Uh, put down the pitchforks. This is not Google taking it down because of not liking the tool. According to the screenshot it's a DMCA request from "BPI", "a UK record label association".
Actually, we should keep up the pitchforks, but redirect them towards the legal frameworks that give private, unaccountable entities the power to unilaterally disrupt infrastructure with almost zero legal recourse.
You can always do a DMCA counternotice. Then the onus is onto the one who sent the notice in the first place to gather evidence and take you to court. In theory, there's fines for false notices if they can't prove anything.
Of course, you better be sure that you are in the right if you're gonna do that though.
> Then the onus is onto the one who sent the notice in the first place to gather evidence and take you to court. In theory, there's fines for false notices if they can't prove anything.
The problem is, in the worst case Joe Random has to go to court over a snippet of music that randomly blasted from a passing car in a youtube video and risk going to battle with, say, Sony Music - a conglomerate with eight billion dollars yearly revenue. Many cannot take on that level of financial risk, not just the risk from the court verdict itself (punitive/damages) but also the cost of all the lawyers involved.
And at that point, we're in kangaroo court territory - when people have the theoretical right to due process but practically cannot use that right due to the risk involved, it's nothing short of the foundation of democracy being undermined. We need a cap on lawyer costs and damage awards so that the 99% can have their fair day in court against the 1% again without having to fear going bankrupt. At the moment, the only resource the 99% have is to go to the media and raise a stink, but the success chance for that route is probably on the same order as a lottery win.
[This is Julia, Eric’s cofounder] We have filled out multiple counter-notices. The first attempt was the recommended action in Google’s initial takedown notice: send an email to dmca-agent@google.com with specific reference to the ticket number (2-1881000033144). I wrote a lengthy response explaining why the claims were unfounded in most cases.
After a few days, they got back to us saying actually we needed to file a counter notice form, which involves pasting the URLs one by one into a web form with an explanation for why the page did not violate copyright. So Eric and I split up the URLs and did that, one by one, for 317 URLs
We filed the counter-notice on Thursday. As of the time of this comment (Monday afternoon), we have not heard back, and our pages have not been reinstated
Yes, but along with having to provide your own personal information to pursue a counternotice, you also have to risk going to court against an opponent significantly more powerful than you.
This! Other people wrote about counter DMCA takesdowns. This goes beyond DMCA notices.
The regulator should notice that serving sketchy DMCA notices is a form of denial of service. An consequently, if the DMCA is ruled to be unfounded, there should be heavy pubishment for the issuer as well as the enforcer (Google in this case).
FWIW the platform must respond to DMCA requests, by law, without it's own saying in the matter. They only can check if the request satisfies the minimum requirements of DMCA. Punishment for the enforcer wouldn't fly.
Platform must respond to valid DMCA requests. Valid DMCA requests are for copyright infringement - there is no such thing as a DMCA takedown request for circumvention tools, that still requires court involvement.
>The DMCA takedown request has resulted in over 300 of our pages being removed from Google Search
Note that google regularly removes millions of pages due to DMCA requests. But I can still easily find kapwing.com in google results, so it's not like they removed the domain.
I still don't see how they can pretend these anti-circumvention takedown requests are legal. The DMCA clearly lays out the path to challenge an alleged circumvention, and it involves a court order barring distribution of the product. Takedown notices are only for violations of copyright.
Obviously, this tool does circumvent YouTube's mechanisms to download and edit a video. The user kinda accepts the risk (how many of them even read that privacy policy?) but there is no verification that they have any rights to the video. Which is imho as it should be.
It's neither wrong nor illegal to download someone's video and edit it. It's explicitly allowed in many jurisdictions under fair use. However, OP seems to accept complaint's framing.
Speaking of youtube-dl, there's an excellent fork, yt-dlp[1], which circumvents the newer speed limiting features YouTube implemented. (From what I gather, they use APIs for older devices.)
Yeah, AFAIK in many jurisdictions, this would be thrown out of court, because you (YouTube) cannot go around and complain about people downloading your videos after you put them on direct access on the Internet ! (Your profits being reliant on separately shown ads aren't an excuse because you could splice them directly in the video and the analog hole still exists anyway.)
