Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA.
Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.
A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.
The only tenuous leg the RIAA has to stand on is claiming that allowing only streaming of content constitutes some form of digital rights management code, and by reverse engineering it, without imposing the same restrictions as Youtube's website and apps, do, maybe that's some form of circumvention which will be found not entirely legal.
They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.
It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.
> Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA.
Are you a lawyer? Ethically I agree with you: copyright law regulates distributing copies to other people, and YouTube is the only one doing that in this scenario.
But I've been told in other internet discussions that courts don't see it that way. Basically, that the point of the law is to allow big companies to stop people from accessing media without paying, and the interpretation is stretched as far as it needs to be in order to enforce that.
Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see it the way of the party with the most money all the time. You can interpret laws until you're blue in the face, but they get to break the rules.
Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally.
It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".
> Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see things in the way of the party with the most money all the time.
This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court.
In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it.
RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?)
A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they?
So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.
> Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see it the way of the party with the most money all the time. You can interpret laws until you're blue in the face, but they get to break the rules.
This is a result of money being a proxy for competence.
They may not be a lawyer, but they have basic grasp of copyright law. It is indeed distribution of copyrighted content without permission that is illegal, not obtaining it.
> Copyright infringement requires distribution, that is the core of the offense.
Infringement does not require distribution. The rights encompassed by copyright include reproduction, derivation, distribution, public performance, public display, and broadcast rights. Infringement of any of those rights is copyright infringement. For US law, see at least 17 USC 106(a) abd 501(a).
The tort of copyright infringement is as you describe it.
When people say copyright infringement requires distribution they mean you can't be tried in a criminal court for merely copying you can still be sued.
> The crime of infringement requires distribution.
At least in the US, criminal copyright infringement may be for any act of infringement. The statute 17 USC 506(a) [0] describes the necessary conditions for a criminal prosecution, which are not limited to reproduction or distribution. Here [1] is a nice article from the department of justice about the crime.
Courts take a very non literalist approach to technology. Even though YouTube is literally sending copies of the video to users’ computers, because they provide no convenient mechanism for saving the video then courts will tend to ignore that. Instead, it will be argued that a musician’s YouTube channel is acting like a venue and the users are attending an authorized public performance. youtube-dl would then be equivalent to someone recording a concert using a camera.
They might have a very strong case in court. One of the reasons youtube-dl is so active as a project is because they’re in an arms race with Google. Google regularly changes how videos are delivered in an effort to thwart downloading tools. The RIAA could seize on this and even have Google testify that they’re trying to protect against this unauthorized downloading. Given the revelations about the tests in youtube-dl’s own repo, it would be a very difficult legal battle.
In that context youtube-dl would be a camera which most assuredly isn't illegal.
In the criminal sense, you're correct.
In the civil law sense, you'd be wrong. Using a camera to record a performance is an act of copying and is subject to copyright law. Generally, if the performers and/or the owner of the copyright don't give you permission to record the show, you don't have the right to do so. (Note that taking pictures or recording short clips is usually but not always regarded as fair use. Recording an entire performance without permission is rarely treated as fair use.)
However, recording the performance is also an act of creation, resulting in a derivative work that has its own copyright, but one which is useless without a copyright license to the underlying performance.
I don’t understand your argument. No one is saying that recording a performance isn’t subject to copyright law. They are saying that youtube-dl is the camera, or the camera manufacturer. Canon or Nikon are not subject to copyright law because I use one of their cameras to illegally record a concert, I am. I am the one that did the illegal act and the fact that manufacturers make cameras, that gave me the ability to do it, is not the problem. The argument is youtube-dl shouldn’t be subject either, that it is the individuals using it to download copyrighted material that are breaking the law and a program having the ability to be used illegally is not the fault or responsibility of the program.
Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.
Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it.
A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.
This is false. Also, time-shifting is not a a valid fair-use defense for material available on-demand, because the justification for time-shifting (as in the Betamax case) generally no longer exists. There are other fair use arguments that could be made, but time-shifting isn't one of them.
They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but they cited a variety of US cases. Kazaa, Limewire, Napster, etc, are all US cases that all came down the same way: a tool intended primarily for copyright violations violates the DMCA, and in certain cases can even expose its developers to statutory damages under the copyright code.
