIL from the sibling comments that it always means "super many, lol" which surprised me) (I'm not a native English speaker)
To me, it sounds like music industry execs are not familiar with the Streisand effect. The first time I became familiar with Youtube-dl, it was during the Github DMCA PR fiasco. The number of stars for Youtube-dl increased sharply as soon as MS reviewed the decision and let them back online.
> music industry execs are not familiar with the Streisand effect
The Streisand Effect didn't save Napster or Popcorn Time. It could only save these people from the RIAA if they actually made enough money to fight the lawsuits and win.
For anyone wondering why: it is not consistently maintained anymore. I think I remember something about the owner of the repo steppung down? yt-dlp is an actively maintained, direct fork, with the same features and then some. It also solves an issue that has been lingering for months now where videos download painfully slow on youtube-dl.
Will the music industry sue the 1978 me, with the tape recorder right next to the radio, and me holding the "record" button to catch my favorite songs (along with the banter leading right up to the first lyrics)?
They should also get a royalty on cameras, because someone might take a photo of copyrighted cover art. Oh, and also a royalty on pens and paper, because someone might use them to write down copyrighted lyrics
I believe than in Portugal one pays a tax with every hdd or any device that might be used to ilegally store copyrighted content.
So I pay a tax for the eventuality of doing the thing I cannot legally do but at the same time if I already paid for it how can it still be ilegal?
Pretty much all over Europe but it's not for illegal copies: it's for legal copies as in "copy an LP you own to a cassette for use in a car" (that's the original use case).
Of course everybody knows that it's practically covering missed royalties from illegally copied content, but according to the letter of the law it isn't.
This is correct. Source: Portuguese man with a deep hatred for copyright protection institutions, motivated in large part by the introduction of that law.
Maybe impose a tax on our brains as well since it stores copyrighted data in our memories. Complete with mandatory brain chips that detect when you remember their data and charge your bank account automatically.
Isn't it the case that you can order from some of the more popular OEMs with Linux pre-installed, and they won't charge you the Microsoft licensing fee? I think Dell and Lenovo do this?
Maybe they do charge the Microsoft fee anyway, but I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't fix that issue.
Its still the case that if you are an OEM vendor, you need to make sure your hardware plays nice with the new versions of Windows. You better "cooperate".
Its difficult to describe all the behaviors they were engaged in.
"...The Complaint alleges that Microsoft has used its monopoly power to induce PC manufacturers to enter into anticompetitive, long-term licenses under which they must pay Microsoft not only when they sell PCs containing Microsoft's operating systems, but also when they sell PCs containing non-Microsoft operating systems..."
https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
As a reminder...They lost their case "United States v. Microsoft Corp." and June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft. They would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components. This was overturned on appeal on what can be only described as technicalities...
The Judge said: "...Microsoft proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing."
Politics changes in the US and the power of lobbying made everything to end up in a settlement that for most Microsoft has been ignoring or forgetting about.That is how much it took to make them open "some" API's
This one from the EU is one of the best overviews:
Short answer: yes, the music industry (and similar media industries) has historically fought tooth and nail against any technology that allows anyone to consume content in any way not directly controlled and monetized by the music industry. There's a well-documented history of media industries fighting against "time shifting."
No because that is not a loss-less copy. The quality is severely affect and that amount of damage you can potentially do to sales is minimal. EDIT: Completely forgot about the "tax" on blank media and tape records.
Anyway, if they didn't want people to be able to copy their stuff, then they shouldn't have put it on YouTube. The music industry is being as dumb as they ever where, it's fascinating that they've learned NOTHING in the past twenty years. How much money can they possibly lose on youtube-dl vs. how much money they continue the scam out of artists.
At this point who doesn't have a subscription to a streaming service? Those who don't where never going to pay anyway. They aren't losing money.
The funny thing is they did this to themselves. Consumers were perfectly happy with their regular HiFi stuff and records. But the recording companies and the big hardware manufacturers (notably: Philips, Sony, both owners of enormous music catalogs) would love to sell everybody an upgraded HiFi system and get them to buy all their music again. In a format so dense that no computer would ever be able to store that much information on a writable medium so pushing large numbers of lossless copies of music into the world was a no brainer. We all know how that ended.
