The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market.
To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions[0]. That ban would work regardless of fair use.
This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law, BTW - your access to copying tools should not evaporate because of a lack of ability to enforce copyright on you.
[0] How this ban is actually implemented is immaterial, but perhaps radios can't have detachable speakers or audio out ports to hook a tape deck into, or tape decks have to only have an integral speaker and no audio in ports. This wouldn't stop home recording of radio but it'd be significantly worse.
> RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool
"(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work"
The argument would seemingly be that youtube is in no way "effectively controlling access to a work." And none of the peculiar details of it's implementation are designed to operate in this capacity. Quite the opposite, it's technology is designed to broadcast, for the purposes of inserting ads, content to anyone who merely requests it.
Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site and has nothing but an ad-hoc system with limited availability that takes action only after content is uploaded. As there are many videos that are past copyright protection or have been explicitly released into the public domain, and they make no distinction in the "technical measures" used in those videos, that they aren't effectively controlling access, and the tools aren't circumventing them for this purpose.
I am startled, and also glad, that record labels haven't put the screws to youtube enough to get them to implement widevine for music videos on youtube.
The problem is that if they implement Widevine they also need to license FairPlay, PlayReady, and Adobe's DRM schemes as well. Otherwise YouTube is effectively Chrome-exclusive.
The reason why EME didn't lead to a catastrophic downfall of freedom on the Web is purely a function of DRM being expensive to license. Netflix can afford it but not YouTube, and YouTube creators generally don't want it[0].
Related note: if YouTube starts putting DRM on videos then every creator that's ever used Kevin Macleod music is now violating the Creative Commons anti-DRM clause. YouTube actually added a feature to mark your video as CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, so they'd be at least marginally aware of this clause, so they'd have to at least make DRM opt-in.
[0] To be clear, this is moreso that what YouTubers are actually worried about is reuploading content back to YouTube and monetizing it. They don't care so much if you have a stream-ripped copy on your computer that you just watch on your own. But things like Content ID actually work way better for preventing reuploading.
hey, that's a really good point that i hadn't thought of: either whatever is required to watch a youtube video isn't a 'technological measure that effectively controls access to a work' or it's illegal for youtube to host all those videos using incompetech music
I'd say at this point youtube has so much more market capture than any non-chrome browser, they probably could just say "get Chrome or gtfo" and not even notice the audience dip.
They don't have to explicitly require that of communications services. Just write interoperability into law and the problem goes away.
The reason they don't work with each other is there's a line in the terms of service that says you can't use anything but their official software to interact with their servers. WhatsApp will literally ban your number forevef if it detects this. That's the root cause of the shittiness of apps. They very much want you locked in and forced to use their shitty proprietary software. If society makes such terms illegal and unenforceable, free software clients will start showing up and other companies will start integrating with their competitors whether they like it or not. This will also fix all other apps of any kind, including social media apps. It will kill things like remote attestation and web environment integrity. It will just fix everything.
Third-party clients are great and I agree that the ability to use them should be enforced by law. But really, that's not enough - I don't want accounts on numerous different networks just because one group of friends is here and another is there and the school is using that one etc. Once you are at a certain size, you should be required to federate with the one official chat network.
Why? I don't want into any "official chat network". I despise whatsapp and its success in Europe is a testament to the lacking class, culture and taste of its clueless inhabitants.
The best way to get there is to support Matrix then. I have elaborated in sibling comments on why trying to have the government force the existing systems to be compatible is a terrible, terrible idea.
This isn't going to happen. It's not a good idea generally. It doesn't bring "freedom for the people" but instead completely undermines it. Such integration would break the security of Signal, rendering its existence moot.
Take a few minutes to think about how it would have to be implemented on a technical level.
I'm not sure I understand? all three of those apps are end-to-end encrypted. Surely the recipient's phone has the key to decode and the company does not?
First of all, Telegram is not end to end encrypted. It has limited support for end to end encryption of direct messages only. There is zero support for E2E of groups, and zero support for E2E in a multiclient context, which makes the feature almost completely useless, and indeed, almost nobody uses it and I don't think even 1% of telegram users have ever used it or even know how to use it.
Integrating either Signal or WhatsApp clients with Telegram would to tantamount to a backdoor, or would require a redesign of Telegram so drastic that would upset its users. A perfect analogy is integrating WhatsApp and Twitter because Telegram is actually more similar to Twitter than it is to WhatsApp.
But even integrating Signal and WhatsApp which now share a similar encryption scheme and user ID isn't a good idea: Most Signal users don't want any interaction either directly or indirectly with WhatsApp. The two programs have completely different group implementations: WhatsApp keeps all the metadata server side, whereas Signal handles all of that client side with the server acting as a dumb router of opaque messages that wrap the group state updates. How would those two systems be reconciled? Would Signal have to accept WhatsApp users joining its group and then just leak all of the group metadata to WhatsApp servers for compatibility? Would WhatsApp have to re-write its entire service to be compatible with Signal's group semantics and see to it that all billion users are fully upgraded or kick them off the service?
These issues go on and on and on, and they increase exponentially the more messaging systems you try to add. The whole idea is just ridiculous.
Signal would have to create a fake user for every integrated Whatsapp/Telegram user, and the client would have to create an e2e key pair. Signal's zero knowledge policy doesn't need to be compromised in order to achieve that. Hopefully it would be possible to opt out of the integrations.
This was why XMPP failed. The UX was terrible because different clients didn't support the same features broadly and it was a big mess. And everyone just went with centralized services where everything works as expected.
I would doubt it. Websites are essentially software distributed on demand, there is no requirement to distribute your software for any particular platform (browser).
If Apple can make their software (i.e. Final Cut or Logic) exclusive to Apple devices, so can Google.
$10 million? That's maybe 20 developers for a year, including costs of employment, office space, IT services, etc. Less that 1% of Youtube's employees. Chump change.
I have music playlists turned to swiss cheese on paid streaming music services, and it's for that reason that I've turned to doing the unthinkable: buying mp3s like some kind of devolved luddite.