In practice though, this has resulted in several (replay) video broadcasters hiding their videos behind mandatory account creation - IIRC a legal battle is still ongoing because doing something like this might violate the obligations they took when they rented the public EM spectrum.
Does yt-dlp circumvent the age check for videos classified as not suitable for minors as well? From what I've seen the loopholes for that type of video seem to have gotten closed this year.
I can't even tell why this one specifically is age-gated, but something as explicit as their Deutschland video isn't. I guess there must be a boob in this one somewhere.
Well, the thing is that many of us here won't ever notice, because they own a Google account that is older than the minimum age (or something like 'minimum age' minus 'reasonable age at which someone could open a Google account'), and which got grandfathered in as 'age checked' simply by having existed for over a decade. You'll never see the age verification stuff if you have on of those.
Now create a new Google account. What Google will ask you seems to be region dependent, but here in the Netherlands I get just two options: make a dummy payment using a credit card, or send in a copy of your ID.
This year I closed my age old Google account, and moved from Gmail to Fastmail. I did have to create a new Google account recently for use with the Play Store. It's not tied to anything that costs money, so that's fine, but it won't work on Youtube for age gated videos. I get the question outlined above now.
The case is more nuanced than it looks from the outset. In this case YTDL is executed on the provider's premise not on the users machines. So you are not distributing a tool, you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
I still think that a DMCA takedown should not apply (and the regulation is BS) but this looks to be a different case. E.g. I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
> you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
...
> I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product
So, when Google scraped the internet to provide search engine, that was okay, but when some other site scrapes something, it is not?
If they are doing something illegal, by all means sue or report them.
But Google acting as police, judge, jury and executioner here shows why it's a problem to have a single unregulated company with so much power.
- Google recorded half of the planet with cameras scanning license plates,
addresses, faces. You see those blurred in Google Maps, but the license plates,
faces, are not blurred in the internal data at Google. I am still to see
confirmation of data correlation not occurring.
- They scanned the Wifi MAC addresses associated with physical addresses "by mistake".
- They scanned public records of companies, and associated them publicly and sometimes the private address of the owner, and invite you as the owner to
"take ownership" of their google map data...
not to be a google apologist, but they only ever record public areas. Do you hold tourists that take photos to the same standard?
> are not blurred in the internal data at Google.
whatever is in internal google is irrelevant, since the data is not exposed publicly. Do you expect that a tourist that took the same photo with a license plate to blur out their photo in their own private album? I would expect that the tourist that publishes the photo (say, on facebook) blur out the license plate, but not when it's in their own private album.
> sometimes the private address of the owner
how did google get the private address of the owner of a public business? I don't quite understand the claim to the wrong doing.
> how did google get the private address of the owner of a public business? I don't quite understand the claim to the wrong doing.
Google got it because some owners have their company registered to their own private address. It's the extra step of publicly exposing that info and pressuring you to take ownership of it otherwise it will be shown on Google Map an offer that currently is 98% of the market. Why do you think you have the option of blurring the view of your house in Google Maps?
What is a public area? Anywhere that can be viewed from any spot accessible to the public? So the only non-public areas are rooms with no windows?
If I go to Google Street view I can see a lot of details from inside my house, same with the houses of my neighbors.
If you stop and stare inside someone's window in public, people will notice and wonder what the hell you're doing. Nothing's stopping anyone from staring through people's windows through Google Street view though.
In most "free" countries, people are free to stand outside your house on the public street and look towards your house as much as they want. They can even take photos.
So you can wonder what the hell they're doing as much as you want, because what you're suggesting is perfectly legal.
Everyone was within their rights to deny Google access to their machines for scraping, but that would have been impossible to do. The web is only a psuedo public apparatus, filled with private computers. While you could technically deny access to a specific person you could never actually implement that or follow it up legally.
Looks like scraping is allowed then, if your robot is named "Mediapartners-Google*" And you can name your robot whatever you like (there's no legally enforced nor defacto registry), so my robot:
If robots.txt were a thing, Google would never have built its search engine. Everyone would just allow Altavista and disallow everyone else, like they do with Googlebot and Bingbot now.