Everything available on Youtube is not a lossless copy. Especially music is lossy-compressed and loudness-optimized, so lossless vs lossy isn't a valid argument here.
YouTube is just another streaming service, they make money by delivering their copyrighted material on it just like every other delivery method and people pirate via it just like every other delivery method. Choosing to put their content on YouTube isn't a dumb choice at all, it's one of the few sane things about the situation.
The music industry (in collusion with Congress) killed DAT with this same specious argument, when everyone knew that "perfect digital copies" were the LEAST-likely vector of attack on their industry.
The obvious and dominant form of music copying was with double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms and bedrooms around the world.
And in the end, the media publishers' lies about "perfect digital copies" were proven to be just that, as profoundly IMperfect MP3s became the real threat.
I love how "trusted" in this context basically means "against the will of the end user, enforced by the technological supremacy of hardware manufacturers".
I would've preferred submitting the article by netzpolitik.org [1] where I first encountered these news but as far as I am aware HN submission are required to be in english.
Any person capable of basic reasoning would understand that any information at all sent to your device could be written to a file for long-term storage. They can't expect people to accept that technology is magic and is sacred enough to not be thought about too hard.
I have been informed by lawyer friends, who have read the YouTube terms of service, that viewing the content from YouTube in any way other than on the YouTube webpage using an interactive user agent is a violation of the terms of service and keeping the file sent to you is a copyright violation, because YouTube didn't authorise such use. Obviously your browser's cache is allowed to keep a partial local copy, because it's doing it in the approved process of showing you the content in the approved manner.
That's all that legal fluff that shows how insane our society is sometimes. In reality, the service owner is no longer in control of what happens to their content after the bits physically leave their premises. No amount of legalese is going to change that and help enforce this. That's just the way information works. And unlike our artificial laws enacted by governments in the interest of corporations as opposed to regular people, this is a law of physics, so it treats everyone equally and no one gets to choose whether to follow it or not.
> the service owner is no longer in control of what happens to their content after the bits physically leave their premises
If course they are, in a legal sense. Copyright had no sense of bits, data or access. It just cares about licenses.
I'm also not sure that it is a great idea to try to ignore this law. Otherwise they just double down on DRM to ensure that they are the true owners of any devices those bits cross.
Copyright is next to impossible to enforce. Especially so since the majority people don't respect it in its current from, and the entertainment industry abuses it.
Laws that protect physical property and condemn violence are universally accepted and thus thoroughly enforced. If you see someone breaking into someone's house, you'd probably call the cops on them. If you see someone torrent a movie, you'd probably accept that as a perfectly normal thing to do, maybe a bit immoral, but definitely not worthy of real punishment.
And a law that isn't enforced is just a bunch of letters.
> Otherwise they just double down on DRM to ensure that they are the true owners of any devices those bits cross.
Any DRM system is by definition vulnerable to data extraction because the data has to eventually be presented in a form that can be perceived by a human. Even if you presume that the system is absolutely tight and you can't extract the raw stream without millions of dollars worth of equipment, there's always the "analog hole". And it only takes one recovered HDCP key to break the entire system.
> keeping the file sent to you is a copyright violation, because YouTube didn't authorise such use
Except that the copyright of the contents is with the creators, not YouTube. And also something being in the terms of use does not make it legal, and they cannot make fair use illegal.
I seriously doubt that this would be an issue at all if they believed it ended at "they kept it". They think youtube-dl (and similar programs) are enabling people to share these files widely, not just to save them.
I agree with you, and I think the music industry's abuse of the legal system should be criminal.
That said, they don't know if youtube-dl users are planning to share their files in torrents, upload them to random websites, etc. I think their goal is just to prevent anyone listening to music in DRM-free environments, regardless of how harmful of a crusade they have to go on.
Damn. I probably need to up my monthly fee for my different projects I host with them.
