I was thinking the same thing:
The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material.
We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs! The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of the music industry with how easily they can be used to create unauthorized copies!
i love how dead kennedys literally left one of their cassette tapes sides blank and printed "Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help." on it.
Well, following their logic behind DMCA compliant, I guess fiddling long enough with developer's console on Chrome or Firefox would allow you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube the same way youtube-dl does.
sed s/youtube-dl/firefox/g and voilà, DMCA for Firefox ready to submit...
Let's go further! Let's DMCA the Linux kernel because it runs Firefox/youtube-dl/curl/wget!
The logic behind the DMCA complaint is that youtube-dl is “marketed … for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work” [1], not that it “allows you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube.”
The hell it isn't. A unit test is a bench test for one particular functional unit. It's a check function. If you accept that tests as carrying intent, then I demand every weapons researcher or biologist to be arrested this instant. Clearly they are only out to murder people. That is patently ludicrous.
> If you accept that tests as carrying intent, then I demand every weapons researcher or biologist to be arrested this instant. Clearly they are only out to murder people.
Well, what do you think weapons are for? I’m not saying arrest them but that isn’t really a great example, considering the sole purpose of weapons is to kill or destroy. Using weapons for anything other than killing or destroying is basically a secondary usage.
One of the tests in question extracts the m4a audio file of a Taylor Swift song [0] that has nearly 3 billion views and shows me 2 ads before playing. That's a lot of revenue for UMG, who I guess are a bit unhappy with this mechanism that youtube-dl provides of listening to it without having to watch the ads.
So it's only a problem if the video has a lot of views and ads?
If that's the case, we should ban all Pi-holes, too, as they _can_ be used to block ads.
What if I have YouTube Premium, then I don't see ads, so am I allowed to download via youtube-dl?
> So it's only a problem if the video has a lot of views and ads?
Pretty much, yes. No one is going to hire expensive lawyers to enforce copyright on something not generating revenue, although legally they can.
> If that's the case, we should ban all Pi-holes, too
If Pi-hole is anywhere saying or implying "use us to watch $vendor's content without watching their ads" then yes pi-hole is waving a red flag at $vendor who is now motivated to try to ban pi-holes. If there is a legal action they can afford to take they will.
> What if I have YouTube Premium, then I don't see ads, so am I allowed to download via youtube-dl?
No, downloading is a separate "right" from the right to watching without ads. (Downloading is the first step before uploading elsewhere and literally stealing the ad revenue.) But I think there's a legal grey area if you're watching (streaming) with youtube-dl, without saving the file. I'm sure it's against Youtube's TOS though.
Are you sure you want to say it's literally stealing the ad revenue? I would imagine literally stealing the ad revenue would require robbing the bank or safe where the ad revenue money is stored.
Yes. You have reduced the amount of cash they have and increased the amount you have by the same amount. If that's not stealing I don't know what is.
Trying to say that's not stealing is like trying to say
"Someone hacked into to my bank account and "obtained" my money" is not stealing either just because there was no physical cash involved.
How does it increase the amount of cash I have? I watch the video, without ads, and I have exactly the same amount of cash as before.
It also does not decrease the amount of cash owned by the content owner or hosting company (apart from hosting costs, but that's the nature of the internet and they are willfully participating in it). The only cost involved is opportunity cost.
Yes, you are indeed talking about the opportunity cost. Re-uploading the video as your own (with or without ads) would indeed constitute copyright infringement, but without it, it is not.
I'm not sure this fits the definition of opportunity cost either? I understand why you think it does (because it was money not gained that could have been) but the content producer doesn't have multiple options to choose from here. They expect to have X dollars in their account, instead they have X-Y dollars and there's Y dollars in thief's account, because of the actions of the thief, not because of any decision they made.
The crux is in the expectation: they expect that they will make X in a given day, but an expectation is not a guarantee or a right. They also could have made X in a given day, but sometimes that just doesn't happen due to various factors.
