The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:
The legal defense of youtube-dl is premised on the idea that there's no circumvention occurring [0]. I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything... it seems obvious to me that YouTube is trying to put up roadblocks and we're trying to get around them. I would feel better if we could find a way to defend ytdl without the pretense of acting like this cat-and-mouse game isn't going on.
I thought the most recent legal argument was the 2019 hiQ Labs Inc v LinkedIn Corp[0], in which the Ninth Circuit found web scraping to be legal, and forbid LinkedIn from blocking web scrapers. The exact same argument can be made for accessing YouTube via youtube-dl.
The article does indicate that the decision in hiQ v LinkedIn was vacated by SCOTUS following the 2021 Van Buren v United States [0], to be retried by the Ninth Circuit. However, I'm not seeing a way that the decision in Van Buren would change the outcome, as it concluded that the CFAA did not apply to cases where somebody is legally allowed to access a computer at all.
Discussed on HN before: Court: Violating a site’s terms of service isn’t criminal hacking (2020) [1] (probably other discussions as well). My comment on this one:
> ... it's the webmaster's own responsibility to "just not serve" if they don't want it to be served, and their failure to implement their own desires as software doesn't suddenly give them carte blanche to claim whatever they want was breaking the law. ... The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables.
>The fact that Microsoft is too lazy to implement a solution that effectively implements their desired policy isn't material to what the actually implemented policy enables
This implies that at some point someone would be able to say, we have tried to implement a policy, we have spent this many man hours of engineers, we have had 5 different solutions that were broken through, at some point these things must become hacking.
So long as the https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole exists, piracy cannot be stopped. The ever-escalating arms race between content and consumers will go on, but there will be no victory, only collateral damage.
If you have content people value but they aren't willing to pay for it, find out why. Maybe it's because you're charging too much, running too many ads, making it hard to cancel, or they just don't actually value it all that much. In YouTube's case, I would say that for the vast majority of content and the vast majority of users on the site, the content is worth approximately $0.00 to them, and the content is not so crucial that a few unskippable ads in a row will have most users just saying "forget it" and finding something else to do.
Yes, pointing a camera at a monitor is more work and worse quality than getting the original video with best-quality-possible [compressed] audio, but no amount of laws can prevent people from doing that if they really value the content highly.
if that becomes the only avenue to rip a movie wide spread distribution of said movie with out permission will die
The idea that you would have lots of people getting up camera's and monitors to record a movie for distribution on the internet is laughable, and it would be a cam quality today so you would just end up with the early releases capture via someone setting in a theater which are generally poor quality
I think software can create a good version of a video taken from a middle-tier camera. My 8-year-old DSLR, Nikon D750, can take 4k video at 60fps. Its sensor has more dynamic range than even high-end screens can produce. When I take a picture of my TV I can see individual pixels. That camera can capture every bit of info my screen is putting out. I bet from a 4k/60fps video from my camera you can process it to produce something closer to a 1080p/30fps BlueRay rip.
This was not the case with handy-cam theater rips. Those things were at best 480p and could never capture the picture projected on a screen even in the best conditions.
Then people will make a complex device that hooks in where the LED/LCD grid does and converts the signals intended to drive the panel into a video feed for recording. And making a device that directly takes the output of a Bluetooth device's DAC (or even grabbing the digital output directly) should be even trivial.
It wouldn't be easy, and would need some adjustments for colorspace etc but this is a method I have seen discussed online before.
The speaker part is much easier. At some point in almost all modern audio systems, there will be a PCM signal as part of the DAC step. Hook in here, pipe that signal to a computer's audio in / microphone port, and you've got a pretty clean audio stream.
Poor quality but they still exist. If all digital versions were made unfeasible, you can bet good money that camripping would become more popular - and probably result in better-quality approaches at some point.
You gave me an idea if someone was to design a small display attached to a camera paired specifically to capture high quality video not just someone propping up a camera but where external light was blocked and the image size and camera are perfectly matched with an audio input as well they may have a market.
In theory, HDCP is supposed to prevent such use, by cryptographically verifying that the video isn't going to a device able to copy the media. Keys can be revoked by, say inserting a disc with a new set of revocations on it (alongside the media).
If you want to play such media, you have to license keys from Intel and show that your design is hostile to copying.
I was just thinking with vendors making hardware more hostile and if they made that not a possibility where an external camera defeats that. If a capture card works then that seems even easier and if youtubedl is under attack maybe that is how people will do it but one thing is for sure, people will do it.
We're not being a little too cute. If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl, given all of those are HTTP clients. Saying otherwise would be setting a dangerous precedent of trying to legislate which HTTP clients are allowed and which are disallowed.
Surely the fact that a single blemish exists does not imply that we should just curl up in a hole and admit defeat. The fact that Widevine exists does little to damage the core of the above argument.
My point is that this is fundamentally not a viable argument anymore:
> If you are supposed to be able to access YouTube from Firefox or Chrome, then you are also supposed to be able to access it via youtube-dl
Were this an axiom, services like Netflix simply could not exist. We're defeated whether we admit it or not – browser DRM is not being yanked from browsers anytime soon. That's not even talking about its forebears, like Silverlight, Flash, Applets, etc.
The difference is DRM is a technical-only measure in most countries. The services employing DRM are scumbags, but they're welcome to try it.
That doesn't mean that ridiculous positions such as trying to legally forbid access to a website other than through a handful of sanctioned browsers is going to fly.
I can go to an all you can eat restaurant with my empty stomach. I can’t go to an all you can eat restaurant with an empty garbage bag to fill up with food for later.
It's a cute analogy, except it fails to explain why youtube-dl is the garbage bag in this instance.
If we step away from analogies for a bit, are you actually arguing that we shouldn't have the ability to modify the markup and the code before we display it on our computers?
