Currently, AFAICT, the "rolling cipher" is not even required for unthrottled speed. I could be wrong. I am not an expert on YT. However I tested all the 30+ sample videos in youtube.py^1 outside the browser, without using "youtube-dl" or "youtube-dlp", and got only unthrottled speeds. Perhaps someone can provide an example to prove that this "rolling cipher" is actually required.
Another point I never see discussed is that every YT video page contains download links in the source of the page. No "rolling cipher" is needed to use them. I think it's fair to call them "download" links because the speed is throttled to be too slow for "streaming".
Correct, the only ones claiming YouTube's "rolling cipher" is an anti-piracy control are the RIAA. YouTube themselves have not claimed this to my knowledge.
You have to build it from source to avoid the 60kbps limit. There hasn't been a release since Dec 2021 and there have been some updates since then that implement the 'puzzle' to get the right value of the url parameter.
It's worth noting that YouTube is trialling a new player and a lot of applications (invidious, new pipe, etc) are experiencing some issues in the last couple of weeks.
I have a feeling Google/Alphabet/YouTube aren't investing a lot of money into this, because they know their opponents have almost infinite resource, of free time and dedication.
Besides how would you like to work in the YouTube "DRM" team, where every few weeks you'd show up to work and the news is "well, they cracked it again, your last few months' of work is useless.".
> I have a feeling Google/Alphabet/YouTube aren't investing a lot of money into this, because they know their opponents have almost infinite resource, of free time and dedication.
They aren't investing because its a CLI tool. Its not really a threat.
If it was, like, a "1 click download free music from Youtube!" app that was trending like crazy, Google would focus more on fighting it.
The project is balanced between reasonable accessibility and not drawing too much attention from Google. Its kinda like the AI Wars video game, where you undermine a distracted/disenterested AI without drawing too much of its attention.
There are many websites that provide exactly that function. I suspect most of them are based yt-dl{,p}. By killing cli tools, google can effectively stifle such websites as well.
YouTube has it's hands tied behind its back by the 100s of apps that have been deployed over the last two decades. Shutting down youtube-dlp, but also losing ad revenue from, say, every Roku box in the world, is not a tradeoff anyone is signing on for. So best they can do is nibble around the edges and hope they make it hard on downloaders while not flipping the entire apple cart.
I don't think that's necessarily true. People said that about Blu-ray for ages, and for a while they were right but in the end the industry had people paid to keep updating keys and fixing bugs forever, and the open source world only has volunteers.
Last I checked (which was a very long time ago) the only way to rip a Blu-ray was through a commercial program.
That's probably partly because Blu-ray waned in popularity compared to streaming. Still I definitely think it's wrong to assume that Google couldn't win this battle.
> People said that about Blu-ray for ages, and for a while they were right but in the end the industry had people paid to keep updating keys and fixing bugs forever, and the open source world only has volunteers.
I can rip Blu-Rays easily with freely available tools [0] - even shiny new UHD ones. Doesn't seem the industry won that one.
Pirates don't distribute the leaked device keys anymore so you need to get disc-specific encryption keys derived from that but that's all done automatically for you and I imagine is only because this is currently the path of least resistence - if this was not an option then device keys would leak faster than they can be removed from new releases.
> Still I definitely think it's wrong to assume that Google couldn't win this battle.
DRM is an inherently unwinnable battle. Won't stop anyone from trying and making things worse for regular users in the process though.
We did that at AOL with regards to fighting spam, when I was the Sr. Internet Mail Adminstrator in the mid-90s.
We would put in weeks and months of work to come up with a new method of fighting spam that would actually work [0], and over the span of a weekend after launch, the spammers would already have worked around it.
[0] As opposed to the random crackpot ideas that every damn stupid AOL VP came up with that started with "Why don't you just ...". If I had a nickel for every damn stupid AOL VP crackpot idea, I'd be a multi-millionaire by now.
We had a similar document that we had developed over time which I believe pre-dated this one. Ours may even have been the inspiration upon which this one was based.
For me, by that time AOL had become a sufficiently toxic place that we came to a mutual agreement that it was time for me to leave.
