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Host of "youtube-dl" Web Site Sued by Major Record Labels

posted by martyb on Monday January 17 2022, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 17 2022, @03:17PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 17 2022, @03:17PM (#1213391) Journal

    https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt [cmu.edu]

    How to decrypt a
    DVD: in haiku form.
    (Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
    ------------------------

    (I abandon my
    exclusive rights to make or
    perform copies of

    this work, U. S. Code
    Title Seventeen, section
    One Hundred and Six.)

    Muse! When we learned to
    count, little did we know all
    the things we could do

    some day by shuffling
    those numbers: Pythagoras
    said "All is number"

    long before he saw
    computers and their effects,
    or what they could do

    by computation,
    naive and mechanical
    fast arithmetic.

    It changed the world, it
    changed our consciousness and lives
    to have such fast math

    available to
    us and anyone who cared
    to learn programming.

    Now help me, Muse, for
    I wish to tell a piece of
    controversial math,

    for which the lawyers
    of DVD CCA
    don't forbear to sue:

    that they alone should
    know or have the right to teach
    these skills and these rules.

    (Do they understand
    the content, or is it just
    the effects they see?)

    And all mathematics
    is full of stories (just read
    Eric Temple Bell);

    and CSS is
    no exception to this rule.
    Sing, Muse, decryption

    once secret, as all
    knowledge, once unknown: how to
    decrypt DVDs.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Funny=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3