If you insist on making a cute physical analogy, a more apt one would be of a tyrant buying out all the stores and allowing free entry on the condition that people's eyelids are forcibly taped open before they enter. After some reasonable people start removing the tape from their eyelids, the tyrant throws a tantrum and attempts to legislate away removing eyelid tape.
> it fails to explain why youtube-dl is the garbage bag in this instance
No it doesn't.
The buffet lets me eat as much as I want while I'm in their restaurant following their house rules. The garbage bag lets me take food out of the restaurant and consume a much larger amount of food however/whenever/wherever I choose – something the restaurant has forbid me to do according to their rules.
This feels very much like what Youtube DL allows me to do.
> are you actually arguing that we shouldn't have the ability to modify the markup and the code before we display it on our computers?
I’m not arguing you shouldn’t have that ability.
Morally, I feel I’m bound to play by the rules of the service if I want to use that service. If they’re showing ads I find distasteful, then I don’t use that service. I don’t find some technical workaround that allows me to do something that I believe is fundamentally immoral.
The same as I wouldn’t take a garbage bag to a buffet, I won’t block ads on YouTube (or anywhere for that matter). In fact, I love that YouTube lets me pay $10 a month to not view ads. Are they still tracking me? Probably. Do I care? Not at all.
Thanks for answering, I really appreciate it because it helps me to better understand your position.
I do feel the same general impetus not to be an ass to people. Not bringing a trash bag to steal all food from a buffet for myself is a part of my rule set too.
However, I feel strongly that websites are not very much alike to a physical place in which I have to observe the rules of the host. In fact, I cannot bring myself to view the website's code as rules.
To consider a web where I am merely a passive consumer of content served to me by an active publisher goes counter to the very nature of the open web with which I have grown up. The opposite view makes much more sense to me: I am an active participant and the website is the passive information vessel.
A malicious website enforcing its will on me feels like a decidedly perverted concept. My best attempt to explain why would be to liken it to an evil magic book which, upon being brought into my home, attempts controlling and limiting my behaviour. It is the book that is the guest inside my house and not the other way around!
I also do care about tracking quite a lot. I do not want to be tracked. To track me against my will feels like an act of aggression, or at least rude and distasteful, quite similar in tone to the actions of the rude garbage-carrying patron in your example.
> The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:
Can not reply with the entire situation but I would not be surprised if Google does not care enough to stop the project through other means but tries to reduce mindless zombie-bots from sucking up bandwidth all day long. If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes.
Irrespective of that, the complaining party is the RIAA and not Google or YouTube in name.
> I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything
I think the optics are a little different when it's a third party internet service as the medium, but 'we' are still arguing what constitutes fair-use of DRM protected physical media. :-(
>> If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes.
This has been happening more and more recently - seriously slow playback when my Internet access is still ~1gbps on all other sites including fast.com/netflix, or Google Drive.
> If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes.
I'm not sure if that's still the case today, but in my case it used to be because of a dispute between Google and Free/Proxad (a French operator) which led to limited peering for years.
I'm pretty sure in your case it's also just anemic peering capacity between your ISP and Google, rather than Google as a whole lacking bandwidth. I haven't noticed anything at all here for example.
As I read that post, the circumvention applies only to a throttling control, not an overall access control. Since it should have been just as easy (if no easier) to simply block unofficial clients instead of throttling them, it seems like a clear argument that Google does not intend to block 3rd party Downloader, but merely give preferential treatment to first party ones.
If you by that argument. Then bypassing the protection might be illegal, but would not be a copyright issue, and Google would be the only one with standing to sue.
The throttling is so severe it is effectively blocking. The throttling goes down to 50KiB/s on my PC trying to download a basic youtube video. That around 0.4mbps which puts you barely around the bandwidth needed to stream a very low quality 360p/480p video. For reference, this video is about 2 minutes long and that's how long it took me to download it via the last version of youtube-dl:
Maybe it's a compromise because they still have their own legacy versions of the client that can't support the new scheme and yet need to remain at least semi-functional?
I'm sceptical there is a long-term solution for people to have all the content available on YouTube (and similar services) accessible by the freedoms we experienced in 1995-2005. You choose either the range of content, or the freedom of choice in how you access it.
>I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it
Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23 years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take input/output control away from the user, this required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and windows 11 are the beginning of you not being able to run or play files or exe's over the next 20 years as youtube, netflix, the game industry update their software to use TPM.
Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and other software companies will control. They are removing ownership of our devices and they needed microsofts help to do that.
We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via update. Many UWP games only work on certain versions of windows.
They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was also pushing forced internet connection hard for home users.
Kind of insane that we’re turning our glorious revolution of cheap, general purpose computers back into TV’s in the name of protecting Big Copyright from a niggling amount of infringement.
You'll be locked out of using your hardware's full potential, same goes for the software and media you use, too. Look at how Nvidia already locks nouveau developers out of using their GPUs' full power with cryptography.
There are already non mainstream OEMs you can buy hardware from that won't have this problem. System76, entroware, Purism (laptops+smartphones), Frame.Work (not only Linux laptops) and other Linux manufacturers are there to serve you. On the mobile space there is Purism, Pine64 and FairPhone.
In our dystopian future, if you want ownership of a computing device you 'll need buy a nieche one.
Unfortunately that is so. In that case I 'd recommend (used or older) laptops compatible with linux and (older) phones known to be compatible with LineageOS (or postmarketOS if you are adventurous). This "solution" may not work everywhere in the world but hopefully it will cover a not insignificant part of non EU/US/UK.
