> We strongly believe we’re on the right side of history here. Everyone except the music industry knows this
I don’t think higher-ups at the RIAA or MPAA are so naïve as to believe they’re doing the right thing in any situation. They just prefer money and power to being decent.
Wikipedia gives more weight to Mitch Glazier¹ being a lobbyist than RIAA’s CEO. It comes as no surprise that:
> He played a role in drafting the No Electronic Theft Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Copyright Term Extension Act.
> I don’t think higher-ups at the RIAA or MPAA are so naïve as to believe they’re doing the right thing in any situation.
I learned last week when taking my kids to see the Mario Bros. movie that it's no longer MPAA, but now MPA, the Motion Picture Association. I saw it on the green preview cards before each coming attraction. It's a bit scary: they now see their toxic behavior not only afflicting America, but the entire world.
That's... been true for decades. The US has this peculiar level of international power where changes in its laws end up directly affecting the rest of the world.
They even pressure some countries like Spain to change their laws to follow MPA and RIAA desires. I recall around 2010-2011 in Spain politicians made law called "Sinde", surname of the person behind it, at the time it was published in some newspapers that it came to fruition after a meeting/conversations with some USA government members, in some media they even called it "Sinde Biden", yep that one .
I think that's a little harsh on RIAA/MPAA exexs. Their comfortable way of living gets validation from how enthusiastically property laws are enforced. That leaves plenty of room for them to believe they're doing the Right Thing™.
Even though, as an article of basic critical thinking, they certainly aren't.
Only if they define "the right thing" as "the thing that makes them the most money". And if they really believe that, then they're even worse people than I thought.
Only for some businesses (usually the really big ones, and the attitude is unusually prevalent in SV). Not "business" in general. And those businesses are being run by truly terrible people.
Isn't privatized censorship already here? Cloudflare (disclosure: I am an investor), controls a large portion of the internet with their DDOS and CDN. Followed by Akamai, etc.
There are already cases and examples where Cloudflare and other CDNs have kicked sites off of their platform or responded to take down requests.
Between ISP's, Proxies, and Payment processors there are lots of extra legal ways to shut down anything you would like to on the web.
All it takes is enough money and/or political power.
The thing is this isn't new. Traditional publishing had throttles at the publisher, the seller and the library. Freedom of speech is not requirement to broadcast.
Yep. At banks it has slowly gotten particularly bad since lately EU EBA had to issue guidance on how to tackle 'regulatory expectations and[..] unwarranted derisking'. US Treasury did not offer a guideline yet, but one of its higher up recently had a speech that touched on it too.
This is what happens when your system is not dumb pipes and can be massaged based on who is currently doing the bossing part.
And this is why I roll my eyes at anyone who tells me 'just do it yourself'. Do what at this point? Roll foundational infrastructure that should be dumb pipes?
Coffee did not kick in yet, but the game is rigged and whatever ideals existed with the emergence of early internet have been gone for a long time now. We are just seeing some of its more visible effects.
And more concrete example for the banking system is a recent bank failures. The Fed and FDIC have effectively given notice to the banking system that crypto is disfavored. See:
I’m not sure it’s surprising or undesirable for heavily regulated banks that rely on government support in both good and bad times are avoiding a highly speculative and unregulated asset class that has a history of ponzu schemes and other frauds.
I really wish the messaging about Net Neutrality focused less on the idea that ISPs were going to be able to charge you for access to specific services or throttle competing services (which is a terrible idea), and more on the freedom of speech issue.
AFAIK there's no way to say anything on the internet without permission from at least an ISP and DNS... and usually also a webhost and website you don't own. It would be nice to have some legal protections from at least some of those entities.
This is a question I have. Why do so many websites have CDNs now? Like it seems that everyone feels like they need to throw their website behind Cloudflare even if they are serving content to a relatively confined region.
When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything? Or is this like how you need to use React and SSR even when you have a relatively simple static site, i.e. cargo cutting?
> When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything?
When distributed denial-of-service attacks through botnets, sold as a service to anyone by the "owners" of these botnets, became popular. It takes just one person who doesn't like you, or even who wants to take your site down "for the lulz", to cause so much traffic that your site is disabled and removed by your hosting provider as a way to "protect" their other clients. By being widely spread over the global Internet, CDNs like cloudflare have the advantage that each node receives only a small portion of a widely distributed denial-of-service attack, instead of receiving all of it at a single place as would happen without a CDN.
> When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything?
I think it was when Reddit and other social link platforms were becoming established, the linked sites would go viral and then the traffic would do an unintended DDOS.
Cloudflare and other providers offered free DDOS protection, then it became a defacto standard to have a CDN
In addition to what others said (like DDoS protection), having a CDN or proxy up front also shields potential abusers and/or litigants against immediately finding out where the origin servers are physically located.
The free version of cloudflare lets you keep secret the IP address of your VPS. It also mitigates the cost of high prices for bandwidth if you use services like AWS/GCP/netlify. You're less likely to go offline if your website is unexpected popular on a random day.
That's quite different. The case described here would be another party forcing Cloudflare and any possible other provider to boot the subject as a customer.
Privatized censorship is also known as the freedom of association, and a fundamental right both legally in the US, and morally as an inherent human right.