I still buy CDs from time to time. Sturdier than vinyls, no copy protection, harder to accidentally delete than a downloaded MP3 or Vorbis. So I have a few precious albums that (until the plastic degrades or my home burns?) I'll always have.
Are they really though? It's my impression that even mass produced pressed CDs have a reputation for rotting on the order of 20-30 years. Vinyl lasts a century or more if you don't physically abuse it. CDs are certainly easier to rip though, so probably still worth it.
If you play a vinyl record enough to wear it out, at least you listened to it a lot before it wore out. With CDs, you might never listen to the music even once and come back years later to find it has destroyed itself.
I use https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader to immediately archive flac files to my NAS after a purchase, then convert to those to a lossy for space saving format for mobile playback/family sharing as desired with a playlist. This way I have my archive, and the artists I like get their support.
this is indeed what had happened to one of my top listens in 2022.
artist decided to revise their own back catalog narrative so to speak, and I get it but holy crap the horses already left the stable.
So it is not for sale. I might find it on soulseek (thanks for the suggestion someone else ITT). the album meant a lot to me, as these things can when they're literally top playcounts for the year - clearly it does.
and it was, you know... super-indie, mom's basement kind of soundcloud & distrokid released production.
wonderful and now gone. Had I bought this on iTunes it would have gone into my offline library. it was for sale, and is no more.
my takeaway has been to get very defensive about any hyper-indie releases that I want to hang onto.
I don't get why everyone jumped onto streaming in the first place - it was always clear to me that not "owning" any of the music/movies I like was a bad idea.
Rules of three/trinities are incredibly common in human societies, does the choice of naming affect anything very much?
I also feel like it's a bit disingenuous to refer to baseball as a "child's game", when most people know it for the professional variety played by high end athletes.
3 violations is enough to establish a trend, while giving people a little bit of leeway for the first and second violations since they may not know / understand the rules. 3 strike rules are formulated because there is a general consensus that such rules are fair and just, not because people like baseball.
As a outsider, three-strike laws have always seemed to be a uniquely American form of injustice, leading to overpunishnent. It's disappointing (and a little chilling, considering the global policies of the tech giants originate in the US) to think some people might consider them fair or just.
The question is whether youtube connects the authority of the copyright owner with particular videos. It obviously does. The copyright owner is the entity that receives ad revenue, and the entity that can strike videos that violates its copyright.
No, they're not good faith actors, far from it. However, the sorts of bad faith actions they engage in are not violations of the law. "Implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" is a provision of contract law, not copyright law.
Oh, copyright monopolists are a million times worse than patent trolls.
Patent trolls don't make the laws, they just exploit them. Copyright monopolists literally make the laws and then complain that the whole world isn't following them. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on lobbyists and essentially buy whatever laws they want. Leverage courts? Copyright monopolists will literally leverage the might of the US government and military to enforce US laws overseas. Look up US Trade Representative reports on "notorious markets" which is all about getting foreign countries to enforce US copyright law as if they had nothing better to do than police imaginary american property. It's packed full of language like "stakeholders" which is code for these monopolists. It's like they're the bosses of the US government.
I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is?
I remember that in Finland, it was debated in courts whether breaking DVD CSS encryption using readily downloadable software was infringement upon an effective copy protection scheme or not. An appeals court decided it was (i.e. CSS was deemed "effective"), but the requirement that the copy protection scheme be "effective" in order for circumvention to be considered illegal is still there in copyright law. (The legislation is based on whatever the EU-wide regulation is and includes provisions somewhat similar to the DMCA such as the prohibition of circumvention.)
I doubt that "copy protection" that can be circumvented by reading the YouTube web page source code would be deemed effective under that law. Does the DMCA not have a similar limitation? Or is the RIAA just trying to play the lobbying and rhetoric game despite having weak legal grounds? (Wouldn't be surprising.)
This sounds like a transposition[0] and translation error. The word "effective" has two meanings:
- Is strong enough to keep you from copying the thing
- Has the effect of keeping you from copying the thing
Congress intended the latter meaning and US courts adopted that. The first meaning would be self-defeating: once someone figured out how to break a copy protection system, it would no longer be effective, so you'd only be able to prosecute the first person to break the system.
If effective meant "is strong enough" I don't think DVD CSS would count because they specifically used export-grade encryption. The rule (part of ITAR, AFAIK) was that 40-bits was the max entropy you could have, specifically so the NSA could break foreign-operated encryption systems. But this is kind of silly - computers are getting faster all the time, so it seems odd that a measure considered copy protection yesterday would stop being copy protection today just because we can crack passwords faster.
[0] Transposition is the concept of copying EU regulations into member state law. I'm using the term slightly broader than EU law. While WTO rules don't have a direct transposition requirement, USTR conditioned lots of trade deals on transposing DMCA 1201 into local law.
> I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is?
The DMCA has no such provision; if a work is DRM-encumbered, it always enjoys the anti-circumvention protections of the DMCA. It’s one of the main reasons why I think works available only with DRM shouldn’t be eligible for copyright protection: the presence of DRM prohibits the creation of an archive-appropriate copy (in a legal sense, not in the quality sense) that can survive the copyright term of the work. If the owner of a work wants to only release it with DRM, they have to rely on other laws with higher burdens of evidence to provide legal protection.
> I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)?
No. "Effective" is defined in section 1201 as meaning that the technological measure prevents copying "during the normal course of its operation" -- i.e., the "happy path" of the code prevents unauthorized copying. No matter how trivially the code may be broken, breaking it is a felony. A simple bit of JavaScript embedded in a page that prevents right clicks (to download images) would be an "effective technological measure" under the DMCA. If you put up a web page showing how to get around this with Chrome developer tools, you are "trafficking in circumvention tools" and can be found civilly/criminally liable under the DMCA.
