Major Record Labels Sue Youtube-dl's Hosting Provider:
"We don't think the suit is justified," says Uberspace chief Jonas Pasche in comments to TorrentFreak.
"YouTube has measures to prevent users from downloading specific content, which they make use of for YouTube Movies and Music: DRM. They don't use that technology here, enabling a download rather trivially. One may view youtube-dl as just a specialized browser, and you wouldn't ban Firefox just because you can use it to access music videos on YouTube."
According to an Uberspace lawyer, the aim of the lawsuit is to achieve some kind of precedent or "fundamental judgment". Success could mean that other companies could be obliged to take action in similarly controversial legal situations.
And the alleged illegality of youtube-dl is indeed controversial. While YouTube's terms of service generally disallow downloading, in Germany there is the right to make a private copy, with local rights group GEMA collecting fees to compensate for just that. Equally, when users upload content to YouTube under a Creative Commons license, for example, they agree to others in the community making use of that content.
[...] "Not only does YouTube pay license fees for music, we all pay fees for the right to private copying in the form of the device fee, which is levied with every purchase of smartphones or storage media," says Reda.
"Despite this double payment, Sony, Universal and Warner Music want to prevent us from exercising our right to private copying by saving YouTube videos locally on the hard drive."
The question of whether YouTube's "rolling cipher" is (or is not) a technical protection measure is currently the hot and recurring topic in a lawsuit filed by YouTube-ripping site Yout.com against the RIAA in the United States. After more than a year, the warring factions are no closer to an agreement.
This comes just as (2021-12-17) the main developer changed his status to, "inactive."[1]
Gee, I wonder why?
In my opinion, "the powers that be" won't be satisfied until they get the youtube-dl program completely chased into the underground. Is the successor yt-dlp) next?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by linuxrocks123 on Monday January 17 2022, @06:40AM (2 children)
A little over 10 years ago, I was worried that they'd find a way to force people to point a camera at the screen for consumers to be able to copy movies for legitimate purposes. It was clear that was their goal. But, they lost. The HDMI master key was released, and it's as easy as ever to copy Blu-Rays, Netflix, and whatever else you want.
It shows just how stupid they are that they're going after youtube-dl. They have tons bigger problems that they have no chance of solving.
They lost.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Monday January 17 2022, @12:09PM
From my experience with these guys, they combine both the subtlety and the intelligence of a sledgehammer. They'll fixate on one particular thing and doggedly pursue it for as long as they can while ignoring, or possibly not even being aware of, any technical advice on the topic, and once they're done they'll declare victory and move on to something else. So having youtube-dl as a lightning rod for them, while it kinda sucks to be youtube-dl, means everyone else gets a free pass for the duration.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @05:27PM
The key to understand movie DRM is that while this may appear to be a goal it is not the actual goal of most schemes. "Copy protection" is more of a marketing tactic.
HDCP and related DRM exists so that movie studios and various other companies (such as Intel) can collect royalties from AV device manufacturers that otherwise have nothing to do with your business. Using ordinary blu-rays specifically as an example, it works basically like this:
Leaked keys and savvy users breaking the DRM doesn't really make any difference. Since it's illegal in certain countries (such as the United States) to actually break the DRM that basically ensures the big players will pay up. You just need to avoid DRM-stripping devices becoming super commonplace.
(Score: 4, Informative) by MIRV888 on Monday January 17 2022, @08:17AM (7 children)
I use it consonantly.
That and https://www.tubeoffline.com/ [tubeoffline.com]
(I'm a data hoarder.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by jasassin on Monday January 17 2022, @08:29AM (3 children)
YouTube-dl and yt-dlp are great with mpv (movie player) on Linux. Watching YouTube videos in Firefox uses a LOT more CPU than mpv. If you have youtube-dl in your path you can:
mpv https://youtube.com/video-url [youtube.com]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @10:55PM (2 children)
With mpv you can watch at different speeds (with still understable audio around 1.5x, use mplayer if you want smurfs), go forwards or backwards one frame (try reading tube stickers in painting tutorials to learn what is exactly being used), get OSD with mini preview for seeking [1], run shaders [2], tweak look (contrast, luminance, brightness, gamma) without touching your monitor settings, watch double or half size with one key, keep on top (took ages for this to appear in FF), change aspect ratio (poorly digitized videos anynone?), adjust subtitle and audio syncs, deinterlace, zoom and pan. And many more. If you do not hava data caps, download to temp and then decide what to do with the file.