One of the best purchases I ever made was a le eco le pro 3 phone once the company went bankrupt for half the retail price 5 years ago. Bought it because it already had LineageOS support. Today it runs Lineage OS 18.1 (android 11) like a champ, it can be make to run bank apps (passing safetynet) if I want to. Still lineage OS is not a silver bullet you either need to get lucky and pick a phone with a big enough following that volunteer devs will support or scout XDA threads in order to identify those phones before purchasing.
> Look at how Nvidia already locks nouveau developers out of using their GPUs' full power with cryptography.
The problem is not cryptography, the problem is copyright.
Nouveau could in theory upload the signed firmware blob from a legitimate driver to the GPU and build an interface to communicate with it. The problem is, the legitimate driver package prohibits any kind of modification outside the intended purpose, which means it's questionable if building and redistributing a tool to extract the firmware blob out of a driver package is legal, and it's certainly not legal to redistribute that extracted blob.
Here in Europe, at least the building and distribution of the tool as well as the act of the user to download the legitimate driver package, extract and use the blob should be legal, but that doesn't help if the developers of the project are outside of the EU :(
Maybe "full potential" could have multiple meanings. For example, one user might focus on hardware performance^1 while another might focus on hardware flexibility. Freedom, doing whatever it is they wish with the hardware they have purchased.
1. Only applicable to an "approved use" of the hardware.
As long as you are able to purchase sufficiently fast hardware that lets you run other OSes and don't want to play games or watch videos on that hardware I guess.
Creator revolt is the only way it seems to force the issue. If everyone started using a open-source medium of storing data and simply extended that to the other platforms, it would take away their control of the medium with which it is presented.
Except for the fact that filecoin advertises the ability to use DRM to protect NFTs ... or something. I have no idea what this post says except for a lot of buzzwords and something related to DRM
I did. If you're a developer, for a personal machine it's both easy and straightforward (I have work provided machines that use other OS's but that's outside the scope of this post). Do a little research on HW that works well with Linux (I went all AMD). Purchase, wipe, install distro of your choice (I went with Manjaro, because of Arch, doesn't really matter). It's been about 2 years and I haven't had a single serious issue (serious as defined here is, can't boot or non-functional HW). I'm running most of the latest stuff, Sway on Wayland, pipewire, etc...
Better yet. Buy from a company that won't charge you for the Windows licence you don't want.
I'm a developer. I am also exclusively a nix/BSD user for about the past decade; my machines, servers, my wife's laptop, my work laptop etc, all nix/bsd.
When I bought my personal XPS 13 I contacted DELL customer support to buy a "Developer" version, it took 3 weeks to ship because they had to build it, rather than provide an off-the-shelf box with Windows pre-installed, but I saved something like £43.
It's not about the money, but I would rather have it in my pocket than give it to Microsoft for some software I _really_ don't want (or need).
Side note, I'm planning on buying a Framework next.
Not a good alternative for the big middle distribution of computer skills of the computer user base. Web browser only? Great. Highly skilled? Great. Everyone else? It can be a nightmare. Linus' Linux Challenge videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M) provide excellent insight into the typical user experience for anyone beyond web browser only requirements and beneath administrator level. If you find yourself saying "what an idiot, how did he not know that "do as I say" would mangle his OS," you're definitively in the highly skilled camp.
Linux UX convention relies on the terminal as a matter of course. Almost everything not in the package manager requires use of the terminal. Even many of the package managed applications require tweaks and configuration via terminal. It's an open secret that package managers are largely inferior to the terminal anyway, in every distribution. The almost universal response to "I am having an issue with the package manager" is "use terminal." Bottom line: terminal is far less user friendly than an object oriented environment, and is often much slower. Until a flavour of Linux exists which never ever, for any reason ever, requires the use of the terminal, Linux will remain in the low single digits in terms of consumer market share. I don't think this will change, because if you ask the average Linux developer what they think of the terminal convention, they love it, and they think users just need to stop sucking so much.
Whenever people mentioned Linux UX and computer knowledge I always feel like I should evangelize that Zorin OS is alive and well, now at Zorin Core 16.
I use it for my parents, after they got fed up with Windows warnings and pop-ups for Windows 10 upgrade.
I am not sure they full understand they are using Linux, they just assume it is a 'free' windows version.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've never used it so I'll boot up a VM and give it a go.
I will be honest with you: I don't expect Zorin to have solved the CLI problem. For example, Radarr is an extremely popular tool for managing movies. It connects to usenet and torrent clients, as well as indexers and movie databases. It makes maintaining a home movie collection seamless.
Radarr is not in major package managers, and requires the CLI for install (https://wiki.servarr.com/radarr/installation#linux). In Windows, I double click an .exe. On Zorin (I assume) I will have to follow a reasonably complicated and time consuming installation process, full of opportunities to misconfigure the install.
This is just one example of many. Radarr isn't a super hardcore 1337 program. It's a very common application aimed at everyone who runs Plex. Until Zorin has a .exe equivalent for all applications like this, it's just not going to be a competitor to Windows, for users who need more than just a web browser, and those who are not IT administrators.
Zorin 16 is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3, so everything you are used to is still there. The only difference is in the UI, with 'Windowish' looking widgets and a focus on usability for non-technical folks.
There are some more extra bells and whistles, as well as service support, in the pro version but I haven't used those in my family computers so I can't comment on that.
I don't want to be dismissive, Zorin is a massive effort but it is mostly a DE change, but it's a DE where they actually thought of the typical non-technical user and cater brilliantly to that.
This doesn't actually solve the problem, though. What's going on is that more systems are becoming reliant on "secure computing" to work properly, so (e.g.) Netflix won't stream full quality to your Linux PC.
On its own that may not seem like much, but the screws are being turned (albeit slowly). We'll reach a point where the only way to access any proprietary content on the web will also require running proprietary operating systems on DRM enabled hardware using secure boot. Banking sites won't work, video playback won't work, even access to textual content will eventually be restricted. This is because the browser vendors, the OS vendors, and the content distribution platforms are all colluding to create this future.