Note that there are Library of Congress exceptions for circumventing, but not for trafficking. So you can figure out how to, say, rip DVDs yourself if doing so falls under a LoC exemption. But if you then turn around and publish how to do it, you are still in violation of the DMCA.
The DMCA says it needs to be "effective," but then defines it as
>technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Which sounds like basically anything they call DRM is DRM.
No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
I'm not a lawyer but how does youtube-dl fit any one of these criteria? despite the name, it's not "primarily designed to circumvent copyright", nor is copyright circumvention its only use (though "commercial significance" seems to be doing a lot of work here).
Reading this I wonder if a computer program falls under "any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof". Has it been established that a computer program can be a protection circumvention tool?
It's not "circumventing copyright", it's circumventing copy protection. The RIAA alleges that YouTube rotating their URLs is a copy protection measure. If that's true[0] then youtube-dl would fit plainly in category (A), since downloading YouTube videos is all it does. Category (B) is there to prevent someone from selling, say, a "DVD decrypting can opener" and then arguing that the can opener part makes the DVD part legal. Category (C) is there to prevent people from selling you the analog hole.
My objection to the RIAA's copy protection argument is that they did not actually create the copy protection measure. They are alleging that some third party's product feature happens to look close enough to copy protection that it should count as such. Would they be able to sue YouTube if they were to stop rotating their URLs? Do social media platforms suddenly have an obligation to continue to maintain features that accidentally frustrate illegal copying of text? Do I have to reimplement spacebar heating?[1]
Another potential objection would be that rotating URLs are not copy protection. This may work, but keep in mind: 17 USC 1201 has no bounds on the scope of copy protection beyond "it has to somehow stop you from copying a thing protected by copyright". Encryption and scrambling systems are explicitly named, but the way the law is currently drafted, anything can be a copy protection measure. There's a lot of language defining existing copy protection systems they wanted to grandfather in (e.g. Macrovision) but nothing limiting the scope of future systems.
[0] If accepted, this would be the widest reading of DMCA 1201 that I've seen accepted by a court of law (as a non-lawyer). Yes I am counting the printer cartridge and garage door opener shenanigans of yesterdecade. Those were bog-standard "designing the product to commit three felonies a day" kinds of copyright abuse and the courts smacked them both down.
I took a minute to read up on this rolling cipher thing and WOW. This is not copy protection, this a complex protocol for content delivery behaving as designed. What exactly is bypassed here?
Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason.
The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online.
Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid.
Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically relevant cases. It is gonna take years to unfuck this.
* duh, they don't even know differences of encoding vs encryption...
> Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason. [...] The lawyers are this stupid.
The law has other things listed beside encryption. Did they really call this "encryption" as you're claiming (citation?) or did it fall under another bucket?
They were referring to it as a "Rolling Cipher" (searchable) and reinforcing the claim based on Widevine as a protection mechanism for the (previously hosted) Youtube Red content. [1]
They were making the case "if youtube decided to replace the rolling cipher with widevine completely, it would seriously harden the DRM protection".
"Die Einordnung der "Rolling Cipher" als wirksame technische Schutzmaßnahme ist auch unter Berücksichtigung der Regelung des § 53 Abs. 1 UrhG zur Zulässigkeit von Vervielfältigungen zum privaten Gebrauch verhältnismäßig."
This translates to that they think base64 is a reasonable technical measurement to protect content.
By this logic they've established that URLs themselves are a valid copyright protection mechanism (encodeURIComponent uses base64url behind the scenes), which has another scale of consequences. That is why I'd argue that the court has no idea whatsoever what base64 is, what it does, or that it is even an openly defined specification as a text interchange format.
I think what confused the court is the parameter shuffling for the signature parameter in combination with base64. Even though this is not encryption they made it look like effective encryption in front of the court.
It's not just base-64. The 'url' of the next chunk of data is encoded in the data of the previous chunk. (As opposed to just doing a chunked transfer of a bigger file). This feature is only in place for some videos, mostly music videos.
This was deemed a 'rolling cipher'. It obviously isn't. Or at best, its a rolling cipher with the key being completely public at all times.
They must have the same lawyers and be getting the same judges as anti-2A groups. The level of misinformation and lack of understanding about the topic in contention feels similar.
I feel like it doesn’t make a difference how good the “encryption” is, it displays intent that you wouldn’t like your data downloaded. Just like an open door to your house vs a really easy to pick locked door makes a big difference.
But base64 is not an a form of encryption, it’s just a different encoding. It’s not bad encryption, it isn’t encryption at all. How does that show intent?
I'd assume that it's a way to make it so the average person can't just right click and choose download, or easily go into inspector. I know base64 isn't encryption but it's a minor hurdle to dissuade the average person hence my inference of intent (e.g. we made a token effort for you to not download, showing we are protecting our assets). IANAL though so I'm just hypothesizing, happy to be wrong.
Base64 doesn’t require JS, it requires a Base64 decoder, which either every language has, or any CS student who’s taken an algorithms class could write in a few hours for the language of their choice. Base64 encoding/decoding is the type of thing you could ask most applicants to write during an interview. It’s like saying they encrypted it in UTF-8.
Base64 is just one of the components of the JS that YouTube uses to generate the actual video URLs. It's been at least a few months since I took a look at it, but I remember it having a substitution cipher and some other transformations, but no "real" crypto like AES and such.
That said, if they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key, is it really circumvention of access control to unlock it with anything other than a user-agent they "support" (i.e. approve of)? As I mentioned in my other comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114697), a lot of people "download" from YouTube not to infringe copyright but to simply use alternative software to view the content.
> they're effectively giving you both the lock and the key,
DRM in a nutshell. I think we have to assume the anti-circumvention laws are intended to apply in precisely this kind of circumstance, since that describes virtually all DRM. When these laws were written, it was even common for DRM to be implemented as XORing with some single byte "key", which was trivial to either extract from the program or just brute force.