The fact that it's immoral to infringe freedom of association doens't imply that it is always moral to exercise your right to freedom of association in any way you want. We could all exercise that freedom to refuse to associate with people who are on the wrong side of the $HOT_ISSUE debate and gradually degrade the social fabric until it tears. For many possible values of $HOT_ISSUE, I think we can agree that would be wrong.
So even though you aren't required to associate any more liberally than you desire--and requiring you to do so would be wrong--it's still true that we need most people to be quite liberal in their associations for this (or any) country to work.
That's all a long way of saying that it's valid to complain about private censorship. It's (generally) not okay to propose that we send in the troops to stop private censorship, but it's fine and good to complain when it happens. It's no different from arguing that some{body|entity} should be nicer, or more careful, or even stricter, for that matter.
Oh yeah it's for sure valid to criticize people for exercising their freedoms, but it's not okay to prevent them from doing so.
My pet peeve however is, "They shouldn't do that" very often leads to, "We shouldn't let them do that." though, which I think we agree is a huge problem.
Oh, so now we have terms and conditions on "Privatized censorship is also known as the freedom of association, and a fundamental right both legally in the US, and morally as an inherent human right." Sounded pretty absolute there for a second while it was conveniently the kind of censorship you approve of.
I see it as there is more than one human, and when my rights and your rights come into conflict, there's moral precedence that favors non-discrimination over absolutism.
If I were a German, this would piss me off more than anything: A lobbyist organization from another country managed to successfully manipulate the court of my home country.
Apologies from the USA. We don't support the RIAA.
The Court in Hamburg is infamous for siding with the media industry for decades sadly. As a suer you can choose which court handles your case for these kind of cases.
Came to post this. For an informed opinion on the issue of "Fliegender Gerichtsstand" (essentially, choose where to bring your case) I can recommend Vetter's blog post on the Erdogan/Böhmermann situation [1, German]. LG Hamburg is sadly infamous for this kind of decisions. It can and, based on the research in TFA likely will be, reigned in by higher courts, but this costs money, time and causes a lot of stress on the defendant. I applaud them for standing up to this decision.
The law firm (Rasch) in this case is also no stranger to copyright and piracy dealings. If you search for its name you find websites dealing with their "Abmahnungen" (roughly Cease & Desist) [2, German].
> Apologies from the USA. We don't support the RIAA.
Unfortunately, we do. Year after year, we collectively allow and enable these ravenous corporate interests, and their lobbyists and spooks, to further capture our institutions and strongarm smaller economies around the globe. I wish we didn't, but we do.
I'm a big believer in intellectual property rules and I hate piracy. These actions don't strike me as "censorship" because my enforcement of IP doesn't stop you from expressing yourself in any way. Oh sure, it stops you from pirating me, but that's not censorship. That's me stopping you from being a plagiarist and a copycat.
If anything, tough enforcement encourages people to actually express themselves because they can't just pirate someone else's hard work and pretend they did something of value for society.
Quit reading this. Go make your own content and enjoy all of the power that the Internet gave you. Then enjoy the control over your hard work that IP laws give you.
> These actions don't strike me as "censorship" because my enforcement of IP doesn't stop you from expressing yourself in any way. Oh sure, it stops you from pirating me, but that's not censorship. That's me stopping you from being a plagiarist and a copycat.
When I get tired of my video host or get locked out of my account, I should be able to download all of my own videos to put them on another host, regardless of whether the old host chooses to make that easy.
Journalists should be able to download every video of a politician making a false statement so they can play it back in a year when the evidence of that lie becomes better established.
Works by US Government entities like NASA are in the public domain. Anybody should be able to do what they like with them.
These things are distributed on the same services as anything else. A download tool can't evaluate the copyright status of a work or make a fair use determination. Prohibiting the tool is prohibiting all of the uses that should be allowed.
I used it as a student so I could watch lecture videos while in an area with poor network connectivity. It was my tuition funding the creation of these videos.
> The whole reason you can't do those things you believe you should is because you agreed that you'd give up your right to do those things.
We need to stop pretending that these so-called "agreements" are good faith meetings of the mind negotiated between parties of roughly equal power. The consumer's only options are take it or leave it. There's a huge power imbalance and no ability for the powerless party to negotiate. That's not an agreement, that's a unilateral policy.
Sorry but yes, the consumer's only option is to take it or leave it. You are not entitled to the product of someone else's work.
I see this as the very definition to entitlement; that you must be allowed to use something, even if you don't want to use it the way the owner of the thing wants you to use it.
Some (myself included) reject the premise that the designer and benefactor of the agreement has the right to define the usage of ’thing’.
We are talking about intangibles here (often described by the politically and philosophically loaded term intellectual property) I find it unreasonable to treat them as private physical property. It restricts the true potential of the digital, i.e virtually zero distribution costs.
In my view, digital content resembles a ’commons’ in their use and cultural significance. I believe the interest of IP-holders should take a back seat to the far more important free flow of information.
”Intellectual property” has always been stolen and copied and I would argue that the world is better of that way. So much of our art and technology would not exist without these ”thefts”. Intellectual property is only property because a state uses its monopoly on violence to enforce someones monopoly on an idea/concept/information. It is not because of any divine right of an owner to restrict what others do with intangible objects of information.
Also, there is a spectrum. No one would think it just if the Fourier transform was subject to licensing.