If it hadn't been for that, I would never have gotten a chance to work at Collective Technologies, where we had more O'Reilly authors on staff than any other company in the world!
their work cycling between shutout and useless is the norm in many cat-mouse industries such as anticheat, malware, drug precursors, you name it. the funds go to the fight and not the endgame, everyone except denuvo customers seem to have figured that
I guess you missed the "not" Google proposal for the Browser Attestation API? No need to put too many respurces fighting for a single site when you can just lock it down to blessed browsers.
In order for web DRM to be feasible, it has to work without issues for 99% of average users while blocking the few who will go to great lengths to simulate attestation. That’s a hard goal.
TPM1.2 (used up until a few years back) is already broken because it uses SHA-1. If someone finds an exploit for TPM2.0, a dedicated team could manipulate the entire sandbox down to the hardware to simulate a “blessed browser”, making it even harder for google to detect until nearly everyone moves to devices which don’t even exist yet.
This seems normal when lawyers are involved; they're slow and to act quicker they sometimes shoot in the dark by pushing for excessive measures and/or draconian laws that ultimately could backfire against their clients image.
Also, they cost a lot more than say the cost of opening a new site, so resistance in this context is not futile at all.
I agree and I don't. We can rip dvds almost precisely, because spreading stuff beyond the ability for it to be easily controlled under single point of failure.
Nothing could really be done about DVDs because the hardware was immutable and already out in the wild.
Highlighting a still operating service though just draws legal attention to it.
It's like finding a crappy bar everyone hates that stores beers out back in a alley. You can keep it to yourself and enjoy it for years, or you can "protest" the bar by telling the whole town about it.
I absolutely get your point and I personally struggle with this as a concept, because, well, I was young once. There is a benefit to knowledge staying from being too... easily distributed, especially if it is used poorly. But.. having benefited from it in terms of general knowledge, I am not sure it is my place to lock the gates behind me.
Ad-blocking is definitely an interesting story, but, to me at least, it seems like another cat and mouse game resulting from lack of any pro-consumer enforcement. Corps have legal batting for them. What do we get? Control over our computers and even that is being eroded daily..
I still remember the first time I looked at the log from raspberry pihole. I am not much of a revolutionary, but seeing it all was a radicalizing moment for me. And it wasn't the childish 'I want to see X'. It was 'the fuck is all this on my network'?
Overall, I think you are wrong. Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now. Just like with music, pirates actually forced an adoption of somewhat sane standards..
> Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now.
Streming is not exactly an improvement over what we had before. If you bought a DVD or VHS you could rewatch it whenever you want and share it with your friends. With streaming services you own nothing and content disappears all the time.
I apologize, I may have not expressed myself clearly. What I meant to indicate was that the bits being distributed the way they were was the likely reason we were able to rip dvds based on the fact entities trying to quash distribution of they key stopped.
That was a completely different thing, this is a court order ruling youtube-dl a circumvention tool and that somehow means hosting a website that links to their github is unacceptable.
It's laughable how symbolic and ultimately meaningless this is. GitHub has already proven themselves to be a good actor in this particular fight, so not only is the repo online, but we also have http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
The Uberspace provider is appealing the decision as well. Even with the site down, this looks incredibly positive from where I sit. Rightsholders and litigators get stuffed, we always win!
The site is online, but the download link (https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl) is borked: Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.
i'd rephrase that, rightsholders should not get stuffed, but these are not rightsholders because their rights are not being infringed by the mere existance of youtube-dl
> gun manufacturers enabling death and murder, then by all means ytdl can and should stay up.
I assume you're referring to arms makers selling weapons that are obviously not for hunting game to the civilian market, rather than overall, because (such as it is) countries generally need defence-forces, and those forces do need arms.
It was widely understood prior to the 20th century that the right applied to the people. Here is a long thread with dozens of sources https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1645290263299117056.html. Overwhelming they all agree that military weapons are most protected of all.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Understanding "the people" here to mean the government is absurd. The government doesn't need to petition itself for redress. Moreover, they could have used the word `government` instead.
The Bill of Rights was added because the anti-federalist were worried that the constitution didn't protect individual liberty enough.
> The constitutions of most of our states assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, both fact and law, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person; freedom of religion; freedom of property; and freedom of the press.