Only for paid products (movies, TV shows, etc). Regular videos (even music videos) do not use WideVine DRM or else no tool would be able to download YouTube videos. (Or at least, public tool - private scene groups do of course have bypasses for it)
Yes. Especially when the site uses indirection and js specifically to obstruct it. It doesn't matter that it's not possible to really prevent it, they can demonstrate that they definitely intended to. Locking something with a trivial lock, but still clearly a lock with no other intended purpose but to be a lock, is entirely different from not trying to lock something, when it comes to going to court to claim that someone stole something.
> This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law
Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been.
For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.)
The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good?
Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.
The primary error seems to be in applying the anti-circumvention ban to fair use and non-infringing use, and tools used for same.
Because most video is encrypted, this effectively reverses Betamax and bans home video recording with DVRs without authorization from the copyright holder.
It's particularly disappointing that the copyright office has flatly refused to authorize 1201 exemptions for non-infringing format-shifting or space-shifting.
In the case where someone kills another (murder is a legal term) and the cases of many other 'crimes' eg stealing, abusing children, etc, these are immoral acts. One's heart knows this. In general, what people refer to as 'common law' is more or less in line with morality - I don't object to that so much.
Now, if you wanted to impose a legal system (an external authority of morality) that doesn't cover these cases, you will fail - people will not accept it's authority and will see it for what it is. The legal system has to encompass these overt, actually immoral cases as bait, in order for the individual to swallow the hook. But, the legal system is not determining right or wrong, it is merely echoing what you already know.
Things like intellectual property rights, speed limits, licensing, tax, etc, are the hook. They are nothing to do with right or wrong. They are merely cash machines for the entities that write the legislation. They could be right, had entered into a contract, where government provided such-and-such a service with explicit agreement. But no one ever did..
Laws are not cash machines for those that write them. Laws are an attempt at solving coordination problems. They will arise in any 'state of nature' because the downsides of not solving coordination problems are so incredibly obvious.
Specifically, people will organize into groups that establish and follow rules. Not (just) through coercion, but because the alternative is untenable.
Obviously at that point you get politics, people vying for power, trying to change the rules to their benefit, etc. But that is not the base nature of laws, it is a highly predictable effect of the lawmaking process.
Laws are (nominally) written for the greater good. Copyright protection, for example, exists so artists get compensated for their work, get to claim credit, and, can control distribution. Now this example has obviously also suffered from politics, to the extreme. But the basic premise still makes sense to me.
> They will arise in any 'state of nature' because the downsides of not solving coordination problems are so incredibly obvious.
Do animals or birds have 'laws'? Ok - not that state of nature...
Do you have laws at a family gathering? No.
I think you are mistaking natural law (innate morality) for a bunch of words some corporate lobbyist has written down. And that confusion is the point. If a controlling group can convince individuals to swap out their sense of morality (where each individual decides what's right and wrong for themselves) for a law book that can be controlled externally (a book that monied interests can write or re-write as they like) - then those individuals are harnessed to do what the controlling group say and call it right. That is domestication.
> Laws are (nominally) written for the greater good. Copyright protection, for example, exists so artists get compensated for their work, get to claim credit, and, can control distribution.
Right - that is the sales pitch. But in fact artists get a tiny fraction of the revenue. And the whole idea of the music industry as we have it, is itself an expression of corporate interests.
What I think you are missing is that music and whatever else, would go on without corporations and government and its laws, if people wanted it. However, if you want to harness that interest for parasitic monetary benefit, you need to make laws, enforce them, educate people into believing they are right, etc.
So, yes you can say that this is for the "greater good" but what is actually meant by "greater" are those corporations! Corporations are bigger (ie greater) than the individuals, right?
> I think you are mistaking natural law (innate morality) for a bunch of words some corporate lobbyist has written down.
Not at all. Innate morality is very different from law. Law, as I explained it, is about coordination problems. Such as solving the tragedy of the commons. In 'the state of nature' (scare quotes because I believe never existed, but I am referencing the philosophical concept). i.e. when society has not yet formed laws or large organization. There are many problems that need a solution that is universally followed. This can be actual tragedy of the commons (i.e. overgrazing the field, chopping down productive forrest, not shitting in wells) or it can be simple coordination problems (i.e. everyone drives on the right side if the track, people climbing have right of way over people descending). These lead to rules that a society agrees on.
People who break those rules get ostracized, those people then complain and argue, which formalizes these rules. At some point, the result of breaking these widely established rules moves beyond ostracizing. Rule breakers have harmed the community, so the community gets to harm back through seizure, imprisonment, pain, or other methods.
At that point you have laws. And they are a good thing. People formed them because it made things better. From here on, laws need changing, probably because of circumstances. They also need expansion, because new problems can also be solved this way. At that point you get a legislative process, with the authority to set and change laws. Hence you get power, politics, other things that are also bad. But that doesn't mean laws are inherently bad. They come from a good place, but they have significant downsides.
Besides all this, laws are required to be a state, and being a state is required to have the military strength to avoid being plundered or subjugated by other groups.
Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong.
Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain copying tools. This was hot off the heels of the music industry getting a technology mandate for copy protection on digital audio tape (which would eventually be mooted by MP3 players, see RIAA v. Diamond). The problem is, technology mandates are difficult to draft and have significant problems (sometimes it's legal to copy things). So instead of banning copying tools altogether, they made them opt-out. If the copyright holder protects a work from copying, you can't sell the tool that makes it copyable.
This created a drafting problem: what constitutes protection? At the time 1201 was drafted the biggest copy protection in force was Macrovision, a system intended to make VCRs copying tapes record an unusable signal. So they just copypasted Macrovision into the DMCA. But there's all sorts of other ways you could copy protect things. Software was the most creative with all sorts of dastardly ways to make nonstandard media, ways to check for that media, ways to check that your checks hadn't been changed, ways to encrypt the binary so you can't disassemble it, ways to check for debuggers so you can't copy the disassembled version of any of the above checks, etc. All of that is way too uncertain to draft into the bill.