Also, the issue here is not that Google banned their tool from accessing YouTube because the tool didn't obey robots.txt. The issue is that Google, the search engine, nuked their site, because they didn't like its content.
I agree with this, but I also feel Google should sue them for this feature, instead of removing them from Google Search. I feel like the second is an abuse of their massive power on the internet.
> I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
yeah I can understand this too, but it looks to me like Google is using its monopoly power in industry (search) to protect its monopoly power in another industry (video streaming)
Hum, isn't copyright about publication? The mere act of downloading doesn't necessarily imply this, and there's still legitimate cause for publication as in fair use. Also, wouldn't a DCMA complaint have to concern specific material? (To me, this doesn't make much sense.)
> The case is more nuanced than it looks from the outset. In this case YTDL is executed on the provider's premise not on the users machines. So you are not distributing a tool, you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
So the rule is that you can't (as a user of Kapwing) use a computer you don't own (and are just renting in some capacity) to download your own videos? Or to download videos for "fair use" use cases?
> So the rule is that you can't use a computer you don't own (and are just renting in some capacity) to download your own videos? Or to download videos for "fair use" use cases?
One of the (many) reasons the DMCA is bad is because it makes using your existing rights harder. You've mentioned "fair use" here. But the submitted article is talking about:
> (2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
> (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
You can't use your right to fair use if the IP holder has implemented an access control, because the DMCA makes circumventing an access control unlawful.
The fact that the IP industry was able to implement a law that interferes with free speech shows how out of control they are.
Sad. Who decides which law has priority though, when the laws are in conflict?
Apparently http clients are not banned by this law even though they are necessarily "part of a product" that is designed to circumvent protection,... And they are the main thing doing the actual copying. This law is still not achieving it's full potential. :D
In the same vein, there's conflict between exceptions offered by one law (fair use), and bans by this same law (software to exercise this right).
I guess the courts decide, but in practice courts don't run around looking for conflicts in laws to decide on their own, to make laws more followable by normal people, but they just decide cases brought forward by seomeone. And that someone is usually someone who benefits the most out of some particular outcome, and is thus able to pay for the case.
The whole system seems a bit prejudiced in how it works.
I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
But if Google would actually act on that desire, they're so far into antitrust territory they'll never find their way out on their own. We can only hope that some of those teeth might have grown back.
This is why everybody should stop using Google as their primary search engine, and either use DuckDuckGo/Startpage/Brave or (even better) self-hosted meta-search engines like SearX/SearxNG.
I personally opted for the SearxNG option and I haven't looked back at Google for a single search for months.
Google decides to remove a website from their engine because of their bullshit reasons? And who cares? Google is only one among ten different sources that contribute to my SearxNG results. Other search engines will probably keep including that website.
The best way to stop Google's arrogant monopoly is to ensure that they become just another source among many, and that nobody cares of their search results more than they care about Brave, Ecosia or DDG. Remember that the only reason why Google has so much power over users and businesses is that too many people use it as their sole source of truth.
To repeat what I keep saying in these cases: there’s nothing special about the particular license you use, if it still has pretty much any condition. If Copilot is subject to copyright restrictions, MIT-licensed code is affected just as much as AGPL-licensed code: Copilot is still not meeting (and cannot meet) the condition of the license, attribution. Copilot depends entirely upon exemption from copyright restrictions under “fair use” exceptions.
But still, you’re quite welcome to issue takedown notices, though I don’t know if the regular process is actually appropriate (given that it’s a GitHub project rather than a project hosted on the GitHub platform). Their reaction might be interesting, though I expect they will just declare the notice invalid because of fair use exemptions and ignore it.
I'll approximate: Contract violations are okay if they result in no damages. Courts determine damages by harm done. This comes down to a lot of detailed issues, including things like intent. Licenses are more complex, and I'll ignore issues like statutory damages.
A lot of licenses are GPL-compatible because although the terms differ in phrasing, the GPL has provisions which are substantively the same (e.g. attribution versus copyright notice). Courts won't care.