>> The words "the people" mean the government, just like it means in the First Amendment (properly understood). I don't know how anyone with a functioning brain could interpret it to mean that individual citizens have a right to own military-style guns.
This very question was settled by SCOTUS in District of Columbia v. Heller:
Do you have a more substantial breaking down of the text and the intended meaning? It doesn't make sense for it to only apply to the government. The Constitution puts limits on government, not the other way around. In fact, it lists a variety of things that are recognized as inalienable rights, such as the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
I don’t know how any sane person thinks a bunch of larpers - even if they themselves don’t see them as such - can defend themselves against a willing US military…
I think the main idea is that a well armed population creates a different relationship with the government. It is much harder to round up people and send them to camps if they can actually put up a fight. The idea is to avoid that conflict in the first place by having that threat of civilian retaliation. Yes the government could still do it, but it would be costly.
The Americans are so lucky that they only have to fear their own government.
I don't fear my government. I fear the Russian government. It's very unlikely that my government is going to send me to a camp. But the Russians totally could - they are already doing that in Ukraine.
* How effective one may be in defending himself does not change the right in anyway.
* This is why the right extends to all arms of modern warfare. E.g., machine-guns, mortars, grenades, tanks, night vision, etc.
* The Founder were very much against a standing army...we should probably abolish it.
* When combatants are mixed with non-combatants, one cannot just drop a bomb. Because of this, well armed individuals can absolutely resist the military.
Aside from machine-guns made after 1986 and possibly nukes, you can own any weapon in most states. The things you mentioned are considered Destructive Devices and require payment of a $200 tax stamp.
Sure. If the government just preemptively nukes all American cities and towns then so be it. But to say that civilian firearm possession cannot slow, stop, or impede a tyrannical government is wrong.
> I don’t know how any sane person thinks a bunch of larpers - even if they themselves don’t see them as such - can defend themselves against a willing US military…
I know, that's why Afghanistan is a shining star of liberalism in the Central Asia. The Taliban never was able to defend itself from the willing US military and was defeated years ago.
It might have been, if it hadn't been for the fact that the US leadership at the time didn’t want to fight them at all, it wanted to fight Iraq, and when it turned out that it couldn’t use 9/11 direcrly as an excuse to do so it went to work directly on making that excuse so it could, producing a lingering disaster in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere instead of getting the job done in Afghanistan.
> Do you, in all honesty, think the US showed its full might against the taliban in an all out war?
No, the one thing the US government held back were nukes.
Of course, I could see how those were off the table against a foreign country, but those concerns wouldn't apply to domestic use. The LARPers would stand no chance against H-bombs, which shows the truth of your original point. Small arms can't defend against a willing US military, because a willing US military will just nuke them.
> The US would infiltrate and dismantle any uprising before it could pose a threat to the local state.
Yeah, I know. That's why the US basically has no organized crime at all, and that's why no uprising has ever been successful ever. Governments are scarily competent, the US government especially. They never lose, never make a mistake, are totally unified, and are always ten steps ahead of everyone. It's basically an army of real Jack Bauers and Jason Bournes.
Microsoft did not face a court order, if they did they would surely immediately comply. They faced a seemingly fraudulent DMCA takedown notice, as takedowns are not designed to target circumvention tools.
They did a good thing restoring youtube-dl, but I'd hardly say it puts them in "freedom fighter" territory, more so compared to Uberspace who are actively fighting for youtube-dl.
MS has done a good thing by defending youtube-dl but their lax enforcement concerning windows piracy is a bit different. MS turns a blind eye to windows piracy for the same reasons malware authors don't care if their software is spread on GitHub or P2P sites.
Microsoft cares much more about getting their hands on all your personal data than they care about the money they'd get from an OEM license. People can download an ISO for Windows 11 for free from microsoft.com and simply never activate it.
I don't think so. I think the real reason is that a pirated Windows install is not Mac or Linux, and will probably, eventually, become a legal Windows install.
Imagine telling a bunch of possibly talented and/or ambitious poor people that they should use another (better) operating system. Instead, let them become Windows experts and ultimately make Microsoft more money.
indeed, even if never a valid purchase, still a valuable datapoint for 99% of those "non tech savvy didnt block all the telemetry domains in their personal pihole, but managed to activated w massgrave" crowd
It's also because MS makes way, way, way more money on business licenses than they do on individual consumer ones. They don't have much incentive to care about individuals not giving them a sale. Meanwhile, businesses are actively audited if they're suspected of violating license agreements.