Congress's answer was to say that anything can by copy protection as long as it keeps you from copying things. This is extremely, offensively overbroad. And it also triggered a slew of new attempts to turn 1201 into a generalized "contempt of business model" tort. We had lawsuits over printer ink and garage door openers, because it's trivial to just smuggle more software into the design of whatever product you want to 'protect.' Thus nobody wants to touch any sort of adversarial compatibility, because that carries insane liability now, and since everything needs software now we've effectively ended capitalism and regressed to feudalism.
It is a mistake to think of law as a substitute for morality. Obviously criminal does not equal immoral. However, we can think of laws as a solution to coordinated action problems and economic "game balance". If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size. When Congress makes mistakes in drafting the law, we create the ability to build illiberal empires. But empires are not creatures of the law. They would still exist without it, making their own laws that would be far worse than the ones Congress gives us.
You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.
> You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.
You've missed the point I think. Tim Cook is fine with US law. His corporation and other corporations are the ones that draft it!
> If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size.
You and I do not draft laws. Corporations have no interest in cutting themselves down to size. (What world are you on?!?)
The only interest corporations have is giving us just enough to carry us over the line. They need our acceptance, consent, buy-in to justify their insane nonsense.
All that disappears very easily and naturally, once you realise that one only needs to refer to one's own innate morality over what one can and cannot do.
The only reason why large corporations exist as such in the first place is because the law created the very notion of a legal corporation as an entity in its own right, a "legal person" capable of owning property etc. Without the state to enforce its property (including intellectual property) rights, those entities wouldn't have so much power to abuse in the first place.
1201(a)(2) prohibits selling tools that are either...
- Only capable of breaking copy protection
- Have minimal commercial utility other than to break copy protection
- Are advertised as being able to break copy protection
If you sold someone an aux cord with the marketing slogan "Copy music off Spotify and stop paying for your subscription", that'd violate 1201(a)(2) because of that third prong[0]. There's also plenty of copy protection circumvention tools that DON'T trip 1201(a)(2) because they aren't marketed as such and have noninfringing uses. For example, Google Chrome. You can use it to bypass right-click blockers because it lets you open Devtools without right-clicking. However, browsers have loads of commercial utility outside of this, and they don't specifically advertise their ability to get around annoying right-click scripts, so they're legal.
We don't normally contemplate this sort of thing because most DRM is specifically designed to be both obvious and separable from other permissible behavior. You cannot accidentally write a DVD decryptor that doesn't trip 1201(a)(2). This has led to people mistakenly assuming that the DMCA requires encryption to be involved or something for a copy protection circumvention tool to be illegal.
[0] I've actually seen this happen. There was someone selling VGA cables marketed as a way to copy Netflix.
If you think that's crazy, a year prior Steve Jobs went up on stage at MacWorld and showed off a PlayStation emulator[0]. Today Apple has been extremely adamant in trying to kill off companies emulating iOS, specifically citing DMCA 1201 as some sort of right to not be emulated.
There was no copy protection being bypassed in that era, and ripping CDs was just a normal thing that people did to listen to music on their computer without having to worry about scratch discs etc.
Apple only had copy protection (m4p files) if you bought music from the itunes store during the time period where their contract with the music companies demanded they do that. When that clause ended, they stopped doing it, and IIRC when you redownload music purchased during that era from apple, you'll now get unprotected m4a files instead.
The files iTunes produced from ripping CDs were never copy protected.
Somewhere in my HDMI chain (Fire TV, Receiver, Splitter, HDMI capture), there is something that’s stripping/ignoring HDCP providing a throwback method of “time/format shifting” content from at least one of the big players. Obviously all of those components have other uses, but I’m happy one of them (probably the splitter or capture device) give me fair use back.
I didn't think either was fair use. I think fair use applies to the utilization not the acquisition of. For example if I bought a movie and I used it with the intention to discuss it with clips, I can recode it because I physically own the medium. The fair use chimes in when the clips are in use. However when I download something with a tool from Google (YouTube) I'm violating their ToS. I might also be violating something in the middle that opens up some legal issues. So when you go to use a video only for fair use, you should ask the poster or the source for an unencrypted one. Also they should do the responsible thing and provide it.
WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0].
Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you live in North Korea or Russia, DMCA 1201 applies to you.
Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them. At worst, a few countries would demand some horse trades[1].
Practically speaking, however, democracies are bad at protecting against small harms exacted against large numbers of people[2], so this never happens. Europe has the Pirate Party but the most successful national iterations of it have had to adopt broader Green[3] and technolibertarian agendas in order to have any semblance of electoral viability. In the US, first-past-the-post is an insurmountable hurdle despite the fragility and incompetence of our two major parties. Here, political issues don't so much form new parties as much as they infect the shambling corpses of existing ones.
Barring that, if only one country decided to repeal their anti-circumvention laws I imagine there'd be a lot of grumbling from the US or Japan, potentially new tariffs, but no outright sanctions. The weird part about world trade is that a lot of these provisions are only enforceable on very poor countries. China blatantly violates WIPO all the time and we, practically speaking, cannot quit them. There is no international leviathan capable of, say, rolling tanks on Beijing and demanding market access and copyright enforcement.
[1] Term of art for "unrelated and usually minuscule things used to bargain for a larger purpose"
[2] e.g. how Intuit got the US government to not provide tax preparation services or software to the public for a decade and a half so they could sell their own offering. It's a thing that annoys people but not enough to get voters to flip sides.
[3] including German "Green", i.e. "nuclear is bad, so we shut down all our nuke plants and started burning lignite[4] instead"
There's actually a potential line of attack that rose due to two SCOTUS decisions a few years ago. The Eldred and Golan cases essentially established that fair use is constitutionally necessary in order for copyright to coexist with the 1st amendment.
If the DMCA is found to hinder the effective exercise of a fair use right, it could be struck down (either facially or in an as-applied challenge)
> WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201.
But that's kind of a solution, isn't it?
Suppose the law prohibited circumvention but only when the copy made is an actual infringement and not fair use. And didn't prohibit tools, or at least tools with a substantial non-infringing use. For example you couldn't sell a satellite descrambler that solely allows the customer to watch without paying, but you could sell a device that allows a paying customer to make a fair use copy. Something like that.