For more than 12 years now I host my web projects (nearly) exclusively with them. I really enjoy the way they are setup and structured.
You pay what 10GB of hosting is worth to you (min 1 Euro). Shared hosting without sudo. Great user support. Really helpful and real knowledgeable people actually trying to help.
I can't recommend them enough.
When I started I couldn't afford to pay more than a few bucks a month. Now using them professionally and hosting client projects there I can support them by paying more per month.
Sadly having to fight in the Hamburg doesn't help. In Germany the Hamburg court is known for their pro music industry stance.
Youtube-DL has been an incredible tool for a very long time. I have never used it for music, but I have used it for countless educational videos that I intended to use while on a subway or a transcontinental flight.
The experience of consuming media via an offline software is just infinitely better for my focus.
I would rather see Youtube die than Youtube-DL. Youtube-DL has a lot of use cases.
That's interesting. I don't personally pirate music (I like collecting CDs), but I know there are much better ways to do so. Some streaming services are so laughably insecure that you can straight up download lossless FLAC from them if you know where to look.
That can be done with bandcamp but ironically bandcamp is the one place I'd rather pay because they are a rare platform that's actually pretty good for the artists and listeners alike.
The more they are obsessed with taking down youtube-dl, the more they advertise it and let other people know that it exists, the more I feel like I'm doing the right thing using it on a daily basis.
Seriously, we're talking of a tool whose purpose is to download publicly available videos. What's the big deal? It's not even used for music piracy, for God's sake. I've never seen anyone download their favourite album from YouTube videos and use ffmpeg to extract the mp3s. Most of the folks just use Spotify.
So what's the big deal? That if we use youtube-dl then we don't see ads and we don't get tracked? Oohh, actually that's the whole fcking point, you know? youtube-dl pisses lots of people in the majors not because it's used to illegally download musical content (I'm pretty sure that's only an insignificant fraction of its usage), but because it hurts their "new" way of doing revenue: ads, tracking, and more ads.
And you know what? I'm more than happy to hurt such a shtty way of doing revenue!
Yes, you can do that. I tend to use that for rare and hard to get music (e.g. obscure iranian 60s stuff).
However cutting the full albums apart and tagging the resulting songs is serious work that I don't think a lot of people would do realistically in times of spotify.
I once used this tool for downloading music into SD cards for our car, this was when we were on road trips I sometimes capped out my data. But I used my spotify playlists to direct the youtube downloads, so I already had some paid access to the same music. Nowadays its just not a problem any more, and I simply use spotify directly.
Only in browser. I'd be very happy to hear of an ad-blocking solution for the Android app... I mean I've heard of ad-blocking VPNs but other than that?
Why is that streamers and videos on youtube can't play music but xxx web cam models are allowed to? I really don't understand it. Every cam model plays whatever their heart desires.
Might not be the best place to ask this, but its something I wonder about a lot.
Streamers as well as web cam models _aren't_ allowed to play random music, they just do.
The only time it's allowed is when they have the appropriate licenses. (sync license under DMCA for music synchronized to live streams)
Streamers were doing this without repercussion 5 years ago because the streaming industry wasn't large enough for the music industry to care about. That changed about two years ago.
The same holds for cam models, it's just that they're not getting claims for whatever reason. Maybe the music industry just isn't that focused on live pornography?
This might be the answer. Peloton in their early years also just streamed whatever music they liked as part of their workout streams, at some point they got big enough to get on the radar of the music industry and now they have to pay royalties.
Streamers and other popular YT channels rely on ad revenue from their YT channels. If they play content-id-ed music, the revenue from those videos might go to the music rightsholders instead. For channels which aren't going to be able to get ad revenue due to their content not being "advertiser-friendly" this is not a concern, since they make their money elsewhere.
At the same time, "music industry" has the worst behavior in total impunity:
Like, for example, how at the beginning of January 2022, Sony Music Entertainment had got ALL the legitimate Youtube videos of the Vienna New Year's Concert forbidden to stream in Japan...