[1]: https://github.com/blankname/mpv_thumbnail_script [github.com] is a fork updated for recent mpv (original repo is more stale than youtube-dl... maybe this is the way things go now, fork of fork of...). Even so you have to change a mp.register_event line to 'mp.observe_property("tracks-changed", nil, request_init)' to avoid a deprecation warning.
[2]: for example to emulate CRTs and check how old video games would more or less look. Sadly I have not found the right shader (best so far https://old.reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/hvwvsl/crt_scanline_glsl_shader/ [reddit.com] and you have to change define to #define if copy/pasting), as it seems the syntax is not 100% standard thus unable to shaders from emulators.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @03:56AM
mpv even works in the console, with DRM/KMS or SDL.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @01:52PM
Unfortunately in Ubuntu, the mpv package has a hard dependency on the youtube-dl package. Installing the Ubuntu mpv forces the installation of the official Ubuntu youtube-dl package, which is out-of-date and not patched. If you already have your own youtube-dl installed with all sorts of manually applied patches etc, it is way more up to date than Ubuntu's version.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @03:00PM
Consonantly? Sometimes the misuse of a similar sounding word is amusing. 😏
(Score: 5, Funny) by Kalas on Tuesday January 18 2022, @12:02AM (1 child)
You managed to use it consonantly? Please tell me your secret because I can't stand all the vowels in some of the documentaries I watch!
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Tuesday January 18 2022, @03:30AM
I'm a vowel hater.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @08:32AM (3 children)
So, corporations can scrape and mine all the data they can pilfer from my machine every time I connect (or not), but I can't download a YouTube lecture video because... ?
Increasingly the answer here is because of a corrupted legal system and a wholly captured IP court in the US. Chinese researchers don't have to put up with this rentier crap and that will stand to them as the years go by and by.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday January 17 2022, @02:11PM (2 children)
I believe this is the correct mindset on this matter. At least let's be consistent on intellectual property and rights. Do people need to start forming collectives to advocate for their rights? Maybe they should form a clubhouse with a security team, individually. There could be 10,000s of thousands across the country. They could form larger groups, let's call them States that could advocate for them and express their collective power through something like the Federal Government. Oh wait, they would just be co-opted and bought off the same as the current batch of people.
Maybe instead of meeting them with a reasoned out response, we should simply meet them with fire and steel in an event their grandchildren will still feel in their bones 100 years later.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 17 2022, @03:02PM
Fire and steel? I like it, but can we invite the luddites with their torches and pitchforks?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 17 2022, @05:14PM
Glad to see I was wrong about which side you're on.
However, no need for fire and steel. Why storm the wall, when you can just go around it?
But yes, I would like official recognition of copying as an inalienable right, and an end to all this harassment of people whose work makes copying easier. The Freedom to Copy should rank up there with the other freedoms in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. Copyright law has kept a stranglehold on some technological advancement, and poisons our thinking in many ways.
One way is with seductive and false narratives about the supposed harm artists and scientists suffer every time anyone so much as sees, hears, or otherwise senses a work without having obtained (bought) permission. Another is that our art is thoroughly infested with ownership thinking, with fantasy prone to especially blatant forms of property rights, for instance the Elder Wand from the Harry Potter books that somehow has just enough sentience to magically know who owns it. Another example is Gandalf expressing such respect for property rights that it helped him resist the temptation to take the One Ring. Copyright has even been construed to mean that artists deserve to have the power to dictate what others shall think of their works, what with even having to fight for the right to parody. A negative review might harm sales. Fortunately, the desire to censor negative reviews clashed with Freedom of Speech, and lost. Be good to have this issue settled once and for all, soon, but I fear it shall not be soon. May take a few more generations.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Monday January 17 2022, @09:00AM (9 children)
If you don't want people getting your content for free, put it behind a paywall.