Property “ownership” is nothing more than government-granted monopoly on land/object rights.
But fair, once you throw out a key concept of capitalism, the whole thing kind of falls apart. Guess all the benefits of capitalism aren’t worth it for you…
I get this mindset, but there are also loads of cases where society overrules this.
Consider the case of VCRs/DVRs: the cable companies said "this is for live viewing", but people wanted to record video. There was big pushback, but it was ruled that people have the right to use the video that way, even if television channels don't want them to.
We don't have a right to the labor of someone else, but if we're consuming the fruits of that labor, there's a case to be made that we should be allowed to do so how we see fit.
For instance, your current fork is "if you don't like the company's terms, don't use the company's products". Another fork that we could use might be "if companies don't like the users' consumption practices, they can exit business or change their product".
So an employer must be allowed to use the employee and their product, even if that employee doesn't want their work to be used that way... this is selfish privilege assumed by the employer?
The owner of a body may not want it to be used the way the employer deems necessary. The artist may not want their art to be used for unethical ppurposes.
The producer of labor and art is taken (paid) or left (to die, penniless). But you're right: their employer is not entitled to the product of their employee's work.
Thanks for putting this so clearly.
When did the journalist sign their rights away to download a copy of the video uploaded by a third-party? If the journo had their way, the third-party would have given the video directly to the press.
The third-party who uploaded the video already waived their own rights, and by accessing the site, the journalist also agreed to be bound by the T&Cs.
What is your solution here for the average schmoe who isn't tech literate but is potentially a citizen documenting corruption?
Sure, there's secure drop software etc, but do you really think the average person is going to be able to do that in the field from their cellphone? Also consider the footage that comes out of warzones on YT.
USA resident who factually understands that intellectual "property" is not property as thoughts. idea's etc can not be owned as property. What you call intellectual property is in fact more accurately referred to as intellectual privilege, and unauthorized copying of your work is not "piracy" which is a violent act of theft normally on the high seas.
Attempting to conflate copyright with property and property crimes is not only illogical it is highly immoral
copyright may be worth defending, in a very limited way, but it certainly is not on the same level of property nor should it be considered such.
Copyright to the extent it is worth defending should be returned to the original US Constitutional limits and applicability, and returned to the timespan of the original copyright law (14 years, and 1 extension of a human author of 14 years.. meaning corporations get 14 years, humans can get upto 28 years and no more. and All copyright ends at death of the author. )
Your bait would be more convincing if you weren't confusing basic concepts like copyright infringement and plagiarism which have nothing to do with each other.
I wish your view wasn't so negatively moderated here, because I think it's the only view that results in the quality and quantity of content that we now take for granted.
It's weird to me that folks now feel entitled to content in the way that piracy allows. The concept that you simply cannot watch a show or movie if you haven't paid for it is genuinely foreign to many people, but it is the only reality that results in those shows in the first place.
Content has to produce revenue for its creators, or they're not able to create that content, or as much of that content, or as high quality of that content.
I don't "hate" piracy, and I don't think it even cracks the top 1000 problems in the world right now, but to think it's morally justified seems silly to me.
> It's weird to me that folks now feel entitled to content in the way that piracy allows.
They shouldn't, but that is not at all what this case and discussion are about.
The scenario here is an unrelated third party being accused of being complicit in a crime merely for hosting a general-purpose tool that could be used for piracy but can be used for many other things.
The equivalent analogy would be if Home Depot is convicted of being a participant in every home burglary in their area simply because they sell sledgehammers and drills and other tools that could conceivably be used by someone to break into a house.
> The concept that you simply cannot watch a show or movie if you haven't paid for it is genuinely foreign to many people, but it is the only reality that results in those shows in the first place.
If you're genuinely curious why this view tends to be "so negatively moderated", it's this ridiculous notion.
Lots of people want to listen to good music, watch good shows, and read good books. Some people are capable of producing those things. Supply, meet demand. You think that without IP everybody is just going to give up on making art happen? Even expensive, large scale art? It's absurd, and it's propaganda.
Technological advancement has made this the best time in history for patronage of the arts. Subscription services would be perfect for this. Subscribe to get a vote on what gets made; subscribe to have your review of it count after it's done. Subscribe for ease of access.
I don't know if these industries shrink (or even grow) with the elimination of IP. But the notion that any product people enjoy today just stops getting made at all is crazy.
I couldn't disagree more strongly. Artists can create the content you love because they get paid to do so. Without IP, these artists do not get paid, and therefore cannot create the content you love, full stop.
The only reason you're able to pirate in the first place is because you rely on other people not to pirate, so the artist still gets paid. That seems to be working out, which is why I really don't see piracy as a meaningful problem, but if the scales tipped to where most people were obtaining content in violation of IP laws, then you would absolutely see a strong chilling effect on content creation.
It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Without the ability to depend on others to provide those services, artists will have to do other things besides create art to convince the people creating food to give them some.
That seems to come from a viewpoint of "everything must be controlled in order for things to work properly".
The reality of the world is that it's messy, and it actually tends to work better for everyone when it's not overly controlled.
Trying to be a control freak about things often just leads to bad outcomes for everyone involved. Both the people doing it, and the people on the receiving end of the control freak. :(
Ironically though, control freaks still seem to blame everyone else but themselves after things turn to shit.