It is remarkable how easy they've made it to cleanly pirate Windows recently. You don't even need to run your own KMS thing, there are several public servers, and you just type in three terminal commands.
Totally different from the Vista/7/8 era where activation required real cracking software. It's an explicit signal that they don't really care about consumer licensing.
I wish it weren’t seen as a battle against rightholders.
It’s a big burden for freedom of expression. When there is a lie spread by actual journalists, it’s extremely important to be able to download the video, criticize it, show the moment the journalist lies, reupload it.
Otherwise we become like DDR Germany where the people in power never get criticized or held accountable for what they say.
The shareholder rights are collateral damage, not the main damage. We’re not mainly using youtube-dl to copy copyrighted material.
This is why I'm setting up a reverse proxy on another host in front of my web site, in case I get some fake takedown request from a competitor that causes my host to delete my account. At least if I use a proxy I can spend a small amount of time setting up a new proxy.
I used to have a competitor who would email PayPal every couple of weeks to tell them our web site had CP on it just so PayPal would instantly shut off our payment gateway while they investigated and then several days later cleared us and put us back online. It's too easy for people to make fake requests to take your business down.
That’s pretty much how all payment processors work. The issue for them is that letting fraudsters continue making payments will lead to big Ls for the payment processors, since they end up being on the hook for the money that card networks will clawback or liability from regulations and money laundering laws.
You're free to try running a payment processor with a mantra of "Innocent until proven guilty."
You'll be a honeypot for every scammer, fraudster, and con artist ready to take advantage of that policy, your processing fees will be through the roof because of chargebacks, and the only people who will use your platform will be the aforementioned scammers, fraudsters, and conmen.
I'm sorry for the GP poster's situation, but there's really no way to make everyone happy, here.
Payment processors could assign reputation to longtime users, and they could have a vetting process to users as well, just like banks do. Get their full credit history, all the info of their owners, etc.
They could also communicate problems more clearly and provide better support to those who are sanctioned.
See: crypto. Marvelous technology. Ruined in the public's eye because of the amount of scams in it. Those same scams were used as justification for strict KYC laws. Which did not do much to stop the fraudsters really, hurt legally operating investors' privacy instead.
> I used to have a competitor who would email PayPal every couple of weeks to tell them our web site had CP on it just so PayPal would instantly shut off our payment gateway while they investigated
Isn’t this sort of behaviour criminal? (I mean the competitor submitting a fake child pornography report, not whatever PayPal did to respond to it.) And if not, surely it ought to be.
Yes, but it was done anonymously. The competitor denied all knowledge of it, but the guy he paid to do the reporting would talk to me through chat every day to gloat about it.
I ended up paying 15000EUR bounty to track the guy down. Found him in Germany. 15 year old kid. Had somebody talk his mother about him. Never had a problem again after that.
No, I took it as a cost of doing business. I only went that far after he managed to find my wife's cell phone number and started calling to harass her.
What is considered criminal depends on the jurisdiction, but I doubt making false reports to a private company is criminal in very many. At least in the US, you could certainly get sued for continually disrupting someone else's business, but to sue another party, they'd need to also be in the US so they could be served and actually subject to being forced to appear in a US court and a judgment against them could be enforceable. Otherwise, you end up in a situation like some Chinese business owner just building their own McDonald's. Sure, it violates all kinds of US ip laws, but if their home jurisdiction doesn't care about US ip laws, there isn't shit you can do about it.
> What is considered criminal depends on the jurisdiction, but I doubt making false reports to a private company is criminal in very many.
I live in the Australian state of New South Wales. I just looked up our state law on this topic. Section 314 of the Crimes Act 1900 says: “A person who makes an accusation intending a person to be the subject of an investigation of an offence, knowing that other person to be innocent of the offence, is liable to imprisonment for 7 years.” I haven’t looked at the case law or anything, but just going by the wording of the statute, it seems broad enough to potentially include false accusations made to private companies in its scope.