Linux on the desktop doesn't have enough users to push back in a meaningful way against this trend at this point (and I say that as a Linux user). 10 years ago, maybe, but now it's simply too late. Sure you'll still be able to run open source software on your Linux PC, and write your own code and run it, but you'll be prevented from accessing huge chunks of the Internet.
Fifteen minutes to get up and running with Ubuntu or Mint if you stay focused. A lot of people don’t realize that LibreOffice, Steam, and Discord are all fully usable on Linux these days.
Switched my family to Mint a while ago. It is genuinely seamless. They didn't notice, other than the background changed (and I slowed my haranguing them about virus safety).
Not all Steam games are available, but enough are to keep you busy.
The point was not that Linux is grandma-friendly as an OS, the point was that you do not necessarily have to delay installing it until you get a new computer, and may even negate the need for a new computer (certainly it's added years to various laptops in my orbit).
"Fifteen minutes to get up and running with Ubuntu or Mint if you stay focused."
This sounds to me like it is all easy and if it takes longer than 15 minutes, it is my fault for not being focused.
Well, as a matter of fact, I did install linux on various devices, dozen of times. And with my own customized manjaro install usb stick even in less than 15 minutes, with all my needed software up and running.
But I would never, ever tell anyone that he can expect a flawless install in 15 minutes. This is not realistic. It may happen, if you are lucky - but there are too many buggy drivers and compatibility issues and even official mainstream distros getting shipped with major open bugs, that this advise is just receipt for disapointement.
And zoom. I know Linux but I’m not a sys admin by any stretch. I’ve been using Linux as my personal laptop for 3 years now. It updates itself and has required hardly any manual intervention (just once I had to command line for an upgrade. Generally it’s justed worked.
The upgrader/installers are not perfect but it’s hardly so difficult that software developer would find it daunting.
Unfortunately there is no freedom under capitalism mon capitan, it's part and part of private ownership. American copyright law grants companies state like powers to remove your rights and freedoms.
The only way would be to either 1) revolt against capitalism or 2) try to reform copyright law.
But as we all know the US is the most worshipful of capitalist ideology.
Software coming under copyright allows companies to remove out rights because we never got any property rights for software and games. That allows them to encrypt binaries and make computers that obey them and not us.
So you could call the FTC and launch an anti-trust complaint. https://www.ftc.gov/
Because DRM is vendor lockin when you get down to it.
Anti-capitalism isn’t enough for you to sell as an alternative. We really don’t have a serviceable alternative ideology given the tendency for communism to fall under control of a few men same as capitalism. The Reddit subs can point out some of the problems with Capitalism but not alternatives.
At some point the only option will be to use something like an rPi with a Linux and only interact with the culture made from the next punk movement. Or, targeted violence somewhere. But where.
I think both 1 and 2 are ripe for action. The right person can explain that the assumptions we’ve been sold about capitalism no longer resemble truth and we need to change the rules so they do.
The real issue is company ownership is anti-democratic so we can't stop EA or activision from making games in fraudulent ways, so we'd need to have some ownership share over the company because it effects us politically.
There's no other way then private power being co-owned with the rest of society, aka there are certain things private individuals and companies can't engage in. That is the only explanation because corporations have state like powers at scale which all effect us. So capitalist ideology is still the root cause, there is no other alternative. AKA bobby kotick can say to his employee's "make games with drm" and the employee's must obey or be fired, that is the fundamnetal problem with capitalism in a nutshell. If someone who owns a powerful business is a giant dick there's no way to push back unless you give up the idea of owernship being in the hands of one or a small group of owners that can simply compel our obedience to their rules.
> The real issue is company ownership is anti-democratic
Wrong. Company ownership is perfectly democratic.
> need to have some ownership share over the company because it effects us politically
This happens now with share ownership.
> AKA bobby kotick can say to his employee's "make games with drm" and the employee's must obey or be fired, that is the fundamnetal problem with capitalism in a nutshell.
Every single time communism has been tried, it inevitably ends up that ultimate power rests in the hands of a few. It turns out way, way worse than capitalism, and belief that scrapping capitalism in favour of socialism (which Lenin stated is the path to communism) or jumping straight to communism, is always - always! - from either young idealistic but naive people, or believed by older people who never grew out of their earlier naive disgruntlement.
Besides which, I still believe now in my early 50's that what we have now isn't capitalism at all; it's more akin to corporatism. It's certainly not lassez-faire capitalism.
No it doesn't, you can not own shares in a company and still have it affect you. You can also own shares and have no voting rights, either.
Share ownership is, as it stands, undemocratic in the sense that there is no democratic decision making by all of those who are affected by a company. And a model where wealth decides how many votes you get isn't very democratic, either.
This is written from a position of ignorance on European companies. There are successful midpoints between US style capitalism and communism. In Germany, for example, company boards (for large firms) have worker representation: https://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Rela...
Heck - even functioning trade unions (not crippled as they are in the UK and US) provide a form of democratic check on individual companies.
The mistake is to paint this as a black or white choice, which tendency in the US is driven by hysteria media reporting of any policy which doesn't suit the needs of big business and rich elites.
What Marx calls socialism and what Western Europeans style as socialism aren't the same thing. Western European nations practice social democracy which developed before and independently of Marx.
When discussed without stupid names and branding, most people are open to discussing some of the ideas you are presenting. But the moment you call it socialism you are going to lose people, especially Americans. Because a lot of people have been murdered in the name of socialism.
> Western European nations practice social democracy which developed before and independently of Marx.
When we look at Germany and their universal healthcare system, it was developed in the 1880's under Otto von Bismarck and their monarchy in a direct response to the fears of a Marx-inspired socialist uprising.