Have seen this happen multiple times, unfortunately.
> I couldn't disagree more strongly. Artists can create the content you love because they get paid to do so. Without IP, these artists do not get paid, and therefore cannot create the content you love, full stop.
But why? Why full stop? There's no argument here, just an assertion. I want artists to create things. I will pay them to do it! There are many others like me in this regard!
> It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Yes, we agree there. You should make art in exchange for currency. You should not make art and then try to extract currency from people for looking at it.
In an alternate reality, Netflix produces shows that it streams to its subscribers. Subscribers review those shows which influences which shows continue to be developed. Just like in our reality, some people are "freeloaders" who watch the shows without paying for them (but it's not illegal). Still, many people subscribe because it's broadly understood that shows only get made if people subscribe.
In this reality (much like our own), production houses release pilots. If nobody wants to watch the show that would follow the pilot, then it's a sunk investment. But if they do, then they have to pay for it to get made (which they do, because that's how capitalism works). The rest is just a coordination problem, which the Internet trivializes. Need $5 million to make a season? Don't make the season until you've got it. If you're on the other end of the transaction: Do you want that season to get made? Then do your best to get it paid for.
I'm happy to listen to an argument for why this model would result in a smaller industry, and a subsequent argument about why a smaller industry is so unacceptable that we need IP law. But I won't accept proclamations like "...cannot creeat the content you love, full stop." The market is not so totally uncreative that it can't match up broadly distributed demand (I want to watch good TV) to concentrated supply (I can make good TV).
The issue here is that if a watchdog so much as looks at a provider wrong, under this ruling, they have to obey instantly even if the watchdog's claim is wrong and fraudulent.
To repeat, this would mean the innocent have to go through the trouble to prove their innocence in the face of bullies who are given maximum leeway instead of the watchdogs having to thoroughly substantiate their claim to demand removal in unclear cases.
It makes the watchdogs de facto sovereign censors of the Internet, and turns any idea of due process into a pleasant fiction for most people.
It's also worth noting that ISPs are pretty low on the internet services stack, and as such should be much closer to a water or electricity company than to a newspaper.
> The concept that you simply cannot watch a show or movie if you haven't paid for it is genuinely foreign to many people
I'm certainly not arguing otherwise. However, I am arguing that things like YouTube-DL have legal and legitimate uses. Assuming that even its primary use is for piracy is a pretty huge assumption.
Yeah fair, I guess I got a bit lost in the IP argument; I believe in IP and I think people act entitled to IP that isn't theirs without thinking about what a world would look like if that were generally how people behaved.
BUT yeah the issue is how people use the tool, not the tool itself, and this is for sure a huge overreach by the RIAA.
One HN phenomenon that is genuinely puzzling is illustrated in this thread, where a view is expressed in a non-inflammatory way and is moderated into near-invisibility because of it's unpopularity.
OK fine ... but then there's a non-insignificant amount of responses, indicating genuine engagement with OP's position.
Now you have to squint to read the greyed-out post if you're interested in what the discussion is about, and likewise with your response, which is again well-expressed if not popular.
IMO, moderation should exist to keep discussions within HN guidelines, which these posts clearly follow. Instead it's plainly "I don't agree with you so I'm going to try to vote your view out of existence", which doesn't even work as folks still engage/respond.
Is there any way out of this? HN is famously the best-behaved discussion site on the internet, but this seems to be an unfortunate tendency that happens fairly often.
Dude you are posting to the site who's community does everything they can to keep Z-Library going. They don't care at all about creating a civil knowledge creation empowered society. They care about their self entitlements and how their short term desire can be filled with the lowest friction consequences be damned. As an ex-addict I feel quite at home with this crowd. I too exploited whatever I could to get what I wanted and justified to myself why it was ok.
> Invidious is a free and open-source alternative frontend to YouTube. It is available as a Docker container, or from the GitHub master branch. It is intended to be used as a lightweight and "privacy-respecting" alternative to the official YouTube website.
There are multiple online mirrors, some with web download that even works on iOS.
> Yattee is an advanced video and audio player that can be used to play local and remote files and media links. It is available on the Apple App Store and is marketed as such. However, its core purpose is to function as an ad-free and sponsor-free YouTube app, allowing users to watch and subscribe to any YouTube channel. Due to the strict terms of service of the Apple App Store, Yattee cannot advertise this aspect of its functionality.
Wow, I occasionally open Youtube in a private browser window, and am invariably disgusted by the hot garbage that it recommends. When I opened your link just now, the video recommendations were incomparably better. Do you know if Invidious does any curation or is it just that their average user is so much more discerning in their consumption?
Neither the project Invidious nor the software Invidious does any kind of curation - it's just the usual YouTube recommendations, but as if all of the users of each Invidious instance were one person. It's interesting to see how the recommendations differ between instances, reflecting the interests of the average user on that instance.
I find that I enjoy YouTube a lot more with that kind of semi-personalised experience, in the same way that Hacker News has a collective but remarkably distinctive feeling compared to other forums/link aggregators.
The fact that "technological protection measures" have any bearing on legality is stupid. Implementation details shouldn't affect if something is legal or not. It seems like this is adding an rule that is easier to watch people with because the media conglomerates couldn't sure people for doing other things they didn't like.