Of course, probably none of the parties in the case under discussion live in my jurisdiction, so its laws are irrelevant. Still, if other jurisdictions don’t have a law like this on the books, maybe they should
That's fascinating, thank you. I've been involved with criminal law for a decade and not seen a law like that. I wonder if the accusation has to be made to a law enforcement agency, or whether it would apply in my situation where the person made an accusation to a private entity?
> I wonder if the accusation has to be made to a law enforcement agency, or whether it would apply in my situation where the person made an accusation to a private entity?
I can't find any case law which directly answers your question; as far as I am aware, no case has ever been prosecuted under that law for the type of scenario we are talking about (but just because it hasn't happened yet, isn't in itself a bar for it happening some day in the future). This law never says the false accusation has to be made to a law enforcement agency, even though similar laws in other jurisdictions do explicitly say that; I don't see why a court would insert that requirement when the text doesn't explicitly contain it. But of course, nobody can be certain unless some day the matter actually comes before a court to decide.
Illegal? Probably, but I'm not a lawyer. I imagine the words "unfair competition" might be present somewhere on the legal paperwork. And if it's illegal but not criminal, you have to sue the competitor yourself, which is expensive and time-consuming.
PayPal probably should have some kind of hold on your account saying "don't shut off the account until we've investigated" but that might itself be abusable (see Facebook Xcheck). If this behavior is illegal they might also have standing to sue whoever is sending the reports.
All of that requires you to have at least some amount of evidence tying the false reports to the competitor, too. Or at least enough evidence to survive a motion to dismiss so you can use discovery to get the rest of the story.
> Illegal? Probably, but I'm not a lawyer. I imagine the words "unfair competition" might be present somewhere on the legal paperwork
I was thinking more along the lines of “child pornography is a crime, and making a knowingly false report of a crime is a crime”.
I know it is a crime (in many jurisdictions) to make a knowingly false report of a crime to law enforcement; but PayPal aren’t law enforcement. I don’t think that should matter though - if it isn’t already a crime to make a knowingly false report of a crime to a business, then it should be
After the second false claim you should have had your legal department reach out to theirs, and to the FBI, and that would have solved both your takedown problems and created a huge legal headache for your competitor. And by "headache" I mean time spent in prison.
Paypal has long had the ability to whitelist websites that are subject to this kind of harassment. If you choose not to avail yourself of these options, it's not Paypal's fault.
You, you wouldn't know about the whitelist, it's internal and I only know about it due to a previous client having had your issue.
But going through legal channels and contacting the FBI are both things you should have known about, if you were involved on the business or remedial side of this issue since that's standard operating procedure.
It's amazing what kind of mental gymnastics can allow someone to think you can watch a video without downloading it. Lawyers live in a world very unlike reality.
I can listen to music on the radio, but it's a whole different issue when I pick specific songs to pirate for my own personal listening :p But that's not where the caring comes in; it's the tools I can use to pirate songs; hence youtube-dl going down and not the users who used it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a TOS clause about videos on YT not being your property and that you can't export them off the platform unless you own the rights to the specific video. People that watch videos on YT are using someone else's platform; don't like it, don't use the platform, and tell the content creator to upload somewhere else. Nobody is entitled to bypass intentional blocks by YT and use 3rd-party tools to download other people's videos.
Personally I only used youtube-dl to pirate songs from HQ videos :p I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage.
In order to watch these videos, your computer downloads the videos. Your radio doesn't have to download a copy of the song to play it.
> I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage.
My usage is usually no less legitimate than youtube's usage. I'm usually downloading things that were uploaded without permission from the copyright holders from a platform that is distributing them without permission from the copyright holders.
All a conventional radio does is translate electromagnetic waves that are already surrounding it into sound waves that we can hear. An intellectual-property-maximalist lawyer could cogently argue that a radio that records the signal onto a tape or other storage device is somehow violating the IP rights of the authors, as it is interacting with the work in materially different way than an ordinary radio. Not that I would agree with this lawyer in any way, but the lawyer would at least have a basis to argue that one thing is not like the other.