This is yet another example of abuse of the fact that Youtube, confronted with a copyright infringement report, will first just block the reported video, and only after that will consider appeals...
So now all these videos are allowed again. (took several weeks)
"With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser."
I could argue that the software is a web browser, admittedly one tailored around a specific use case.
I feel the music industry has to do a better job explaining how downloading a youtude video via the youtube-dl user agent is different than downloading the same video via the firefox user agent.
The music industry has no explanation for anything. Its entire existence is based on made up concepts that are irrelevant in the 21st century, ideas such as copyright. To actually explain things is to prove their own irrelevance.
They're not like us, they don't know or care what user agents are. The only thing that matters to them is control. To them, the idea that someone might do something they didn't approve of is an atrocity that must be combated at all costs. They actually think that browsers are glorified passive content consumption platforms where they get to set the rules and it's take it or leave it. Even something as basic as user scripts is an affront to them because it means the user is not a passive consumer anymore.
What does this drivel even mean? What interest does the music industry specifically have against anything but "passive consumers"? It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?
What's the music industry's fear? People making their own remixes and becoming too powerful, rhythmically? No. They don't like people not paying. People don't like paying. Therefore they avoid it. It's not courageous nor morally repugnant, but the motivation is entirely self-interested and the result is mildly negative for the actual people working in creative industries.
This "drivel" means exactly what I wrote: there is no acceptable explanation for anything they do. Nothing they say will ever change the fact that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with the 21st century, the age of free flowing information.
> It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?
Shallow?
These corporations have robbed the whole world of our public domain rights. They lobbied the US government multiple times until they made copyright duration functionally infinite. They use the US government to impose their copyright on the rest of the world. They work on DRM which means they are completely opposed to the computing freedom we all enjoy today and are atively working to undermine it. And on and on.
Of course copyright infringement is active citizenry. It's civil disobedience and at this point it's a moral imperative. To pay them even one cent is to empower them to do even worse.
What does this drivel even mean? Everyone likes to be paid. Everyone does not like to pay. Digital technology has eliminated media scarcity. Some people want to artificially create scarcity so that other people are forced to pay them. Fortunately it is pretty obvious to most people that there is no real advantage to anyone in society to artificially create this scarcity.
As far as I can tell, the copyright mafia's legal action plan is "throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks".
MPA tried to get the source code repository for Nyaa.si removed from GitHub by saying "the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows)."
It was completely bullshit since they forgot to mention that the project provides everything necessary to engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows EXCEPT the actual copyrighted motion pictures and television shows. The repo is back up after a reversal: https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/
That analogy would work if countries with large numbers of privately owned handguns were as safe as (otherwise comparable) countries where such guns were banned.
I think we can agree at least that countries which ban communication tools have worse human rights records than countries which don't restrict them as much.
Also, I don't dispute the media industry's premise that a government which had complete control over all software installed on people's computers could decide to reduce the amount of copyright infringement.
I used youtube-dl as my primary way to consume YouTube content (mostly lectures and podcasts) for a year when I had very limited internet access.
youtube-dl -f bestaudio [url]
then convert to 12kbps Opus with
ffmpeg -i [file] -b:a 12K [file].opus
I could even do this from my phone over SSH but eventually made a simple web frontend for it. I haven't opened it to the public though, because of, well, news stories like this one.
I still do this. I never watch youtube videos on youtube anymore. It's a better experience. VLC is a better player, there are no ads, there are no comments, there are no recommended videos trying to bait me, and I don't even have to enable javascript for google's domains.
I still do because Firefox doesn't support hardware video decoding on Linux in any of my machines. Though I use mpv, which then uses youtube-dl in the background.
Often yes, but it'll be much higher quality than 12Kb/s. But 12Kb/s is plenty for human speech to be comprehensible, though you'll generally notice the quality loss.
Plus, I haven't studied this but I don't think they reencode all old content. New videos seems consistent but older videos can have varying things available. Using bestaudio & ffmpeg will definitely get you a consistent result. I can't promise hard-coded -f options for specific formats will be reliable.