IMO "technological protection measures" should be legally significant in that they should prevent the ability to claim copyright. One should either get a government-granted limited monopoly on reproduction in exchange for it entering the public domain after that period, xor law of the information jungle when you attempt to keep society from using the work for all time - not the intersection of both.
Alternatively copyright could just require the original creative work being put in escrow, so that it's available after the limited monopoly period.
Important to say that Hamburg's district court regularly hands out insane judgements that show that judges understand barely anything about the technology involved and will follow whatever trail the larger business interest will lead them on.
Fortunately, they can (and do) get overruled, but it'll take more time and money.
We really need some form of process to retire judges that clearly haven't kept up with the times and still think in terms of 'series of tubes'. It can't be the only solution to promote them to a different court and hope they'll do less damage.
Even the "series of tubes" thing can easily explain this.
Should the water company be liable if say, some serial killer uses their tubes to drown his victims?
Should the electricity provider be liable for powering the computers that ran the servers?
These aren't new legal questions or anything - pretty common to come across them in law school. Ianal but I've taken some basic classes and even I've seen them!
The rulings, instead, are a consequence of the personal interest and personal ideology of the jurist. We need to collectively create something better then the assumed good faith enlightened monarchies that we call the court systems.
The results they produce seem to have chronic problems
>We really need some form of process to retire judges that clearly haven't kept up with the times and still think in terms of 'series of tubes'. It can't be the only solution to promote them to a different court and hope they'll do less damage.
Unfortunately it's a very thin line trying to do that the "right" way and having it look like a complete authoritarian purge
The district court of Hamburg is so notorious that when I read "a German court ruled in favour of $some_type_of_copyright holder" I instantly assume that it was Hamburg.
I'd go about it an alternative way rather than going after the judges: design a network resistant to censorship in the first place. If content can be taken down this easily then society has a problem.
Instead, just make a network where you can't just pull out a plug, or click a button to erase information just because somebody somewhere is upset.
But the typical web is just built for mass consumption and is easily manipulated.
Unless you get the majority of the population to rely on your network somehow then the government can simply end up outlawing all methods to access that network.
some already exists but adoption rate is slow for few reasons like not needed for most people or the type of content they host, the crawbacks compared to off-the-shelf hostings when you don't need a censor proof solution, no standard or stable solution ( multiple new products keeps proping up).
The technology alone will never be enough or widely available if the judicial or legislature keep attacking and restricting their use.
Retire them? If the only consequences for this kind of shit ends up early retirement then this is just asking the next regional judge to take over the business.
For the sake of testing, I just downloaded youtube-dl from Github [1]. I then tried to run the program, but it failed with:
/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory
Okay, the script can't deal with "python" vs "python3", whatever - I'll change the script's first line and move on. Next attempt:
$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV8WFvSNYE
[youtube] 5pV8WFvSNYE: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug. Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
I knew I would get this error because I got it two weeks ago already. And considering that the version number is `2021.12.17` that looks suspiciously close to a dead project, or at least for a project whose very description is "download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms".
Edit: I went through the repo and found that this bug has been reported two months ago [2]. I understand that the project is not dead in the sense that they are still looking at bugs, but if a major feature is not working for two months now then I think it's reasonable for people's faith in the project's future to be shaken.
> /usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory
Your install is not configured properly. This is a googleable fix. (One example is to use `which python3` as part of your command https://stackoverflow.com/a/73610228)
Now in the first week of this issue I half recall the line in the code was pointed out, (possibly it's the one that's now being claimed as not a good fix still listed in the above) in one of the many people reporting the bug, with that being all that needed to be changed ... I didn't feel like at the time, grabbing the source, finding the offending line, and then compile it and besides there would probably be a working binary fix available for download that might have resolved a few other issues. I'd been following along every few days to a week to see there were any links to working forks compatible with older gear ...
Now my problem is I'm not running Win 13 or the latest linux distro but still I have the best up to date browser I've yet to find that runs on my old system ... and that link does nothing ... if I put the link in another it simply opens back at the top of the parent.
I figure I could copy every recent file one by one from the git repo and play at fooling with my own, but since someone commenting on this topic actually compiled the given source - only to land some old 2021 problem - sigh.
Now I have flipped though what I see in the above ... no fix info ... fucked and bye bye time. The next option touted as the fix sadly does not run on my old system, it could work with the online server but ... how long until ...
It is of course easier for people like me who are no longer or were ever competent programmers, let alone being well versed in python, to pick some other program - I've been told such as IDM will handle youtube antics fine as well as being compatible with older systems, so it may well be worthwhile to purchase a copy.
I can't follow this post very well. yt-dlp I think has this fixed. There is also ways to fix this without having to download youtube-dl file by file as you mention. (see this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55562973 as a single example) there are are many easy ways to get around this issue. You can do it! Good luck.
Thanks. Unless you're inferring it works in interactive mode, I'll take it as a guide to rebuilding youtube-dl. Is there a link with all the updates in one pack or do I have to create a github account to gain access? Other than that, as an outline of a fix, the stackoverflow link as a solution seems vague to me.
There's a reply made to the current thread here which, to me anyhow, means the listed full source code at github has not been updated.