A lot of what developed in Europe was inspired by Marx and socialist organizing and developments on the continent.
> Wrong. Company ownership is perfectly democratic.
It's not because a lot of shares end up owned by one of the few large ETF/pension plan administrators: in 88% of the S&P 500 companies [1], Vanguard/BlackRock/State Street together own the majority of the shares, and at least the passive ETF-held parts usually do not participate in voting which means that tiny "activist" investors now have a lot more vote percentage than they should.
Not to mention corporates with different share classes where the ones with voting rights are to a large degree privately held and the ones traded publicly do not have vote rights, such as Tesla [2].
> Every single time communism has been tried, it inevitably ends up that ultimate power rests in the hands of a few.
So where's the difference to the current situation, where those with the "ultimate powers" in society are effectively under control of their party donors? At least in communism, everyone had a right to a home to live in and to a decent employment matching his skill (see e.g. Art 24 sec. 1 of the Constitution of the former GDR [3]).
Interestingly, this belief is never shared by people from Europe who've actually experienced communism.
The issue in many cases is _corruption_ which will exist whatever you do (there's always a snake in the garden) so the trick is to implement the right legislation to control it and ensure freedom...
> The only way would be to either 1) revolt against capitalism or 2) try to reform copyright law.
Since (2) precludes the need for (1) and, hence, shows (1) is irrelevant to the discussion, and to do (1) would be an immense act of self harm akin to sticking one's fingers in one's eyes, repeatedly, for all time, I'll take (2), thanks.
We might end up in a situation in the near future where China provides the more open solutions.
Russia will now use Chinese UnionPay to get around MasterCard and Visa banning Russian clients.
I have gen2 ipod touch that the hardware is perfectly fine, but no way to update the software that I know.
What's possible is that China will have one policy for its own citizens, but another for the rest of the World. They have proven to be very flexible on ideology if it makes them rich.
it is practically a wget for web videos and can be forwarded to like mpv. you should look at the supported sites it is quite extensive and youtube being a humble beginning.
I signed up for YouTube Premium because I wanted to watch some videos offline (on a flight). The download speed is awful. Now I use YouTube-dl when I want to watch videos offline. I still have Premium because ad-free is great!
I wish the media industry understood this and took action. A lot of what they call "piracy" is less about people not wanting to pay and more about the paid experience being on-par if not worse than the pirate experience.
I wholeheartedly agree. With video games, especially on Linux, it is far better to pay. On Steam, it was far easier to just pay and click Play than to pirate the gane and deal with Wine and getting the game to work. So I pay.
Gaming in particular is an area where I think most marketplaces have gotten their act together. I don’t hesitate to buy games through Steam or the Microsoft store.
Games are easy to pay for, fast to download and I know at least steam and Epic have a very reasonable refund policy (if you have less than 2 hours of playtime they will refund you without issue). I’ve used this a couple times for games that either had many technical issues on launch or I didn’t like the mechanics of the game.
The only game store that is absolutely terrible in all of this is EA/Origin who have a very buggy and slow client. I just avoid their games as a result.
1) doesn't work without an account 2) I dont give google my payment details 3) the platform does not deserve any % of my donations, it's used used because it's a monopoly 4) not every creator I watch deserves the same cut, smaller high quality creators need more -> off site donations e.g. Patreon is way better in many ways.
I did when they stopped displaying public dislike counts. Very smooth experience, did not even ask me why I was leaving. YouTube doesn't seem to care much.
When I moved to another country where Youtube Red/Premium wasnt available, when I eventually contacted Youtube support they refunded the past 6 months of the subscription.
I did the same because I wanted to consume podcasts with the screen locked and not have adds. But the download speed for me is pretty good. Downloading a 2.5h podcast in 480p (which has the same audio quality as 1080p IIRC) takes less than half a minute.
This is the main reason why I use NewPipe rather than pay YouTube's ransom. Although I have a high bandwidth plan, I just don't like wasting bandwidth and disk space for video data I'm not actually looking at with my eyes. Most of the time I pop on some intellectual content and listen to it, and the video is often unnecessary. Just give me the damn audio and I'm good. YouTube seems to think this isn't a concern, and maybe it isn't if I forced it to download the 140p version of the video, but that's still a clunky solution. Or maybe the execs think that providing audio downloads lets people "steal" music.
How can we create a video platform with high-quality discovery, personalization, subscriptions, comments, voting, and more — while also making it technically incapable of being evil and closed?
Are there technologies that we can use to allow network effects to accumulate to software that isn't controlled by a single, rent-extracting, and private entity?
Google isn't really rent seeking with Youtube. It pays for distribution (even for demonetized content), site development, building recommendation systems, content moderation, accessibility though subtitles, etc. That doesn't mean they don't make money on it, that their decisions are always just, or what they promote is good for society, just that they add a lot of value beyond someone hosting a webm file on s3.
I think maybe this was true five years ago, but at some point they decided to turn the screws and really ramp up advertising. I don’t follow their financials but I assume the site was self sufficient with far fewer ads than today, and that now they are extracting profit (rents) from their established behemoth. Of course I could be wrong.
I think advertising is evil is the sentiment, and that's not out of place in a forum that has a focus on building a better future, rather than making money any way possible.
This thread has been a fascinating exercise in reading comprehension. I was replying to the statement "Google isn't really rent seeking with Youtube."
Rent seeking is a form of making profit. So of course they are making a profit. The question is whether they are making a profit in order to fund their operations as was suggested by the person I was replying to, or if they are "rent seeking".
According to wikipedia "Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth."
That is why I said they "at some point they decided to turn the screws and really ramp up advertising". The claim I am making is a direct reply to the person who said they are not rent seeking, they are merely seeking profit to fund their operations. I am making the claim that they have moved beyond that to seeking profit without creating additional value in their service.