It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.
Nope, not even close for so many reasons already explained in this and other comments.
> Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it.
YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).
Yeah, I should have worded that better. I was referring to Youtube's license with the RIAA, since Youtube doesn't provide a copyright license to its users for content licensed from third parties.
If the license between the RIAA (or other licensor) and Youtube allowed visitors to make permanent copies of Youtube streams, then downloading a Youtube video would not be a copyright violation. But generally, having entered into streaming and downloading licensing agreements with the RIAA before, I would be extremely surprised if the RIAA would enter into such a license with Youtube, as it would kill sales of digital music downloads if people could just download permanent copies of Youtube videos instead for free.
If you own the copyright and upload a video to Youtube, then it wouldn't be a copyright violation to download that video from Youtube.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal violation when you're downloading a copy from YouTube even though you're the original copyright owner of the video. Youtube has a license to distribute the copy according to their TOS. That license will be subjected to specific terms (streaming + DRM protection). It might not include allowing creators to circumvent those terms for archival purposes.
It's very possible to have a TOS violation but not a copyright violation if you're the copyright owner of the video being downloaded.
Owning the copyright means you don't violate the copyright in making a copy, but that doesn't mean you get to make that copy through any means; you still have to use legal means, and for a website, that means methods that are acceptable under the TOS of that website.
I haven't seen anyone else making this argument yet, but yes! Chunk by chunk, streamers copy bits into their buffers and discard them as they are done watching. Is that discarding required, when the same companies can charge extra for additional bandwidth usage (not for making additional copies, but for clogging up their pipes)
I'm not sure if this is going to be considered similar to taking a full copy but I'm also not sure what substantial purpose there would be for taking that full copy except for the (probably valid fair use) purpose of shifting access to manage time, location, or network conditions. Given that you pay separately for your bandwidth, and there is an incentive to conserve it, I don't see any way this isn't considered fair use without a sharing component.
Taking a copy is incidental to lawfully consuming the content that was provided in an authorized setting, whether that copy is stable or not. Nobody is hosting copies of YouTube content, paying the bandwidth and hosting bills so anonymous co-parties to the infringement can enjoy the content separately from the authorized channel, (it is not even suggested that anyone would want to do this.)
> I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.
> Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.
TV broadcasters do not give you a license to copy their content but it's legal to record TV. Why is youtube any different?
It was legal to record TV, using VCRs and DVRs, for time-shifted viewing, due to the alternative being that the content could not be consumed at all (at the time of the Betamax case, episodes were broadcast once, and generally not re-broadcast unless they were extremely popular, and were not available for purchase individually or even as part of a collection).
Today, there are a multitude of options for consuming TV content, and due to the (recent) creation of time-shifted licenses, the fair use justification for standalone-DVRs has mostly gone out the window (which is why they're not for sale anymore; for example, Tivo no longer offers standalone DVRs; Hulu, cable companies pay for time-shifted viewing).
As Youtube was always on-demand to begin with, the time-shifting justification for recording TV in the Betamax case never applied.
Legally, even running a program is making a copy (from disk to RAM):
Yes, that is why 17 USC § 117 provides that making a transitory copy necessary to run the program (such as a RAM copy), or an archival copy of the data needed to run the program, are both explicitly not violations of copyright.
I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.
It does not. Youtube does not explicitly, or implicitly, provide the user a license of any type. Youtube has licensed the right to provide a temporary copy of a video to a user.
Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.
It normally wouldn't be...except that some idiot decided to include unit tests to make sure that youtube-dl could be used to download music videos covered by RIAA licenses. That basically makes the RIAA's case, especially since youtube-dl must be regularly updated to handle Google's countermeasures.
Right, but 17 USC§117 only applies to programs, not video. Who provides me the license to copy the video from the buffer of the network card to main RAM, and then to GPU ram, and then to my screen?
Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.
A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.
The only tenuous leg the RIAA has to stand on is claiming that allowing only streaming of content constitutes some form of digital rights management code, and by reverse engineering it, without imposing the same restrictions as Youtube's website and apps, do, maybe that's some form of circumvention which will be found not entirely legal.
They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.
It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.