However, video streams are not a signal floating in the EM spectrum. They are 1:1 connections that must be requested, their content must be actively downloaded onto local memory, and the content must be transcoded and/or decoded into images and sound to be consumed by a human. The point is that this description is as true for a video being watched on the official YouTube app on a Pixel 5 as it is for a video that has been downloaded with youtube-dl/yt-dl on a PC. There is no material difference in the actual events taking place.
Radio has since the mid 1990 moved towards digital signals, and by now almost all conventional radio receivers do not covert electromagnetic waves into sound waves. They covert electromagnetic waves into a digital sound file, which then get copied into local memory and run inside a software program that plays the sound (and generally outputs meta data). It can also buffer sound if it wants to.
As a interesting side-note, Norway has stopped using FM radio in favor of digital radio, and Sweden is on route to do the same. The primary argument here on Sweden in favor of keeping FM radio is that older car models might still not be compatible with digital radio, and the FM radio could in theory be useful case of national emergency.
It's literally exactly the same. I can listen to a broadcast radio signal with my rtl-sdr usb dongle and save as much as I want of the instantaneous streaming data. I can watch a youtube video with computer and save as much as I want of the instantaneous streaming data.
There is literally no possible way I can experience the sound or video without first receiving it. The only difference with "streaming" is that lawyers think it is somehow not downloading when you delete it afterwards. Magical thinking.
Downloading implies data persists. AM/FM radio and TV antennas take an active signal and play it on-demand, without persisting the data, and without copy-protection.
The detail is with what's in-between the signal and how you're using it.
- It's fine for me to record antenna TV to VHS; there's no copy-protection and it's for personal-use
- It's probably questionable, but largely fine for me to record songs playing with my phone's sound recorder; you can't copy-protect public audible noise in this context
- It's not fine for me to put a dongle/box in-between a Roku or TV streaming box in order to break HDCP to record content. The problem here is breaking the platform's copy-protection.
- It's not fine for me to go to a torrent site and download a song. I think for archive purposes you have to archive from personally-owned media, but it's likely gray-area if you own the media and pirate content of that media from somewhere else (like if you own a PS2 game disc and download an iso online)
youtube-dl was being used to break/bypass YouTube's copy-protection.
I wonder how specific that ruling is; nowadays you'd have to break HDCP if you want to record from most devices with something in-between, and it seems like that wouldn't be as-legal with bypassing copy-protection
What on earth are you talking about? Recording radio or television for personal use is illegal now? Are we so used to not owning a single thing that these things are alien to us now? I mean, I'm not misremembering the era where people taped shows to watch them later, am I?
Also, pardon my language, but fuck off with your "watching videos on YT's platform". It's my user agent, my hardware, my actions that are causing the video to be shown. I'm already making allowances to youtube by executing their code mostly unencumbered, I'm not bending over backwards and granting them extraterritorial rights.
Not a lawyer, but as I understand it's not legal to break copy protection. It's legal to archive media for your own personal use. Recording VHS and even sound recorder from a phone is more-legal than putting a box/dongle between a FireTV stick and your TV in order to break and bypass HDCP.
Outside of straight-up piracy, it could be argued that youtube-dl was bypassing YouTube restrictions.
Also if someone had that attitude towards a service I was offering, I'd go out of my way to block their access; I choose the restrictions on my platform that I offer to others, and people that actively go against that can go use someone else's platform or host their own since they're so sure they must know better :p
>It's my user agent, my hardware, my actions that are causing the video to be shown
technically, you are asking for a video to be shown and Google chooses to show it to you. We don't really have the power dynamic to say "we allow google to execute their code", because we are the ones seeking their service.
>I can listen to music on the radio, but it's a whole different issue when I pick specific songs to pirate for my own personal listening :p But that's not where the caring comes in; it's the tools I can use to pirate songs; hence youtube-dl going down and not the users who used it.
So basically you are not allowed to listen to what your mood wants but rather what their sponsors want, that or pay us! Yeah no thanks.
Btw, you can still record songs from FM/AM radio too, just use any SDR and pass that to your preferred application and record it, I would love to see how they will prevent that.
I can pick specific songs and even download them for offline playback with Spotify. A problem in that case would come if I try to bypass Spotify's copy protection and play the offline songs in a different player.
You used to watch video all the time without downloading it - over TV, the theater, etc. Some people see video playing on a computer and assume it must work exactly like something they grew up with.