So you comply with the treaty without the catastrophic overreach of the existing DMCA 1201.
In almost every case stupidity is never a defense for violating the law, but stupidity is a valid legal defense against questions of intent. Breaking copy protection is a question of intent.
This caveat is the same reason I can't really support PeerTube. P2P shifts copyright liability onto individual users.
Okay, maybe you could always technically sue someone for watching a YouTube video, but it was practically way more difficult by having to go through Google first to get an IP. P2P skips that step because you dox yourself whenever you use it.
yes, but checkout the redundancy that filecoin nodes offer, they basically pin IPFS for free, not intentionally its just turning into a killer app for filecoin
I readily admit I haven't looked super deeply into Filecoin but I thought they were trying to cryptocurrency the pinning problem, and thus not "for free" right?
filecoin has a coin. I don't know where the burden is for consumers.
a third party service https://web3.storage built a file storage tool on the permissionless network that uses filecoin nodes to pin IPFS links, so it doesn't matter? this third party service tries to make a business model and has overhead costs, and that currently involves a 5gb free tier with unlimited bandwidth. Used to be 100gb. Still cheaper than Pinata and other pinning services that don't use filecoin. And all of that is cheaper than company run centralized file storage because those charge by bandwidth and cant be compared.
This discussion isn't really about whether the service provider has costs, its about a solution for consumers the same way we would talk about a VC subsidized centralized service that happens to be free, for now.
Considering that many countries take a copying fee -- which is intended to cover lost revenue from exactly this use case -- for cassettes, harddrives and other storage media, yes yes it should.
It certainly solves the ethical debate, but sadly the data storage extortion is nothing more than a means to make you pay for your content multiple times.
I would support a political party that intends to change this, but I don't think any party I vote for actually cares about it.
Ah, the legendary carrier pigeons of the internet! If only bandwidth were powered by their fluttering wings. In reality, the modern internet is a vast infrastructure of data centers, cables, and protocols. But it's fun to imagine a world where data is carried by avian couriers.
Historically, carrier pigeons (or homing pigeons) have been used to deliver messages over long distances. There's even a humorous and real experiment where a carrier pigeon carrying a USB stick was faster in transmitting data than an ADSL connection: the "Pigeon vs. Internet" race.
But in all seriousness, the point you're making is valid. Bandwidth is not free, and the resources required to maintain and expand the internet's infrastructure are significant. It's easy to forget about the underlying systems when we use everyday services. Just like water and electricity, the convenience of modern technology can make it easy to overlook the complexity and cost of the infrastructure that makes it possible.
So, while we don't have to feed and care for digital pigeons, it's always a good reminder to be appreciative and conscientious of the resources we use.
Of course, up to you, but most youtube videos are actually an AAC (m4a) codec and thus by asking for mp3 you're going to get a transcoding ffmpeg subprocess in between the bytes and the file in your directory. I would be stunned if whatever your ultimate consuming player is doesn't support aac/m4a/mp4 playback
$ yt-dlp -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k...
139 m4a audio only 2 | 1.47MiB 49k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 49k 22k low, IOS, m4a_dash
140 m4a audio only 2 | 3.90MiB 129k https | audio only mp4a.40.2 129k 44k medium, IOS, m4a_dash
249 webm audio only 2 | 1.54MiB 51k https | audio only opus 51k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash
250 webm audio only 2 | 2.02MiB 67k https | audio only opus 67k 48k low, ANDR, webm_dash
251 webm audio only 2 | 3.95MiB 131k https | audio only opus 131k 48k medium, ANDR, webm_dash
599 m4a audio only 2 | 950.46KiB 31k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 31k 22k ultralow, ANDR, m4a_dash
600 webm audio only 2 | 1.06MiB 35k https | audio only opus 35k 48k ultralow, ANDR, webm_dash
function sideload() {
mv $1 "$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~co~supertop~castro/Documents/Sideloads/"
echo "Sideloaded $1 to Castro; should be available soon."
}
Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public. The issue is with how far this rent seeking goes, and where the balance between social good and private good falls. I'm very firmly in the camp that most IP law has, in the modern day, gone too far. But I do think that conceptually it is beneficial to have and maintain some level of rent seeking.
Of course, we now have a torrential supply of available media, which markets strongly say is worth little to nothing. Apparently, given mass distribution tools and sufficient level of education, the public creates things on such a large scale that it can hardly be argued protectionist policies are necessary for them to exist.
We also see that even with these protectionist policies, only a select few are ever even able to be economically viable, let alone successful. Art's opportunity cost is so front-loaded that it's difficult to produce things while working full time, so the majority of potential successes are prevented from even starting. And then the artistic process is impeded by these laws, as rentiers cry "similarity" over the most absurd things, which creates a chilling effect. It's particularly bad in music.
The best way to support the arts is UBI and the abolition of copyright.
> The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this.
This reasoning is taken at face value in most discussion but should be challenged. A lot of assumptions and potentially specious logic is embedded here, and it's not clear and obvious that any of the following are true:
* it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public
* Paying people to encourage making ideas public increases the amount of value
* most ideas are worth anything at all
* that the most valuable ideas will be made public even with these protection regimes in place
It's arguable that even though there was less information out there before copyrights and patents became a thing, that people were still driven to create art and science, and the quality per unit might have even been higher. And even with patent and copyright in place, truly valuable ideas are still kept secret.
The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.
> The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.
they also protect smaller and potentially more innovative operations from being out-executed by large capital pools.
i know that often times patents have been used by larger and more entrenched concerns to try and control entire spaces (like edison's mppc) but i often wonder how often the patent system has provided some breathing room and opportunity to build something of value for startups working in areas that large players come to identify as potentially profitable...
> Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public.
