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.
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.