Also, Opus is actually two codecs. You'll only see CELT, the general purpose codec, from about 32kbps and up. But at super low bitrates it uses SILK, a speech codec. At 12kbps you'd very probably see the hybrid mode, where SILK does the bulk of the work but CELT handles frequencies above 8kHz.
So youtube is already Opus, but it's not already SILK.
On a technical level you're right, of course. But the industry is more concerned with how content is delivered to non software savvy people (the vast majority). So controlling the tools leads to less overall downloads (in theory anyways.)
They'd probably have the same issue if youtube added a "download as audio" button to every video without paying studios.
The law isn't based around technical gotcha's but instead on how human judges judge things. It doesn't matter that, if in some very techincally-correct viewpoint, youtube-dl is in theory performing the same actions as a browser. youtube-dl is not a browser, you and I both know that.
User agents aren't "technical gotchas", they're a fundamental concept of the internet we enjoy today. Browsers are merely one type of user agent.
If you make content available via HTTP, then obviously any HTTP client will be able to access it. It doesn't matter that they "meant" for the content to be accessed through browsers.
If they had a proprietary client that wasn't a browser, they wouldn't be complaining at all. So why does it matter? It's about control. It's the fact that user agents act in our behalf in order to do what we want and protect our interests. They want to force us to use something that acts on their behalf, does what they want and protects their interests.
This isn't about "human judges". Those are all paid for. Industry lobbyists literally create the laws that they blindly enforce.
No, this is about a stealthy war that's being fought for the control of our computers. There will never be peace between us. Either the entire copyright industry will be destroyed or we will lose the computing freedom we all currently enjoy and the entire concept of "hacking" will be a footnote of history.
No. The law is very clear that you are allowed to make copies. For some time now you are not allowed anymore to circumvent copy protection for that, which is an illegal law but still standing, but even this is not happening here. The industry has no leg to stand on, this is just terror-by-suing, trying desperately to stiffle fundamental rights of german people.
I'm not defending the industry or the case at all. I'm just saying that saying "youtube-dl is technically a browser", and letting the defense rest its case, is the kind of technically-correct nonsense that often gets written on HN but would never work in the real world.
That's not nonsense, it's very relevant to this case and just the facts. That the judges in Hamburg are not suspectible to facts or reality is on them, not on HN.
And actually, it is what an expert courts should and do commission in such cases would explain.
They would certainly agree. Most of their work involves playing the cat-and-mouse game of youtube-dl vs. YouTube, all coming from the fact that YouTube never intended people to view their content using youtube-dl.
IANAL, but things like the computer misuse act literally say how someone means their computer/server to be used is the correct way to use it. Trying to do things not originally intended is hacking, and youtube clearly don't want you downloading videos unless you pay for Youtube Plus (and even then it's still just into the app, not a seperate mp4).
Interesting, I recommended somebody to take a look at Uberspace just yesterday. I can't personally vouch for them because I haven't had a project fitting the profile, but they seem extremely nice mostly partly due to their pricing structure.
I can't help but imagine how amazing things would be if we didn't have such an insane copyright system. With the internet and today's tech there's no reason why the full contents of every book ever written shouldn't be available instantly. Same with media. Instead, art, culture, and knowledge are being lost all because a small number of people want to control access and play gatekeeper.
I think it is great. You can buy DRM-free lossless music from countless sources like Bandcamp or Qobuz. And if you don't want to bother with that there's always Spotify & Co., which gives you access to a pretty large catalogue of music for a very reasonable price.
Youtube could make the penalty much higher. They don't want to because they know that working with content creation corporations is good for business, and over deletion doesn't hurt their bottom line at all.
Youtube isn't the party that should be punishing these take-downs. They might be able to apply some pressure to them but only through threatening to remove the DMCA sidestepping process which, honestly, benefits everyone. This is a case of folks with a lot of money persecuting folks with very little money - and that scenario breaks our current legal system. I think we need better support (and a restoration of the removed rights that were sidelined into forced arbitration) for class actions or other styles of group lawsuits. Amicus briefs from prestigious institutions and advocacy groups are surprising effective in this space already - but you can still get really boned when you have a winning case but not enough money to actually win it.