You cannot just give it out for free and demand payment after the fact. I'm pretty sure that's fraud.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @10:27AM (8 children)
When was the last time a multinational megacorporation was successfully prosecuted and hit with a meaningful[1] fine for fraud? I don't know about overseas, but here in the Capitalist Kleptocracy of Amerika the crime of fraud is standard operating procedure for publicly-traded companies. When they're not committing fraud against their customers or the general public they're committing fraud against their
slavesemployees through wage theft. They do it because they have been repeatedly shown that they will NEVER, EVER be meaningfully fined for it.[1]A meaningful fine would be a fine that exceeds 10% of the company's market cap. Anything less they can (and do) write off as an operating expense. Want to see Scamazon keep forcing their slaves to urinate in bottles? Fine them any amount less than $200 BILLION for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @12:35PM
Would you bite the hand that's feeding you? There's never going to be "meaningful" fining, only bits which don't hurt the capital owner but give some kind of satisfaction to the (largely dumb) masses so people don't get on the streets with pitchforks.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday January 17 2022, @01:43PM (1 child)
I am not sure fines can ever be the answer. Meaningful competition definitively works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @07:06PM
I don't think fines will work either. Might I suggest heads on pikes? For egregious corporate fraud, decapitate all the C-level execs and put their heads on pikes outside the corporate headquarters, as a warning to their successors.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 17 2022, @03:05PM (2 children)
May I direct your attention to the EU and Big Tech? Google and Facebook are getting slapped around pretty frequently over there. Also, Chine doesn't tolerate any competition in the surveillance industry inside their own country.
I use those examples only to illustrate that we can do something here in the US, if we only decide that it need be done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @10:33PM (1 child)
If a corporation has to be "slapped around pretty frequently," it is probably because they aren't afraid of getting hit.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 17 2022, @11:14PM
True, but, EU fines seem to be growing in size. Maybe not fast enough, but they are growing. At some point, the profit to risk assessment is going to start guiding Big Tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @03:29PM (1 child)
Intellectual property laws are antithetical to capitalism. And capitalism assumes full transparency and doesn't tolerate fraud. Your problem is not with capitalism.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 17 2022, @05:30PM
Copyright and freedom of thought are on a collision course.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 17 2022, @03:17PM
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt [cmu.edu]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday January 17 2022, @05:16PM
Is it only YouTube that the RIAA holes care about?
This same script works on a number of other web sites.
A fork of the script under a new name, which never mentions YouTube might go under their radar. The script could even have a line of code to specifically test for YouTube and exclude it from working with that. (Nevermind that such a line of code is easily commented; but now we're changing subjects to unauthorized software hacking.)
Isn't this script, and knowledge of how to download a video already so wide spread that they can never put the genie back in the bottle? Like trying to get rid of DeCSS.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Monday January 17 2022, @07:56PM
In the United States as well. Before digital media there were tape recorders. Back then, "piracy" was selling unlicensed copies. In the '70s a country singer, I've forgotten whom, who found a bunch of 8-track copies of his work. He kind of trashed the place but destroyed the copies. Nobody was charged.
Everyone recorded off the radio and felt like some sort of outlaw, but recording the radio was never against the law. Then in 1978 they made its legality law with the Home Recording Act, cementing your right to record.
When Sony came out with the Betamax, the MPAA sued, and lost on the basis of the 1978 law.
However, there's the DMCA which outlaws breaking copy protection. That's the MAFIAA's only out with this; did they break encryption?
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @12:01PM
we should push from the other side:
if a program or device that can acces data on the PUBLIC internet doesn't provide a "save" button (*) it goes to jail.
(*) a "download" button is a misnomer since the data already resides on the device (you're looking at it).
one could, in theory, buy a new device for each youtube video one wants to store, eh?
connect to wifi, connect battery to wall plug, acces youtube video, load it into ram, disconnect from internet. watch 1000 times. place device in "bookshelf" with usb-power to keep content alive. rinse, repeat for every content.
i swear, people shot guns for "fun" and there are people waking up in the morning with a cup of joe and thinking how to "fuck up" the world for the rest of us. like a intellectual game of brainwashing...like "i got nothing better to do, let's go about proofing the unwashed masses are susceptible to mental lead damage."