Now one can argue whether or not I am correct, but what was never under question was whether or not they are making a profit. The only thing being questioned was the purpose and result of that profit seeking.
The previous commenter was saying they're doing more than just hosting video, which is true. If you want to create a nonprofit for video hosting, go ahead, but don't blame YouTube for turning a profit.
Everyone replying in this manner is missing that I am discussing whether or not they are rent seeking. No one is questioning whether they are or should be making a profit. The person I replied to said they are not rent seeking, they are just seeking profit to fund operations. I claim they are rent seeking, which is according to wikipedia:
"the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth."
No one is questioning that they are or should be making a profit, only the purpose and result of their profit seeking.
Also don't be surprised that your not for profit folds very quickly.
YouTube got to be YouTube because Google sank enormous amounts of money into it for no return for a decade. Indeed, YouTube probably still hasn't broken even if including those costs.
I can also pay YouTube $0 a month and never see an ad again.
I do pay money for Nebula, because they seem like their hearts are in the right place. I pay about $60, 70 a month to various podcast and video creators directly.
I don't use adblock, vanced, and sponsorblock because I'm cheap. It's because I don't like what YouTube as a whole is doing with incentivising clickbait and maximising revenue above just being an unobtrusive platform.
I whitelist Alec at Technology Connections, Steve Mould, a couple of others, from the ad blocks, because they aren't on Nebula yet. They should be.
> It's because I don't like what YouTube as a whole is doing with incentivising clickbait and maximising revenue above just being an unobtrusive platform.
If you really didn't like that, you'd stop watching YouTube.
I am discussing whether or not youtube is rent-seeking. The fact that I can pay money to get rid of all the ads is either orthogonal to my point or supportive of my point.
Your views are also worth more to the creators. That isn’t to say there are not other issues with creators and wringing money from the Google branded stone.
> How can we create a video platform with high-quality discovery, personalization, subscriptions, comments, voting, and more
Ideally, by decoupling these things from one another. There's no reason they'd have to be part of a single platform - for instance, a client (app or web) could fetch public 'likes' and/or comments referencing (or "annotating", per the relevant Web standards) a PeerTube video from Mastodon. This is already superior to what YT does.
Several different problems. First, we need an architectural design that folks can actually agree on. Then we need open protocols. Then we need implementations. Then we need infrastructure. Then we need to migrate existing content. Finally we need network effects.
If we ever get there, I suspect it'll be through a combo between a decentralized registry core and federated and commercial gateway system (similar to VPN or usenet providers). The biggest challenges are related to identity, moderation and abuse, while appealing to a mainstream audience.
You can't, if copyrighted content from the major media companies ends up on this product. Things that feel like anti-features on YouTube (can't watch videos with the screen off, can't download videos) are consequences of lawsuits against YouTube from ages past.
> Are there technologies that we can use to allow network effects to accumulate to software that isn't controlled by a single, rent-extracting, and private entity?
When you'll understand that YouTube's monetization is the reason why it's so popular (because, as opposed to other services, it's self-sustaining and, most important, profitable FOR CREATORS publishing there), you'll be closer to your answer.
Competition died mostly because:
- They have shit user experience that's outright broken (I'm looking at you Nebula and your portrait locked tablet apps and broken TV apps).
- They don't earn enough to cover bandwidth and transcoding costs (bandwidth is VERY VERY expensive even in western world when you stream video at scale).
- They don't have a simple answer for creators uploading videos on how to earn money from their creations. YouTube makes it a click (and a die roll for random demonetizations). Others don't and add friction to users as well.
It is an unpopular opinion but we need to change the business model. Highly tax digital advertising so that subscription/patron business models have a chance and then we start to have more aligned incentives. Right now, digital advertising is too cheap and easy to exploit.
that's a matter of opinion. i find YouTube filled with plenty of videos I would deem immoral, harmful, abhorrent. they remain there. and that's fine, nobody forces me to watch them.
I have difficulties to understand opinions that tolerates child pornography. and while it is without doubt a problem, I think it would be pointing at a tree to hide the forest to discuss illegal pornographic content.
what's more at stake is divergent thoughts that are curtailed by opinionated (if not politicised) authorities.
Law enforcements would remain active in prosecuting illegal content publishers.
this thread more specifically touches on freedom for consumers to pull DRM content somewhat gated behind official clients, and the war between copyright holders and the conscious consumers. an alternative to YouTube where publishers and viewers can more freely operate is undoubtedly a step forward, and the collateral potential consequences don't outweigh the benefits.
if what you beleive in is prison to keep everyone safe, it may be exactly what's coming very fast at us if you haven't noticed.
Should child pornography be removed from such a service? Regardless of law enforcement actions. After the criminals are in jail (or not), is the content just still readily available?
How is it decided who removes it - who moderates the service?
Even if they win, what would it remove? A website, which essentially just hosts some links to github. Within German jurisdiction only. So it would probably be up and running from a different provider within a day or two. And the repository itself would remain completely untouched anyway.
By shutting down hosting a links-only-page, at one provider, in one country, and that only if they win in court and no higher court overrules the decision?
By bogging down anyone involved with the project (even if the involvement itself doesn't infringe on anything, like a links-only page) with costly and time-consuming investigation.
The German verdict would apply EU wide unless another court overrules it, and is useful precedent to getting similar judgements elsewhere.