It's still far from optimal though, with that system it is still way too easy to do legal bullying. If you draw out a legal case long enough the coverage of legal expenses for the defendant does matter less and less (still better than not having it, of course!), because the financial pressure can still do permament damage that might not be easily reverted, add to that the intimidation and potential crippling of work/career/brand/profession of the defendant if any of those are part of the legal battle.
Companies can still calculate the costs of losing the case and come to the conclusion that the benefit of the intimidation alone is worth it.
This can have a chilling effect - if you are a legitimately wronged party you still might be hesitant to engage in a legal battle if some technicalities failing to be technicalities could result on you losing everything you've ever earned in life when you get hit with a suit to recover legal fees.
I think we sorta want more proactive and aggressive state attorneys that will prosecute seen injustices for the public good. I've pondered this a lot and I can't really see any obvious other path that doesn't have even worse potential consequences.
Make both parties start in non-binding arbitration, where the plaintiff pays.
If either party chooses to escalate, they'll be on the hook for all the fees, including the original arbitration, if they loose.
Plaintiffs could purchase insurance or some other vehicle to de-risk their claims if they believe, but aren't certain, that they'll win. This will help smaller parties that get infringed upon.
If anything it would make it worse. For those who are making a little over ends meet, a small percentage loss could put them under the threshold, whereas those with far more than they need can afford to lose a larger portion of their wealth.
More fundamentally, the purpose of such measures is explicitly to discourage the bringing of suits - anything big enough to be a viable deterrent to bad faith actors will inevitably also be big enough to deter good faith actors.
It might make sense if potential legal liability was limited to your own expenditure (though that might get complicated with self-representation). For instance if you've spent 30k on a defense vs. a company that put in 20M - you'd be on the hook for 30k or some multiplier/proportion of that. It'd essentially be a one-way filter: little guys get protection and bigger companies receive almost none - but it might also be exploitable by legal trolls filing bogus suits with essentially no liability exposure.
The law of the law be a complicated and harsh mistress.
I agree. In addition, multiple occurrences of wrongful copyright assertion should result in losing existing copyrights. If you abuse the system, you should lose the ability to protect future work.
I mean, the obvious alternative is simply "no copyright". The world existed before it, and people created things without it.
Anyways, less extreme would be that we could go back to reasonable copyright terms as existed a hundred years ago. It seems likely at this point that our current 'experiment' with extreme copyright enforcement is going to produce an entire 100+ year range where the only works that will survive will be those owned by massive corporations who hold perpetual ownership of the work instead of their actual creators.
These "industries" forget that public domain is the default. It's natural, it's just how things are. Copying is not just trivial, it is natural. People infringe copyright every single day without even realizing what they are doing.
The fact is society is doing them a huge favor by pretending their works are scarce. In return they abuse our good will and erode our public domain rights. All we have to do is stop pretending. Start treating everything as public domain. That ought to be enough of a reality check to an industry that thinks it can monopolize numbers for hundreds of years.
Nobody cares how much money they spent to make stuff either. They don't get to deny reality just because they spent money.
Not parent, but if you ask me[0]: nothing. The world is not starved for creative content, there is little reason to continue incentivizing its creation so massively. People have shown quite willing to continue creating even while receiving nothing at all for their trouble, and we can always donate money to the people who's work we want to support.
Yes, it means no more Disney movies or AAA games. I'm personally quite ok with that.
[0] This is largely for the sake of argument, although I do definitely lean this direction.
A society that provides for its people without restricting freedom of information.
There's nothing wrong with protecting trade secrets, etc. but that is the onus of the secret holder to employ proper security measures. If someone assaults those measures, you prosecute them for those specific assaults (physical, cyber, etc).
But you don't prosecute people merely for being in possession or distributing "intellectual property" i.e. ideas and symbols. Only a backwards society would allow that.