MIT signals one intent, and AGPL signals another. That's a big difference. I have code under AGPL, GPL, and MIT, and in the case of the AGPL code being ripped off by copilot, it undermines a lot of the purpose of having licensed the code as AGPL if others can use it without that license. For the MIT code, a lack of copyright notice+attribution would typically be mild annoyance at best.
A court would pick up on that, and act accordingly.
It's interesting to see this statement. When it comes to Copilot, many HNers share the sentiment that it has copied code from open-source projects without their permission.
However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, the same people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
I feel like that provides a valid ethical framework in both cases.
For example, if my AGPL code is taken and ends up in another open-source project, just without attribution, I'm okay with it. If it's used for a father-son duo making an awesome thing for Burning Man, unaware of where it came from, I'm fine with that too. If it's used by a large commercial organization to compete with my open0source project, I'm not okay.
I don't feel bad using SD at home for personal use. It's a lot of fun. I would feel bad, for example, using it to make advertisements or Hollywood films. I don't feel bad about most non-commercial and educational settings.
Your line might be a different place, but there's a line somewhere, and it's not all-or-none.
Are these truly the exact same people commenting? HN has a wide range of interests, so I think it's possible that you're combining two different groups of HNers into "the same people".
I, for example, have some views about Copilot, and think that there's a case for saying that it violates copyleft code licenses. I...do not have a view about art, mainly because I literally have no idea how copyright works in the art world, or if there's something similar to copyleft; so I usually don't comment on the AI-generated art stuff that seems to be popping up left and right.
It's interesting to see this statement. When it comes to Copilot, many people share the sentiment that it has copied code from open-source projects without their permission.
However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, also many people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
You should. What’s the point of licenses if big companies ignore them?
Personally I’ve only ever released source as MIT, knowing it could be resold or used for nefarious things, or kept source private. I don’t trust ransoms on the internet to respect posted licenses, so anything I post publicly I post with as much permission as possible.
Well, supposedly, the next step is suing them ? This of course still requires some power and influence, but if the violation is egregious enough you generally can find a rights defence association willing to help you.
(Of course the DMCA is still problematic for grey areas and spurious claims, like here.)
One can sue, but it won't resolve the problem of double standards. As far as I know, you can't sue google for automatically acting on DMCA claims when they are sent by certain people of power and influence and leaving all other claims to the courts.
Mistakenly googling kawping even auto-corrected to kapwing so I'm guessing they've since been fully reinstated ... (Tinfoil hat) if they were ever even taken down.
[This is Julia, Eric’s cofounder] 317 Kapwing webpages were taken down, but we still have others (including this blog post) that show up on Google Search. As the article explains, our home page, blog, and EDU page are among those that are de-listed
I still kapwing and this post on Google search. I did look at one of the blog posts the author mentioned and tried googling random strings from that blog post and found it did not show up in a google search (though was the first result on Brave search).
I'm not justifying Google here as I am a fan of youtube-dl and the variants, but if you are creating a product or business that relies on Google servers and uses software that could be considered abuse (especially for commercial purposes) then I'm not completely surprised. You could have got an API key which is probably the correct route to go once you want to commercialize something like this.
This is what struck me as well. Giphy doesn't exist to scrape full videos from YouTube. Kapwing offers to scrape full videos from YouTube and then reupload them to other platforms. That not only likely violates YouTube's terms of service but also directly contradicts YouTube's business interests.
I'm not sure the DMCA claim is legitimate (and Google seems to have walked back on it, which seems odd) but this feels more like a ToS violation that would justify an IP ban or strongly worded legal letter than an obvious DMCA case.
Okay so their top organic pages were specifically about how to download Youtube videos. I'm assuming this is against Youtube's Terms of Service and considering Youtube is owned by Google this doesn't seem like they were really trying too hard to stay on Google's good side which you need to do when you get millions of monthly organic traffic and want to keep it that way.