I'm not sure to whom you are referring when you say "thief", but I was under the impression that we were talking about a person watching, but not re-uploading, a Youtube video without viewing ads. This person does not have Y dollars in his account as a result of copyright infringement since they simply watched the video and did not put it up for further distribution.
I really just shouldn't have mentioned ad revenue theft at all in the first place, it wasn't that relevant.
I wasn't saying "people who download are thiefs", I was saying "thiefs start by downloading". Then I had to explain what a thief is, and why they really have Y dollars in their account that should have been in producers account. In my other comment the thief is a separate party from the content consumers (so actually there are 6 parties, content consumers is split into those who watch ads and those who download without re-uploading).
> How does watching an ad decrease the amount of money I have?
There are at least 5 parties here:
· Content producer (spending time and effort making original content that people watch)
· Platform
· Advertiser
· Content consumers
· Thief
In your comment you're Content producer. The advertiser pays the platform who pays the content producer, and the amount they get is based on the number of views (there are other factors, but I think views is the main one). Let's say they're getting X views per day. Then the theif takes the content and uploads it to their own account with ads enabled, and gets Y views per day, and gets paid for that. No one is going to watch the content on the producer's channel a 2nd time just to make up their view stats, so now the producer is only getting X-Y views per day and hence is paid less.
I'm not a lawyer, and even if it was I could never tell you that anything would be "ok" in this kind of situation. But I suspect that it would be better off.
> Why stop with torrent clients? They should ban all browsers, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!
We're talking about an industry that normalized rootkit DRM and persuaded pretty much all hardware manufacturers to implement expensive encrypted pipelines to lock you out from trying to even take a glimpse of content playing.
After a few years of working near this industry I really cannot overestimate how rentseeking and scummy every single part of it is. They will abuse you without a second thought if there's a cent to be made.
All computers with the option to install applications or unlocked/unlockable bootloaders can be used to make copies of copyrighted materials. And it certainly happens a lot.
But then, when secure boot came, Microsoft was forced to grant every owner of an Intel compatible computer the right to unlock it for antitrust reasons (luckily).
So were is the borderline between a legal tool and an illegal tool? Well, lawyers will find out...
In the meantime youtube-dl needs to be distributed some other channel. Which of course might raise the risk of back-doored or otherwise poisoned version floating around.
Why stop with browsers? With enough creativity you can use any network protocol to download copyrighted material, so they should just ban computer networks.
So what does it mean when someone says "he got off on a technicality"?
There have been plenty of cases where exactly that happened.
There's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, and many are persuaded that when someone hasn't violated the letter of the law, they haven't violated the law.
Judges, lawyers, and juries will vary on this, but in many cases the letter of the law will carry the day, and people will in fact "get off on a technicality".
Because browsers and network protocols were not created with the primary purpose of violating copyrights...
Intent matters in the law.
After after all, two guns can be physically and functionally identical, but if one is purchased to be used in a conspiracy to commit murder then it's evidence of a crime, and the other gun is still just a gun.
They would prefer it if you only used DRM input and output devices that only run approved code rather than general purpose devices that can run any code you can conceive of or download [1]
Same for any kind of information exchange, like speech or the written word. Common sense says their argument doesn't hold water at all. Should courts decide in favor of the takedown that'd just go to show how broken our legal system is. Let's hope not.
And you don't even need a browser for that. Your operating system comes with TCP support and that in itself is enough. (OK, some of them may probably be willing to build in all kinds of restrictions, so maybe they can get a RIAA stamp.)
The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material
Didn't the RIAA put up a considerable effort against torrenting in the early 2000's? I remember quite vividly them going after just about anyone who made music available, even if you owned your own songs and were simply uploading them to a web UI to listen to in the browser (Remember Muxtape?)