To be honest though, I don't think they need to win, just get clarity. YouTube have almost certainly committed to the labels that they do apply DRM to YouTube videos containing their content, and are telling them that the rolling cypher is it. If the labels take it to court and the court rules in Europe that the rolling cypher is not sufficient to be considered DRM contractually then Google are in breach of their contract, and will have to apply Widevine to YouTube videos containing any music.
it's a cat and mouse game that mice have kept winning. Pretending DRM is even technically an option to curtail abuses (or fair copies) is naive at best. a fallacy at worst.
also to note that it is companies that act illegally in preventing fair use of copyrighted content. it's a battle where both sides pretty much decided to ignore the law. since registered companies are meant to respect the law to continue to operate, and pirates, well they are pirates and prosecuted for it, if caught, I opt for the court to instead compel YouTube, and its media partners to provide DRM free content so that everyone else, consumers, can enjoy the rights granted by law to make fair copies of content. that would resolve the matter once and for good.
> also to note that it is companies that act illegally in preventing fair use of copyrighted content.
No, they're not. Law on copyright does vary from country to country significantly, and you're citing "fair use" (a US legal concept that doesn't exist in Europe) about a European case, but generally speaking copyright exemptions are exemptions that are defences to stop other people suing you. They are not "rights", and there is no requirement for any other party to technically or practically enable them. I can keep my copyrighted work in a room you're not allowed to take a camera in, and that's perfectly legitimate. Likewise, companies can apply any digital locks they like.
(Note in some cases there are small, specific allowances on circumvention provisions for exercising of copyright exemptions such as the US Library of Congress list, but they are generally very small, very specific, and again do not require the copyright holder to enable it, just reduce their legal back up.)
No court would ever rule the way you want it to, because fundamentally you misunderstand the basic legal concepts.
99% time I use YouTube the following way: I download the videos for archival, extract the audio tracks and listen to the in an audiobook app (which is good at adjusting the speed up to 3x and remembering positions I pause at in every track I listen) while commuting or doing chores. I think would consume up to 98% less content if I couldn't do it this way.
It is also important to mention that the YouTube website itself (I don't mean the videos - only the HTML&JS part) is among the slowest websites on the internet, painfully slow to use on Raspberry Pi and old computers.
But I also want to archive the video. I used to "like" videos I'm interested in to be able to re-visit them in future but soon found the percent of deleted videos among my likes disastrous so I concluded I must archive everything. I also rarely want the highest quality.
It seems many people are missing one of the most important points:
This is reverse engineering of obfuscated javascript for the sake of interoperability with software which are not google(blink|geeko)/apple(webkit) browsers.
The real problem is the other way around: streaming services not providing support for noscript/basic (x)html browsers (with the <video> HTML element) should not be legal in the first place.
The only real technical issue is with seeking of streamed big videos: only HLS has a standard way to do that as far as I know (I may be wrong). Don't know for mpeg DASH. Because, a noscript/basic (x)html browser would pass the URI of a streamed big video to a media player and must know how to seek into it.
I switched to yt-dlp a few months ago, under the impression that youtube-dl was no longer maintained? At least for youtube purposes, at least for the one crucial issue that forced me to switch. I forgot what the issue was, but it had several PRs sitting there for months and nobody was gonna merge it.
> As software gets more stable, updates should be less frequent.
But a project like youtube-dl needs frequent updates, because otherwise it'll stop working after an update from Google.
I'm not the parent, but the "a few months ago" timeline makes me think they switched to yt-dlp in December 2021 when youtube-dl did not work for a few days after it broke due to a change from Google. There were PRs quickly made to fix the issue (some of which actually predated the breakage if I remember correctly) but no one was around to merge them for a few days. This is also the time the project's maintainer officially became inactive[1].
YouTube throttles the download speed of videos to the real-time playback speed. It also provides (if I recall correctly) a random token and a JS blob; if the client executes the JS and passes in the token, it gets another random token as output that if passed along with a request will unthrottle the downloads speed. As a result, full-speed downloads are only available to clients that can safely execute untrusted JS, which is mostly web-browsers and not command-line tools.
I believe the way yt-dlp works is that somebody manually ported the JS blob code to Python, which gets things working but leaves a lot of scope for arms-race escalation in future.
They didn’t. They added a challenge–response step to downloading the video, and throttled any request for the video that doesn’t include the correct response to the challenge. The webpage has some JS that computes the correct response, so you don’t get throttled if you view a video there. You can find the details in the bug tracker if you want.
As of a few weeks ago my download speeds with youtube-dl were about 150Kb/s and 50Mb/s with yt-dlp. The missing feature from youtube-dl is that it could not download videos in a reasonable amount of time — a fairly necessary feature.
Okay, what again prevents me from making a service that films a browser watching youtube? Could they do anything against that? No? Then ytdl will continue to be a thing.
You mean for other people to use? You'd lose any copyright case in Europe. You mean for your own personal use? I'm pretty sure if they limit it only to people who can be bothered to set up a camera pointing to a monitor and cleaned of reflections and lighting artefacts etc etc then the labels would be okay with that given 99.999999% of people won't.
Presumably they can take legal action against you if you distribute it and make it harder to access and find by others. Also the quality will likely be lower.
I'm pretty sure DMCA has a clause that can hit you with a massive fine over that. Remember, US has sold all of their freedoms off to DRM content owners.
I like YT-DL but I'm amazed it still works. Google pushes use of widevine for netflix/etc to try to around this issue. I know there's a difference b/w 'premium' netflix content where it's only professionals vs youtube where it's semi-ad-supported, but they could just pull the widevine switch on principle if they got serious
The best way to ensure there is no "copyright infringement" would be to shut off Youtube altogether and make sure nobody can see a "music video" without paying a subscription. Other than that, they should assume their content is accessible from any device which was exactly their original intention.
The duplicitous attitude of music executives is that they even pay radios to play some songs in loops to turn public attention to them, but then cry wolf when people need tools to see/listen to them as they want. There are so many great artists that we don't know about because they are struggling to be "discovered" beyond the music industry streamroller...