There are updated individual components - however it's been in the order of 16 years I've decompiled and adjusted and recompiled. It might be worth the effort ... if only youtube-dl was going to keep on sailing onwards. The nah moving to something else commentary informs me that sooner or later updates will probably get slower until such point people won't bother reporting issues - better for my old system to make the move sooner rather than later.
yt -dlp is probably relevant to the cheap online server I use with the latest python installed. I generally didn't use youtube-dl on it, unless the download was going to take some time and better to let the server accumulate it over a few hours. yt-dlp supposedly fixes the trick youtube used to try and discourage cli downloaders.
That depends on who "you" are.
Linux distros these days tend to ship modern python package with a python3 executable, no python executable. Many distros still support a python2 package, some install that as a python exeutable, some as a python2 executable.
iirc. homebrew on OSX installs python as a python3 executable, no python exeutable.
Hopefully no-one should support python v2 in 2023 ?
Fedora does the same. Must have been 3 or 4 years ago Python 2 was removed as a dependency from the core system packages and "python" started resolving to a Python 3 release.
I expect this has filtered down to RHEL9 now.
Multiple version are supported with "python2.7", "python3.9" etc. if a version older than the current default is required.
Expecting python3 to be available as 'python' means that _your_ install is broken (until the time when python3 re-implements all the syntax and semantics and stdlib of Python 2.7 so that code may run unmodified).
The I can't believe it's not youtube-dl quasi unofficial fork yt-dlp has a most recent stable release 2023.03.04 (last month).
Of the two one is keeping up with the month by month twists and turns of websites altering their video embed methodologies to defeat CLI rippers .. and the other one isn't.
There is much much more to the code base than simply youtube ripping, both can (in theory) also rip from (say) ABC Australia's iView, from the Royal Institute Christmas Lecture series, from redtube, etc (hundreds and hundreds of variations of websites).
That shim layer between the core ripping engine(s) and the manifold ways of embedding access to a stream is what is being kept current in yt-dlp releases (and -U updates).
Original most recent official youtube-dl (December 2021 release) can no longer find its update service.
A while ago youtube-dl broke and wasn't fixed. yt-dlp fixed the problem.
Granted, I haven't kept up on whether original youtube-dl eventually got around to getting its primary functionality to work. The several-month interregnum that definitely occurred seems like a good reason to consider it "dead".
It's been fixed but the new maintainer refuses to release a new version until someone manages to help him figure out how to get automated builds running (which seems to have been the problem for the past year and he refuses to just do a manual build so that youtube-dl at least works with YouTube).
Have you tried yt-dlp? I remember what made me switch. YouTube downloading didn't break, but became extremely slow when compared to my actual network speeds. YouTube seems to do something to fuck with the speeds every so often. yt-dlp is quick to hop on those issues.
It stopped being able to download videos from youtube. That's not the only functionality, but -- given the name of the software -- I'd say it should have been fixed. All the repo activity in the world won't balance out the inability to do the only thing you advertise that you can do.
youtube-dl only works for some people around the globe, as youtube is apparently running A/B testing. Yeah there's a sort of fix ... that's been tucked away at github by way of go nowhere link, but there's the given idea it's time to ditch the cheap computer or online server and try and get something else to run instead. I read that sort of sentiment as that yup it's probably dead and maybe time to move onto more expensive toys that programmers really give a fuck, well that year ... or just ignore youtube for the time being. It's sad because what I generally viewed on youtube was of no interest to the music industry.
youtube-dl is not dead, it just had a longer pause for reasons. There is (again) active development for some while now, after some reorganization and new focus[1].
They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant.
These days yt-dlp covers my needs instead, and unlike youtube-dl, they the seem to be accepting patches, making yt-dlp work (and keep working) on more sites and services than youtube-dl does.
There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
To be precise, what seems to have gone wrong is that youtube-dl went down the "insane compatibility" road.
The new maintainer has put demands in place to support python 2.6 and up, which is fucking bonkers. Nevermind the fact that 2.6 is even deader than 2.7 ever was (which was the version of python2 officially deprecated three years ago). A side effect of this is that the new maintainer also rejects any patches that introduce new dependencies (existing ones being used is fine though), which has killed support since nobody wants to reimplement certain things to work with a python version that is pretty much only used by one guy still running Windows XP (who began to whine on the issue tracker about being ignored even though XP hasn't even been enterprise supported by Microsoft since 2019 but I guess this one guy is a valuable user?)
yt-dlp on the other hand follows the "reasonable" road of compatibility, which is "current python3 version + 5 minor versions going back" (which is also the standard used for deprecating things in the python stdlib and security patches). Much better and it seems to have healthier contributors as a result.
>They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant.
This sounds a lot like what happened to XFree86 when X.org forked it.
>There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
Yeah, I gave up on youtube-dl a while ago when I discovered yt-dlp. The latter actually works really, really well, while the former is broken. I'm not sure why anyone still bothers with youtube-dl, but then again there's still a few weirdos who won't give up on XFree86 after all these years, and a few other weirdos who still refuse to abandon OpenOffice.org.
youtube-dl isn't fighting anything here. Their hoster uberspace.de is defendant in this suit for hosting a business card website pointing ytdl-users to github.
I don't know about German law, but this sounds like a situation of mandatory joinder where Github and YouTube should have been indispensable parties.
There's no way to determine whether Uberspace's activity was illegal without involving the party who's rights are allegedly being violated or the alleged principal distributing the tool.