That is an unjustifiably charitable take on that court. I bet they do have a clue what they are doing and are specifically making industry-friendly rulings because they know it will get them more customers. Letting companies choose the court they want really should not be a thing, it just has too many perverse incentives for one local court to butter up to them. And neither should a regional court be able to continue to rulings that apply country wide if they often get overturned at a higher court when challenged.
it is a different world. You're seeing the video from a technical POV where you know youtube is streaming encoded bits to your computer, with you feeling you own those bits given to your hardware.
Google sees this as a transaction: you pay us for Premium, you get to keep the bits for longer, because offline viewing is a paid feature they advertise. Alternatievely, they see it as "you watch this undesirable ad and we give you what you want". downloading the video first goes past this transaction.
Yes it seems obvious to me that "download" here means "store outside the browser in a format that can be viewed in any player and copied indefinitely". of course my browser is downloading a video I watch but not in a form that is useful to me outside of viewing it on that site in that browser.
> “[T]he average user must recognize that YouTube content, unlike media content on other websites, cannot be downloaded with a simple right-click and must be aware that this is achieved using technology on YouTube and that youtube-dl ‘overrides’ this protection. It is therefore to be assumed that the average user acts in bad faith,” the Hamburg Court wrote.
Somewhat relatedly: I've been using Uberspace for years now to host some personal stuff (e.g. my Nextcloud instance). It's really cheap (you can start for as low as 5€/month), and I don't know any other shared hoster that allows so much flexibility in what you run on your account. The docs are also superb. I can only recommend it.
Thank you for mentioning this. Haven't heard of them before, but I really love the ethic they're advocating (and demonstrating in their pricing and payment options).
Since it's mentioned, I'd like to remind the continued existence of the so called "District Court" of Hamburg should be an embarrassment to the state of Germany. Their purpose seem to be simply coming up with the most inane judgments as proven repeatedly in the past.
Weird Al released a parody "charity song" in 2006 called Don't Download This Song that poked fun at them too.
> Oh you don't want to mess with the RIAA
> They'll sue you if you burn that CDR
> It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven year old girl
> They'll treat you like the evil, hard bitten criminal scum you are
He also ironically hosted links on his website to download the song DRM-free!
The RIAA is not a thing because of music artists[0], they were created by music labels to represent their interests.
The biggest mistake people make when talking about anything to do with copyright or the creative industry is to assume that, because publishers of creative works represent or hire authors, that we can just collapse authors and publishers down into a single entity and treat any copyright related argument purely as a struggle between artists getting paid and the public wanting free shit.
Of course, publishers do not have interests aligned with those of authors and artists. This is, at minimum[1], a three-sided war between publishers, authors, and customers. Artists want to be paid but need to go through a publisher to sell[2], while customers want to watch/listen/read but need to buy through a publisher. Publishers have massive incentives to screw over artists by reducing or diluting their take in favor of whatever keeps the machine fed.
While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work, they tend to disagree heavily on who should own those rights and how long they should last. Artists want to sell the thing they made, but publishers want assets: they want a brand that can neatly fit on a marketing schedule or an accounting statement. The former only requires short term copyright owned by individual artists while the latter requires infinity-minus-one-day terms, four companies that own the world's culture, and increasingly expansive interpretations of DMCA 1201 that invent DRM out of things never intended to be DRM.
[0] Let's not call them "content creators"
[1] We can subdivide these groups further still, of course, but three groups is enough to make my point.
[2] As per [1] we are treating distributors and publishers as part of the same group of middlemen. For example, while Amazon Kindle self-publishing does not do some of the same marketing or promotion that a traditional book publisher might, they are still intermediaries between authors and readers.
> While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work
They only need this for the current business model of creating content up front and then collecting payments later. This is not the only way to fund creatives - it's not even the oldest.
Not to mention that with the ability to infinitely recreate all creations without loss of fidelity (as is the case in the digital world) we need to seriously reconsider to what extend whe even need to incentivize creation of even more works. There will always be a base level of artistic output done based on passion and perhaps that is enough.
That content creation needs to be encouraged in the first place still has not been backed up by any kind of studies. But if you were to want to do that, making it a nightmare to build on other people's content is surely not the best way to go about it.