I'm not sure what it says about me that my first thought upon reading this:
> an independent club owner in San Francisco tried to run a promotional video given to him for a band he’d booked, only to find Instagram’s filer blocked it. He was able to reinstate the video, 17 months after the band had come and gone.
Was "I bet that was jwz".
Indeed, a brief web search turned up this (via a recent-ish Cory Doctorow post on Medium):
Better to disable than spoof. Lots of CDNs and download mirrors are configured to allow blank ones (so techie folks can access) but disallow unapproved existing referrers (to prevent leeching bandwidth).
Yes, but Firefox' spoofing option that I linked sends the target URL as a self-referrer, which is benign. It's the same behavior as navigating internal links.
Before when his posts got on the front page his own comments section would fill up with people who don't agree with him. He did not like this, so he made it slightly more difficult to see his content so that most people would just give up.
Basically he only wants people who agree with him to read and respond to his content.
I suspect it wasn't that though. When someone clicks on an HN link to an article, and chooses to leave a comment on the article rather than discuss it on HN (or as well as) they're probably not posting a nuanced and we'll reasoned point. They're likely just firing some sort of flamebait rubbish rather than participating in a discussion. If that happened every time your site was linked from HN you'd get tired of it very quickly and start to think HN is full of man-children and brogrammers.
Ehhh, I get it. HN in aggregate has an oddly specific mindset that is honestly grating at times. I come here because I don't mind it that much, but I can imagine JWZ getting a fuckton of inbounds from HN, going "nope fuck that" and setting up a redirect.
In many spheres, yes, but not all. Sometimes the world/popular opinion really is wrong but is pushed with the guise of “healthy discussion.” When you meet a lot of different people, you realize we are all pretty similar… ask similar questions, make similar complaints. It also means we all have similar “healthy discussions” which can be somewhat antithetical to pushing in/discovering a new direction.
If JWZ was the one submitting content here, I'd agree. But people are linking his stuff here and then talking negatively about him (or so he perceives), and I don't see what's wrong with making it harder to do that. Doesn't speak highly of his maturity level, but whatever, it's his site.
EDIT: I don't even agree with his political viewpoints; in fact I'm close to polar opposite. But I get it.
Rather, I would bet that his stance is that if you are motivated by something else than money, you shouldn't go through VC-backed funds to build your business, because sooner or later someone will squeeze as much money as possible out of your business. I'm thinking of Bandcamp as the most recent example, because there is no doubt that they had good intentions and a real vision, but there are many out there.
>I read his blog sometimes and all too often come away feeling disgusted. The comments sections are all echo chambers and his dialog on certain sociopolitical issues (recently, vaccine passports) is nothing short of fascist.
I used to read it frequently and enjoyed it, especially around the time he was setting up DNA lounge. Then after a while I started to notice this odd regression, as in, day by day it seemed to get younger and more naïve. When I eventually gave up it was like reading the livejournal of an edgy 15yo who'd just finished Das Kapital, or a stereotypical r/latestagecapitalism mod.
I can't imagine what's it like now but totally unsurprised to hear it's todays flavor of radically authoritarian leftism.
>> "Your privacy maximalism is all very nice in the abstract, but continuing to cater to the whims of kooks like you is literally going to kill me and my friends."
Hahahah. Oh wow.
Something really weird is happening to a lot of people and I just don't get it. It isn't happening to me, so why is it happening to them?
> Something really weird is happening to a lot of people and I just don't get it. It isn't happening to me, so why is it happening to them?
Could it be that the social isolation from covid is aggravating underlying mental health issues?
Completely speculation follows, but if this guy was a club owner, then he may have gone from a very active social life where people basically worship him to having financial troubles and living in isolation. I've seen people living the party lifestyle going from doing drugs with friends on the weekend to doing drugs alone to cope with loneliness.
To expand a bit on what I said, I think if you have a circle of friends that you mostly communicate with online, and they're the ones that send you links and things, that group will be led by whomever has the strongest opinions. That person is likely to be the most extreme member of the group simply because extremists (relatively speaking) are more likely to hold and espouse views. A whole bunch of people don't really have strong views, they just bob along with the tide. So basically you end up being dragged by a lunatic in the direction of more lunatics. Then you end up screaming incoherently at someone who doesn't wear a mask and calling them a murderer and wondering why people think you're a weirdo.
Thanks for replying. My comment is getting downvoted (rightly so as it's off-topic politicking) but I wanted to have the conversation anyway since somebody else brought up jwz.
That is the exact link I was thinking of. Viewpoints like these really do seem to be proliferating at a concerning rate.
>Viewpoints like these really do seem to be proliferating at a concerning rate.
The progressive left championing the benefits of radical and toxic authoritarianism while screaming frantically that everyone to the right of them is a fascist and that fascism is coming up fast.
In terms of socio-politics we are witnessing the evolution/proliferation of ideas. You can think of ideas sort of like viruses in the way they spread, especially ideology. I don't think it's people being isolated, I think honestly that post covid and the current inflation and the last few years honestly young people especially are looking for ~something~ else, so we're witnessing what ideas people latch on to. There was a really good article recently posted about ideology and how it can harm people it was a really sobering read. That being said I think it's easy to realize that our current system ~whatever we think that is~ has led to widespread income inequality only exacerbated by automation, offshoring, and the availability of higher paying jobs. As far as some marxist feeling a 'sense of persecution' the red scare was all to real, the US Gov's position has been historically repressive of those people including exterminating people in Vietnam and through proxy wars, and even deadly operations on US soil. I don't know anything about jwz or the history of this site though.
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecom...
The legal defense of youtube-dl is premised on the idea that there's no circumvention occurring [0]. I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything... it seems obvious to me that YouTube is trying to put up roadblocks and we're trying to get around them. I would feel better if we could find a way to defend ytdl without the pretense of acting like this cat-and-mouse game isn't going on.
[0] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...