But anyways according to Ahrefs I'm not seeing any traffic loss (not sure what happened with that big spike but there was a Google update at that time):
And I wondered why we suddenly moved to the first page on google for some queries for our app that we posted on Show HN some time ago that competes with kapwing in a small niche (SavvyCut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28950702). It seems that someone made some room for us.
I guess if you rely on googles monopoly to run your business you should not be surprised if they can remove you at will.
For us, a lot traffic originates from competing search engines that show us on their first page even without creating any SEO spam.
It's depressing how shit the internet is now. Youtube has a virtual monopoly on video, effectively making them the public square for rich media. But you're limited in what you can post there, they can remove or deboost or quarantine whatever they want, and they actively prevent you from integrating with them. This is pretty much what every major platform turns into over time.
It's the complete opposite of what it was 20 years ago.
Although generally I totally agree and I think that with the size and relevance of YouTube Google has to allow access to the content with tools like yt-dl (even for businesses), I still wonder why they do not mention the official YT api with one word? Is it to expensive? Why wouldn't they use it?
Well, obviously, APIs provided by Google can allow app creators to do many things, but not things that are useful. Only Google apps can do useful things, per Google policy.
"Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so their API's will not support that."
Downloading videos for streaming services makes them cry, Not only Google, Netflix also hates people who go off the grid too. You should be online at all times and feed them data and money, and save your credit card details in-app, ready for compulsive buying. One day you'll be able to buy things while you sleep.
Yes, but then Google will notify the copyright holder, Google, and they will have ten days to file a lawsuit. If they don't, Google gets to decide if they put the material back up.
The DMCA really seems to fall apart when the host and the copyright owner are the same entity.
> If they don't, Google gets to decide if they put the material back up.
No they don't. If Google decides not to sue (which frankly seems likely given the precedent it risks setting), then they have to put the material back up.
> This post is a cry for help to Google to stand up for smaller web developers
You perceive Google removing you from their Search service as being essentially erased from the internet, which means you understand they're effectively a monopoly.
And when they use that monopoly power against you, your response is to… beg them for mercy?
Not even a little questioning their monopoly status, as a treat?
It's fair enough to argue your case that you didn't break the rules. It just seems weirdly sinister to not even mention that your fundamental problem here is that the rules are capriciously enforced by what authors in the 1990s would have considered “a bit farfetched even for a hypercapitalist dystopia”.
When I search for "Kapwing" it appears in my searches (the post says it doesn't).
Does this mean that after a mere 3 hours Google reacted already?
This would again point to the highly asymmetrical balance of power where those that succeed in making themselves heard publicly (e.g. by hitting HN front page - not so easy, see my own submissions) get their problems fixes by the internet big ones, while those that don't are left to rot in obscurity. #regulateSiliconValley
I don’t get Google’s gripe with youtube-dl. A huge chunk of YouTube content is reaction videos and video responses where snippets of the original video is spliced into the new one for commentary. How are creators supposed to make these kinds of videos “legally” if youtube-dl is not allowed according to Google?
By using Google's own shitty, artificially limited tools ?
Part of the issue also applies to kapwing BTW : your app in inherently worse when you have to fight the browser's own limitations - one recent example I have seen : a tool that syncs the sound of two videos that had a live discussion... but then doesn't allow you to put then on separate screens, both fullscreen, because it puts them both in the same browser tab, rather than two separate windows !
Would running client-side youtube-dl in WASM fix the issue since Kapwing wouldn't be invoking youtube-dl from their backend.
YouTube is in such weird spot because they want to maintain free access to content yet limit how people access it without a pay-wall which OTT players like Netflix etc have been doing since long.
Tinfoil hat mode: CORS enforced in the browser and other such related "privacy" tech were pushed by Google and big tech to prevent stuff like this. Turning the browser into a consumption platform with an encrypted pipe between your screen and the server. As opposed to the browser being an agent acting on the user's behalf.
I think your Tinfoil hat is misplaced. CORS was a hack added to fix the "bug" that cookies are sent cross-origin by default. Without CORS (and modern per-origin cookie jar policies) evil.example could load up https://facebook.com/api/friends.json and get a list of your friends or profile.json to read your profile. CORS was an ugly bandaid to prevent this without breaking existing sites.