This was to be expected, earlier this year a german court decided a DNS is liable a perpetrator for resolving addresses to IPs containing copyrighted material.
German courts are known for technical bullshit decisions.
In the early days of the internet, they decided that you were responsible for what ended up in your inbox. This was before spam filter s were widespread.
Ladies and gentleman: distributed tools, in that very case for instance but not limited to, ZeroNet, was invented for various reasons. So why ALMOST ALL FLOSS projects do ho have a simple vitrine website + the rest on top of distributed solutions?
Oh sure, some like GitHub and co since they are easy but my dear FLOSSers having your data in your hand is valuable and it's a thing you all know. So please try.
Try to AVOID GitHub and ANY other code hosting, as well, because it does not matter if is run by some "evil" company or some friendly one, it's not your system. Almost any FLOSS dev have enough iron and bandwidth to share hes/shes bits in a P2P system, do that. If you are unsatisfied by some classic distributed development models (like git patches over a ML) develop something else BUT distributed or being able to run on top of something distributed.
If you do so, you not only protect yourself and your users from some evil actors BUT you also brake the leg of all corporate power who try to put anyone in walled garden. FLOSS is the most comprehensive and valuable codebase in the world, if it manage to be independent of top players they are TFU simply by the fact the rest of the world know and understand they are not essential and something better like classic decentralized internet do work better than them.
They annoy us with some actions? We can break us entirely killing their most important asset: the band of sheep who thinks we can't live without being on the shoulder of the giants.
Aside MANY new tools will rise, paving the way for a came back of classic desktop model.
It's going to be an interesting year. I wonder what the music industry is cooking in regards to generative sound. They'd be the ones to force us all to install a damn rootkit, they need to update their business model beyond the 1900s
> A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
> Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.
> Following public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs and the suspension of CD copy-protection efforts in early 2007.
> Some of these songs are AI-generated covers of existing songs [...] Chatbots might use entire phrases, sentences, or more, from human authors. Similarly, music bots might replicate both music and lyrics from human artists
There is "learning" proper, as having assimilated the important elements of the experience (allowing to use those principles for further creation), and there is "copying".
Regulation of engineering, even in its more experimental sides (as I would depict some current stage expressions of Machine Learning), is an happening attempt.
I don't understand, what was Uberspace hosting? Was it just an informational webpage about youtube-dl with no downloadable binaries? The article says the downloads were hosted on GitHub which was linked to by the Uberspace site.
It's starting to look like German laws and authorities are starting to interfere with the global Internet/WWW, or to more generalize, regional legal differences are starting to become pronounced as Internet usage expands globally.
It's not that German laws are particularly "bad"; it's built on different social norms and standards, so some things legal in not-Germany might be not in Germany, AND vice versa. The Internet has to evolve to adapt to this reality.
Sometimes it really should be Germany. "Development" is everywhere; "evolution" is pretty much bound to be such; "progress" is where the best slope is. Evolution is sometimes not a progressive development - but it'd better be.
In wide areas across speeches and informations, actually. But they have their sovereign rights to be respected, I guess, so simply labeling them as punchable backwards thinkers might not be the best solution.
> We also got ourselves informed about ‘fair use’ under German law. We even appointed a lawyer, at our own cost, who did his own research and also came to the conclusion that what youtube-dl does is perfectly legal and covered by fair use
That sounds strange. There's no "fair use" doctrine in German copyright law.
I'd guess they base the argument on §95a Abs. 3 Nr. 2 UrhG [1]: basically, providing youtube-dl is legal as the part bypassing Youtube's technical protection is just a small part of it, and other than that its primary purpose is to allow an user to exercise their explicit right to make individual private copies of a work of art under §53 UrhG [2].
If YouTube had any issue with people downloading freely available videos they should just put their content behind a paywall instead of masquerading as a video host
If YouTube-dl let you bypass the paywall, that would make its main use closer to “obviously illegal”.
If it only allows a paying user to make a local copy against the company’s wishes, we would have about the same situation as today. And maybe also a lot of banned YouTube/google accounts when detected.
Yep DMCA exists for a reason. But YouTube doesn't want to loose out on Ad revenue by paywalling free content like Netflix does with paid content. The content itself apart from Trailers is mostly intended for public viewing regardless of whether YouTube has chosen to monetize it with Ads or whatever
It's just Conway's Law asserting itself. The internet is just continuing its transformation to better match the socio-economic-political system -- that of top-down control.
The Internet is not dying. It's just on pause mode.
The people that built the Internet are not the people that will keep building the Internet. Their hunger was fed long ago by the yields harvested by their contributions to technology.
The Internet will remain on pause mode until someone disrupts it with new technology that cannot be contained by social solutions. Something that outpaces laws, outpaces cease and desists. Technology that is unaffected the current rules but uses the Internet as its substrate.
It sounds like anarchy but it's just what the Internet was one full human generation earlier. (Arguably pushing on two generations now).
If we invented the Internet today, we'd consider it an insidious invention designed to pry control away and redistribute it to institutions that shouldn't own it. Could we do it a second time?
>Decentralisation is the key... but no... just blanket hate on anything related crypto/blockchain.
Blockchains are not the be all and end all of decentralization. In fact, most decentralized use cases don't require (and performance would suffer significantly if used) blockchains at all.