The alternative is people figure out a way to get paid before or while they're creating. Because after the work is done and published, it's over. Artificial scarcity isn't gonna save creators anymore.
YouTube really somehow reacts to the use of third-party utilities for viewing video. Recently noticed that youtube-dl and vlc downloaded video stream with long delays. Stream receiving rate never exceeded 50-60 kbit/sec. One of the youtube-dl forks somehow bypasses this limitation
Good, let the Streisand effect flow through them.I encourage people to host youtube-dl(& it's forks) on GH, Gitlab and things like IPFS.
A tool is not piracy.This is not even an argument, let alone a stupid one ,alongside the idiocy of one who believes it.The web already becomes cancerous enough with DRM [Ex: Try installing a FOSS-only system, let's say fedora + librewolf and try playing anything w/o installing flash or drm plugins].
They would probably rather claim copyright for the sound of a hammer and sue you if you use a hammer because a sample of a hammerstrike was used in some popular song.
I would sincerely have thought that youtube-dl would be hosted on some random non-cooperative country, instead of Germany. That it wasn't, came out as a surprise to me.
Its coming to a point where the pages and code for these projects would need to be mirrored in so many places that it would simply become impractical for any entity to try to take them down, while still being easiy accessible to all who want to use them.
They’ll never stop people from doing this unless they make it impossible to hijack audio, which doesn’t seem realistic, assuming we always have pure hardware interfaces for audio.
If these interfaces go away, the future of music won’t be nearly as much fun as it is now.
"youtube-dl" plugin has one neat idea with respect to tests. Both the test and the plugin code for a particular website are in the same file.If the website changes and breaks the plugin updating the tests is much easier way to fix the code. This makes sure tests are always updated, rather the other way of not updating the tests due to no incentive since the problem is already solved which leads to tests being useless.
Google itself doesn't have sufficient monopoly status to be able to take that step. There are YT alternatives which would jump all over that opportunity.
Counter-promote the music industry. Stop feeding them etc.
Many of us had to start doing that - some, particularly as DRM made purchases unfeasible (you buy a container and it only works on a section of Pioneelips models, or it works on the PC but not in the car stereo etc).
I used one of these today, to download "deez nuts" and send that lovely vod as embedded in a signal message.
I am not everyone, so I assume my use case would explain much of the usage pattern for the service.
I am likely wrong.
How much more cases like this do we need to switch to a decentralized (either via blockchain, torrent, IPFS or something else) so that no one can stop freedom to shre code anymore?
Decentralized services need to be much faster and responsive than they are now, and if they would really work for this purpose, then they'll be shut down by some law - like how encrypted transmission is banned on ham radio frequencies[0]. So the most we can enjoy is the small times the mouse is winning in the cat and mouse game. No "anymore" or anything like that.
I believe this is about websites that provide streaming site link to audio file conversion services. There are some apps on Google Play store that do this as well. Internally I presume they all use ytdl
youtube-dl doesn't do anything that couldn't be done with a handful of curl commands; it just simplifies all the requests to the YouTube APIs. ... Oh shit, they're gonna come after curl next! LOL
Entertainment industry legal shit is beyond stupid. I’ve heard of one person’s pirated music and movie collection that exceeded the GDP of most first world countries, going by the numbers the industry gets awarded in civil suits. They literally just tell the courts how much money they’d like and it gets rubber stamped.
If you have money and an army of good attorneys, you usually get what you want.
> pirated music and movie collection that exceeded the GDP of most first world countries
On a similar premise, there is a novel where aliens have been pirating music from Earth and are contemplating their options with respect to their legal liabilities.
There was a meme a while back (which was completely accurate), about how the minimum sentence for uploading a Michael Jackson album was less than the sentence the doctor got for literally killing Michael Jackson.
I hope they do take the website down as long youtube-dl stay on github. I want a high technical barrier of entry so the common folk can't conveniently rip off Billy Eilish videos. If only techies and journalists use it responsibly, then the music biz doesn't care, much like archive.is stays up because Mom and Pop don't know they can read the Wall Street Journal for free with it.