I agree that CORS is a pain and a mess but it had very clear and non-nefarious benefits when it was introduced. Maybe when all browsers only support origin-isolated cookie jars it can be obsoleted but I wouldn't hold my breath.
An open sourced Electron/Desktop app for editing videos sourced from Youtube might be successful, but everything runs in the browser and it's more universal. With WASM, things get more interesting because the capabilities will get closer to "native" apps over the next 3-5 years
What am I coping hard for really? I am all for using WASM where it makes sense. This still doesn't change the reality that all of that is possible with JavaScript. It's also still 100% true that WASM adds 0 extra capabilites.
And Figma could be a 20B buyout without WASM. I don't see any relevancy about valuation and a specific tech choice. Figma's editor is a very good use case for WASM -especially since they have the right people in the team- but there are other ways to achieve the same thing (even just by using JS).
I'm not excited about WASM. It seems like we've come full circle. We already have frameworks to isolate apps, we don't need the browser to do it nor do we want our privacy and security completely obfuscated from the source.
No, it would imply that authors that want to create cross-platform apps would learn how to actually create cross-platform apps or create PWAs which are already cross-platform.
PWAs are a real tragedy of the commons with no platform owner willing to extend first-class UX flows due to competing interests as well as adverserial risks from bad-faith actors.
From a security/privacy perspective electron-esque apps are no different from native apps, and divorced from the browser UX, PWAs only inherit the trust they cultivated while running in the browser. They are just webapps with some quality-of-life sprinkled on top, after all.
Electron apps are often pulling in hundreds of unvetted npm packages and then given direct read/write access to the entire file system. I'm okay with browser security overall for PWAs as I don't want websites to be able to break out of the sandbox and I want permission prompts when they want access to perform specific actions, but I can still inspect the code more freely to see what is happening behind the scenes and say no I don't trust this developer to have read/write access.
With WASM, it is like machine code for the browser meant to obscure what is even happening and you are supposed to just trust it and I don't. I don't trust it to not be abused to push more privacy violations and I don't trust most web developers enough to not just pull in a huge framework with no clue what they are doing and to make accessible fast sites using it.
Wouldn't dependency hijacking only be an issue during build/packaging, rather than installation when everything is frozen? All you're going to see as an end-user is a prebuilt binary that doesn't even know what NPM is. Again, this is no different from native apps.
Native apps are objectively worse than WASM in terms of security/privacy risks as they have access to all userspace syscalls. It's not like WASM bytecode can link against system libraries. Everything has to go through the browser/runtime sandbox. The only real risk here is side-channel attacks like Meltdown.
Again though, they are already sandbox frameworks for the desktop for native apps. There is not a need to have the web browser, a notoriously anti-privacy component, as a DRM player for non-DRM content.
I don't see why a single DMCA would take down an established company's whole business off Google Search, without even a chance to 'comply', if it didn't benefit Google to do so.
It's funny that even though the main page kapwing.com is removed, their tools page with big "YouTube Video Downloader" link is still first when searching the name.
It's interesting that Youtube allows you to specify your video is Creative Commons, yet provides no way for you to legally do anything with that video except watch it
You were competing with google (or they are about to enter a similar space), but relied on their platform in some way. The big company crushes and keeps on rolling.
While I speak out a lot against and try to boycott (many of) US companies, Russian (and Chinese) companies are even worse (especially if let to have the same market share).
I used kapwing once, to cut out a s ction of a YouTube video which I downloaded through some other service and post it on Twitter. I was so positively suprised about the online video editor which allowed me to start editing the video while it was being uploaded, that I created a post on LinkedIn about it.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if YT has developed a mechanism to detect content that was downloaded through YT-DL and your company is a victim of an automated tool someone at YT has created to make sure those who steal videos from others will make less revenue.
E.g.:
- IGN pays for content or gets content exclusively
- someone else downloads the IGN video puts their own watermark over the IGN one and publishes the video as their own. IGN and the company ask
- YT to take those videos down which requires lots of people to waste their time for something that could be automated