This is naive reasoning. People have been publishing content without any DRM and have been earning money regardless. There are even people who don't care whether they make money or not. So, monetary incentive is not a must for ideas, or any kind of work, to become public. To the contrary, such incentives drive out good ideas, or works, in favor of bad ones, which only care about the money and not the benefit of the society.
I think IP laws make lot of sense and so does allowing protection of such. It is only effective way to stop corporations from exploiting creators they do not have direct relationship with.
Not that the current term we have isn't extremely too long. And whole concept of lifetime being involved isn't just weird.
We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone establishing it over non-scarce ideas. It's very bourgeois, not very human.
I’m not sure it’s so modern. Every tollgate in the ancient world was effectively rent-seeking. Even in prehistoric societies, it seems there were protection rackets and shamans with “monopoly access” to the gods.
But for most of human history information was difficult and unprofitable to copy. Copying manuscripts by hand was expensive, and few people could read anyway so the market was limited. It’s no accident that copyrights were invented after the development of the printing press.
My claim was that something we didn't have for any substantial amount of our two million years of existence isn't "human nature", not that it was "bad" (weird moralising on your part). Electricity isn't "just human nature" either. We should decide whether we as a society want or accept a given thing based on its effects on all of us, not whether it's "human nature" (which is almost always an incorrect claim when it's made).
I love the precision with which you've said this - but I also I really need to feel like we need a better "general public" way to say it? I haven't figured this out yet.
I've always thought that reality has made their business model obsolete and untenable, so instead of adapting, they lobby and get laws written to protect it. Essentially "rejecting reality, and substituting their own".
A ton of history and literature has been basically wiped out over the centuries. That fact alone should make downloading media and storing it privately a natural right, just like monks copied writings in the middle ages to preserve them. Distribution is an entirely different topic.
- When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore)
- Your copy was a lot worse quality than what you could otherwise buy
- You could at best distribute it to a few hundred or maybe even 1000 people if you were really well connected.
With videos on YouTube you can:
- Get an unaltered copy
- In exactly the same quality as the original
- Which you can easily redistribute to millions
It's not exactly an equal comparison. An equal comparison would be copying on VHS from analog broadcast TV. Which was also legal.
> - When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore)
If such adulteration was sufficient to prevent my listening to the recording, than I wouldn't listen to the radio in the first place. Radio is at least no better than my recording if it always contains such effects.
> With videos on YouTube you can:
> - Which you can easily redistribute to millions
Which platform might I use to perform this redistribution? And how am I to compete with the copy retrievable from the bands own youtube page?
I want a machine learning enhanced analog loop. I want to be able to point a device at a screen and have the machine learning clean everything up and restore high quality sound and video.
Training data would be easy. Take a bunch of videos, play them on a screen, record the screen. You now have the input and the output, x and y. It's just supervised learning from there.
I know there are better options currently, but in the end we have this, unless they take away general purpose computing (but that would a huge blow to our economy).
They can just tattoo all celebrities with EURion constellations on their faces. Don't worry, it's only a short-term measure until the replacement models are fully trained.
streamable.com just removed a random video of mine for “community guidelines”
I use the site to save random Twitter and Youtube videos. They aren’t publicly shared. Kind of disheartening to see a random video removed without knowing which one. And all for paying $108/year for a simple convenience.
You're shooting yourself in the foot with this example. Millenials did record songs from the radio to audio tapes. I did it (I was born in 1985), my little sister did (she was born in 1990), etc.
But then again TikTok has a 'save video' feature (yet another small example of how it's a better product than YouTube, whether you're a power user or not) which exports videos into you filesystem.
There's technically no difference between downloading and streaming, and in fact nearly all of the videos I "download" from YouTube don't get retained after I watch them --- I'm just doing so in order to be able to use alternative software that respects my freedom.
Since we're talking about video, I think a better analogy would be using a VCR to record broadcasting, and there was certainly a legal battle over that too.
A VCR is not circumventing anything. It’s more like the DeCSS code required to watch a DVD in VLC.
The solution is to host the software in a country that doesn’t have laws against distributing circumvention code, this is how VLC does it. If you host on GitHub then you’re at the mercy of US law.
In Sony v. Universal, the usage of the VCR was justified based on a very narrow, very uncommon use case: if there were a TV show that aired exactly once, and for some reason you wanted to see it but couldn't, and it would never air again, you had the legal right to record one copy for later viewing. (I'm not sure if you had to destroy the copy after viewing it.) On that basis, and that basis alone, was the VCR ruled to have a legal use case. Otherwise it was pretty much a copyright violation device. Justice Blackmun, in his dissent, was clear that even making a single copy for personal use violates copyright law.
Fair use covers making excerpts of a work, not copying a full work, for purposes of reporting, criticism, parody, and the like. If you record or download a full song or video without permission, YOU ARE INFRINGING ON COPYRIGHT.
This is actually correct, since recording a song from the radio by itself generally doesn't fall under fair use. The purpose of the copy is what makes it fair use, for example, as a sample played in a classroom, or for reference for readers/viewers as part of a critical work.
My understanding is that people purely downloading are very rarely if never prosecuted or even part of civil suite. So it is not very big issue and likely is "fair use".
Entirely different question is does offering a tool for this process constitute as fair use as well. Specially if there is DRM involved. Or does tool need to work in specific way to qualify? For example you could record video on your own machine while watching it, but could not directly download a copy?
... also without comments. I appreciate the idea, but without the discussion its basically Twitter since they also hide replies with anonymous requests.
In principle, if you want the post and comments without JS you can just pull the underlying ActivityPub document (application/activity+json). I made a command-line browser based on this idea: https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor
Yep, the web used to be for distributing documents, but now it is becoming/has become more of an application VM [1]. But ActivityPub is a nice format for the document distribution use-case; it is a superset (in terms of features) of semantic HTML [2] and RSS and has higher level semantics (comment sections, profiles, etc) and no server-provided scripting nor styling.
This reminds me of about 10-12 years ago when a Republican staffer suggested that party's platform should include legalising file sharing, on the grounds that the RIAA and MPAA align Democrat so there's no point in the Republicans kowtowing to them.