Hush, don't leak their master plan! Of course they'd love to just ban about anything that can potentially be used to commit copyright infringement. Of course that includes your web browser, too. Unless it can only visit a list of websites pre-approved by RIAA ;)
Why not just ban computers or even why not jail people who even think about using ytdl? These organisations like RIAA need reality check. Sadly there is no body to stand against their bullying and stiffling the freedom of speech.
EFF takes up these causes sometimes, right? This notice is hollow sabre-rattling, so I wouldn’t worry too much. What can RIAA do if somebody forks the project and hosts it in the Lithuania? Not much. Yell into a pillow, maybe.
youtube-dl needs to be regularly updated as streaming sites add new countermeasures to block it. If those updates can no longer be crowdsourced from a popular, reputable site like GitHub, the tool has a good chance of dying.
The RIAA would absolutely ban all torrent clients if they could. If one advertises itself as a way to download copyrighted material, they would try to pull the exact same thing.
What about chromium? They should take that down as well, imagine what children can see using that thing. `curl`, `wget` as well as gitlab - massive offender, random number generators - one of the biggest offenders, any worst nightmare you can imagine can be produced by it!
Well, we (Lithuania) have a law that works along these lines. When you buy any storage device a part of the price is a tax that goes to IP protection agency. The reasoning is exactly that: because you may store some pirated music or whatever on it. How was this bs passed I have no idea.
I believe he has the soul of a gamer. (heck, he ran a regular poker game at Harvard).
And when he was immersed into the money-making game, he was all in, willing to do anything to win.
But when you eventually beat the game, you don't get that thrilled anymore, there's no big challenge ahead. You can play for a while to see how far can you go, but it ends up being boring after a while.
So, I think he moved on to basically a real life version of reversal Plague Inc (instead of trying to infect everyone, he tries to beat a disease). This is a harder challenge in many ways, because he needs to deal with tons of geopolitics, international affairs, research and development, human behavior, etc.
If you see it from that perspective, you can still see that he is still a hard player, but this time, he is playing a game that can be beneficial for everybody, not just himself.
Good point. In the spirit of https://xkcd.com/927/ I propose we add "european programmer's day", celebrated on 5.12 (Dag Sinterklaasje)?
Let's all meet here again. I'll bring a bottle or two of Pastis 512 (unfortunately adjusted with magic marker instead of a hex editor) and we can blast Dylan Beattie and the Linebreakers:
It's interesting how my mind had some trouble processing some of those crater images, because I saw initially some of them as circular buttons, going up from the surface, instead of craters going down.
I had to stop looking, and look back several times before my mind could actually see some of those pictures correctly.
It has happened to me since I was a child, at the time of Apollo. My trick was turning the photo upside down so the light aligned with the room source.
If it's the same now as it was back when I last used it (more than 15 years ago), it should have a search box. You search within the app itself, it shows the results and you select the file you want to download. You don't need to use an external service.
I see the claims that this won't produce inflation with extreme scepticism.
And I say this, living in a country that has had something similar to a basic income for years, although not fully universal (universal for kids, and people below certain income line), the vast majority of people get it and ended up resulting in that around half the public budget goes to social expenses. Every year that bag gets bigger, deficit gets bigger and having more currency flowing, inflation gets bigger and bigger.
So, this income is increased and salaries get adjusted, and it ends up in a never-ending cycle of income trying to catch up with inflation.
It's very hard to get out of that situation once you are in it, because now people depend on this money, and the political cost to cut it is so enormous that nobody dares trying to do it. It would mean the end of their political careers.
Maybe Germany can show us that it can be done, it will be very interesting to see the results. But from what I've experienced, this is not as simple as many people think it is.
> I see the claims that this won't produce inflation with extreme scepticism.
I haven't seen price drops since many people stopped working and can afford less, so I don't expect the system to work logically in the other direction either.
Limiting the increase of rents is often named as a feasible remedy. However this can be circumvented by renovations, after which the rent can be increased. Or reversely, renovations might be omitted totally, which yields a net quality decrease for the inhabitants in the long run.