I'm not hating on blockchains, they have some important uses. But decentralized communications ala the Fediverse[0] wouldn't gain anything from blockchains, and ActivityPub[1] is most certainly decentralized, and while I suppose someone could bolt a blockchain onto it, it's unclear to me what value could be added.
And there's this one weird thing I heard about the other day. It's so outlandish I thought it was somebody's psychotic fever-dream. Supposedly, there are these things called "websites." Not sure what they are, but apparently, just about anyone can set up/own/run one (or more) all by themselves on skinny hardware without any blockchains. I heard about this and just snorted derisively because that's clearly bullshit -- no one could ever do anything like that. /s
> And there's this one weird thing I heard about the other day. It's so outlandish I thought it was somebody's psychotic fever-dream. Supposedly, there are these things called "websites." Not sure what they are, but apparently, just about anyone can set up/own/run one (or more) all by themselves on skinny hardware without any blockchains.
Until someone who doesn't like you sues DNS providers for resolving your hostname, or your nameserver provider decides to kick you, or the FEDs decide to seize the server hosting it, and then you'll wish it was all on IPFS and you were using a Web3 domain (Unstoppable, ENS, etc.). It's not a panacea, but I think it would be step in the right direction.
Before we start talking about Tor (which is awesome) I'd like to remind that onion addresses are absurdly horrible and would never be adopted by mainstream, the only way to have limited domains per physical person (and thus the abillity to choose a somewhat good looking domain) is for them to cost something, and cryptocurrency is the decentralized way we have to do it for now, thus that's where Unstoppable and ENS come from.
The fediverse is not decentralized, it is “federated.” Large portions of the fediverse are censored by a few powerful admins that control the majority of users and speech that flows through the network.
Better examples of decentralized social platforms might be Bluesky or Farcaster. The former relies on DNS (which has some central points of failure) and the latter relies on Ethereum (which does not have the same central points of failure).
>The fediverse is not decentralized, it is “federated.” Large portions of the fediverse are censored by a few powerful admins that control the majority of users and speech that flows through the network.
Really? No one can force me to post (or not) anything on my Pixelfed[0] instance. And if they wanted to, they'd need to commit felonies (using violence or breaking into my premises physically or over the network) to do so.
You're seem to be under the misapprehension that self-hosting isn't viable. I don't believe so (and self-host many services), but I respect your opinion.
Don't like what "a few powerful admins that control the majority of users and speech that flows through the network?" Don't use or federate with those instances.
As I said, I run several ActivityPub instances and I don't even know who such "powerful admins" might be. Nor do I care.
I get your point, but (not attacking you here, just the idea that you have to interact with "big" sites not under your control, that (might) make moderation decisions you don't like).
If your goal is to reach the largest number of people, presumably for commercial purposes, I suppose that you might feel limited by folks who don't want your unsolicited commercial posts on or federated with their sites.
That could be limiting. But the vast majority of us just want to share and interact with people we know about non-commercial stuff. Setting up you own instance is absolutely decentralized (go ahead -- block my Pixelfed site -- I don't care -- I don't know you and I don't want to interact with you).
There are many use cases and perspectives here, but your assertion that ActivityPub (AP) (as a protocol, not any specific instance, which is why I separated the applications that run on top of AP) isn't decentralized isn't accurate.
The existence of instances with large (relatively speaking) numbers of users is irrelevant to whether or not the protocol and the platforms that rely on it are decentralized or not.
Feel free to disagree -- As I said, I get your point, but it's not relevant to any of my use cases. If the current AP ecosystem doesn't meet your needs, you have other alternatives as you mention -- But AP is definitely decentralized.
Agreed, and it's really frustrating to see how little HN understands that decentralized != 'cryptocurrency' or blockchains. There's such an immense hatred due to laziness in categorizing anything remotely close to blockchains (without regard for how close e.g. git is to these technologies). There is a lot of value in them to solve some of our problems (e.g. the foreseeable closing of Docker hub, huggingface, and many others).
YouTube isn't what's dying, it's the organic, non-monetized, grassroots web that's being killed off. You know, the stuff that's actually interesting and cool and not trying to sell you anything.
Just guessing, but the legal situation in Germany is perfectly clear: You are free to download any content from streaming platforms as long as it is not an "obvious illegal source". Youtube being a subcompany of Google/Alphabet clearly does not qualify as "obviously illegal". The catch is, that it is still illegal in Germany to bypass copy-protecting measures. I.e. if you would rip a Netflix stream that uses Widivine/DRM, that would be illegal. I think this is the argument they used in this court case, although I was not aware that youtube videos use browser DRM.
> although I was not aware that youtube videos use browser DRM
I'm pretty sure they don't, at least not for all resolutions. I'd never install Widevine into my main Firefox, but I watch YouTube daily though it. Perhaps the copy protections are more security by obscurity (i.e. weird endpoints, weird parameters, arbitrary requirements, etc.) although I have absolutely no idea since I've never read yt-dlp source code.
I don’t think higher-ups at the RIAA or MPAA are so naïve as to believe they’re doing the right thing in any situation. They just prefer money and power to being decent.
Wikipedia gives more weight to Mitch Glazier¹ being a lobbyist than RIAA’s CEO. It comes as no surprise that:
> He played a role in drafting the No Electronic Theft Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Copyright Term Extension Act.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Glazier