At the time it was immediately shot down, but if someone made the same proposal now I suspect it might not be. It would certainly liven US elections up.
Depends on how said material was purchased. E.g. Most YouTube videos would not be okay to simply download, since you did not technically pay money to obtain a copy.
However, things you buy on YouTube movies really should be downloadable.
Like everybody, I'm also a fan of free (anything). But you did not ask for the waves that pass through you (so you have the right to record it); but, you have to request a file from a server, not the same thing.
There is no such thing as streaming without downloading.
With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls).
Coming from the UK, I was surprised to hear that recording a song from the radio is allowed under 'fair use'. Especially given that I grew up during the time when that was actually relevant, it was drilled into us remorselessly that recording stuff onto tape was basically illegal, even if it was impractical to enforce. It looks as if the law was amended in 2014 to allow for 'private copies', but I think that still excludes copying from the radio, etc.
Whats to stop me from playing a video full screen while I have a screen recorder? There are plenty of sites out there that can already convert youtube to mp3s
Copyright is just one of the impractically odious pillars of capitalism buckling under the stresses of late capitalism. Trying to "make it work" is a temporary measure at best, but I think more relaxing of the restrictions at least behind the advancement of technology by at least a couple of decades will be the only chance it has to remain relevant. The laws that stopped people from running bootleg vinyl presses are laughable when applied to copying a file from one of my computers to another.
The current experiment of seeing how many $10-$20 corporations consumers are willing to pay monthly ends either with monopoly/oligopoly of art or a new golden age of piracy.
Before even download, can we at least acknowledge that Youtube is the greatest copyright infringement platform on the planet?
Whatever the "excuse" of the uploaders and the host of those uploads (youtube), the sheer number of copyright protected material uploaded in clear sight should be the main concern of any copyright enforcer, not those who download.
I make no claims as to the presence of malware (or lack thereof) in the links in this comment, and I'm not condoning or endorsing anything, nor am I stating an opinion on the ethics of downloading YouTube videos for any purpose, but for the sake of adding information to the table, there are still options available:
And I'm sure many others. I guess as long as the situation is such that it is not stupidly easy to figure out how to get around the restrictions that "prevent" downloading YT videos, workarounds and options will continue to be available. Information is very hard to lock away if it is on the internet and available to the public to some degree. I imagine he situation is considerably different in more totalitarian countries like China and North Korea, where content and online activity is scrutinized/monitored by the government more "thoroughly".
It seems hard to find a line in the sense that recording technology is becoming more and more common, as is the trend of social media companies wanting the masses to "share" their experiences on social media. Hypothetically, if I record a concert with Snapchat spectacles and then upload the snap to YouTube, am I committing some kind of copyright infringement or am I simply sharing an experience with my "followers"? I have actually had videos of concerts that I recorded on my phone taken down from YouTube, even though it wasn't like I recorded with a professional camera or even that the recording sounded particularly good, but I guess some content management stoolies on YouTube (and I imagine Vimeo and maybe LBRY/Odysee/elsewhere) are paid to try to take down content that appears to be bypassing the creators' ability to collect money for their material.
The youtube-dl ruling was at the Hamburg level, does anyone know if they can appeal to the federal courts in Germany? Apparently Hamburg is nightmare tier for this sort of thing.
> Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?
You mean, "hasn't yet been enforced on a person by person basis". If history has proven anything, it is that the government and their corporate masters will do everything they can to expand their powers by passing new laws and enacting new regulations so that they can extract every dollar they can.
The purpose of all these schemes is not to make copyright 100% enforceable, but to make it costly and/or risky enough that the majority simply won't bother.
Learn the new "meta". Just collect the songs and then run your own commentary on top of them. Thus instantly turning them something legal. Even if you just post them to place no one listen to.
I don't normally read articles here, but for some reason this time I did. I'm very disappointed that the fine article amounts to nothing more than a fatalistic tweet.
For anyone with self-respect, it is. Come get me, media-conglomerate scumbags.
Remember how they whined against DAT and basically had it killed (abetted by Congress), claiming that "perfect digital copies" would destroy their business? Meanwhile, everybody on the planet knew that essentially all "piracy" took place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms.
And sure enough, even when "piracy" went digital, it was in the form of lossy MP3s... far from perfect. So their story was a lie from top to bottom... but we've seen our "representatives" abet ever-greater crimes against consumers at their behest. The absurd tax on blank media, and the DMCA (and even more-egregious proposals since) stand as disgraceful examples.
Do you remember when Circuit City or Best Buy offered "every CD $10.99 or less?" The idea was to bring people into their stores, where they'd buy other stuff. But all of a sudden that deal disappeared. It turns out that the record companies threatened those retailers with financial sanctions (by withholding cooperative advertising funds) if they continued to offer those prices.
The record companies were sued for this behavior, which prosecutors said ripped off consumers for $400 million. Gee, this is the same figure that the record companies whined that Napster cost them. Karma is a bitch.
I still have the stub of my $13 settlement check from these assholes.
The hypocrisy of download defenders is exposed when re-distribution is the concern. Most content producers and publishers are fine with downloading as long as you don't re-distribute (which is theft), but we have no way of preventing that, so they are forced to close the download gate
That is not theft. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts [footnote]. To "steal" means to physically take someone's property without their consent.
Instead, you seem to mean a violation of copyright. Copyright exists "to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." "The main purpose of the Copyright Act is the public good of use and access to works of art, even if such a public good comes at the expense of the author of the work." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._...).
And then my opinion: In this age, copyright fails at that. It even has the opposite effect of resulting in less use and less access to works of art. I think it would benefit the public if copyright were abolished (or at least shortened to 20 years, similar to the amount of years that a person gets from a patent to exclusively produce and sell their invention before anyone may do that). I do think however that it should be a duty to mention the source or original author when sharing a work.
[footnote]: but you can neglect to mention the source, or uncover and share information someone wants to keep private