> Speaking with TorrentFreak, Uberspace owner Jonas Pasche says that his hands are tied. Failure to comply with the order would either result in a massive fine, or worse, a prison sentence.
So you can only legally watch Youtube videos when and where you have a fast and unlimited internet connection? That sucks...
Let's say you only have a cellular data plan, but it has a data cap, or your cell coverage is slow. So when a friend sends you a link to a video, you go to a library or coffee shop to download it to watch later. Is that "acting in bad faith?" I guess it gets in the way of Youtube's "right" to shove ads at your face, but avoiding the ads was not the point.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, they failed to outlaw VCRs back in the day, so hopefully this nonsense will also get slapped down.
The YouTube app lets you download videos and watch them online, but only with YouTube Premium.
Similarly, Google removed any unofficial YouTube apps from the Play Store that supported playing with the screen off, because they want you to pay for it.
Tangential (but infuriating): there was a several year gap between them banning apps with background playback, and actually launching that feature (via Premium) in my country...
... and all this headache will just go away once Chrome's Web Integrity ships and hooks neatly into Protected Media Path and that totally optional TPM in Windows 11 that got stuffed down everyone's throat as a free update from an equally generously free Windows 10. The trap is almost closed, not long now.
>> “[T]he average user must recognize that YouTube content, unlike media content on other websites, cannot be downloaded with a simple right-click and must be aware that this is achieved using technology on YouTube and that youtube-dl ‘overrides’ this protection. It is therefore to be assumed that the average user acts in bad faith,” the Hamburg Court wrote.
This argument seems ass-backwards. Why is it not YouTube which acts in bad faith by not providing the means for users to download videos in the first place?
Because there is no such thing as selling a product in bad faith under capitalism. Except the acts explicitly named as illegal by existing laws. Those are obviously bad faith acts, which is why we made them illegal at the beginning of time. But if an act isn't illegal, and if you believe you'll profit from it, then it is by definition a good-faith act.
You can host videos on any bandwidth and hardware you can get your hands on; old laptops from landfills, SBC Raspberry Pis, $80 decommissioned Optiplex from businesses, and even Android phones and TV sticks if you set the servers up through Termux. You can also use the cheapest VPS option for like $5/month, but that kind of negates not using YT at that point.
It's free in the sense of all the software being available to do so for free (OS, webserver, php, media software), and free as long as you have something to run it on; chances are anyone reading this can use the same device to run the server.
Whether or not the people watching the videos from the server will have a good experience is something different :p But even a low-speed broadband connection in the US today has enough upload to handle small sites and I can vouch for this on measly 1MB/s upload (I've self-hosted videos over years with all the mentioned software).
YouTube is a provider that has the resources to allow people to upload videos, and watch them for free. It's their platform, and they have usage rules.
1 Mbps would barely give you a low quality stream to a single user, never mind multiple users.
My point wasn't against self hosting your own content either, but rather that this is absolutely not an alternative to YouTube in any way because scaling to YouTube's level is extremely expensive.
The draw of YouTube is also the user made content, not stuff you can buy off the shelf, rip and then host. This means those users would never use a decentralized platform because discoverability is nearly impossible.
The fight you are fighting is a nobel one, but reality means it's always going to be a niche solution that nerds use.
You can't expect every human being to be enough of an expert in all topics to make informed choices on their own for all their interactions with corporations. That's why we have tons of saftey regulations governing the products you can sell. Similarly, it is much more reasonable to resrict a few megacorporations than it is to expect everyone to understand why the so-called "trusted" computing is bad for them.
I noticed recently that my distro's youtube-dl stopped working (it can't successfully download movies) but thanks to news like this one I found a fix in one of the comments here:
> While Uberspace didn't host the open source software, it was held responsible for the website linking to the software hosted on developer platform GitHub.
It's what our corporate overlords and their pet politicians want, and they ain't gonna stop fighting until George Orwell spins in his grave, and prolly not even then.
We already had mass censorship of wrongthink on social media coerced by federal agencies. This is petty by comparison and Orwell has been spinning for years now.
There is a right to private copying, you pay additional fees for media such as CDs, DVDs and USB sticks, but it is illegal to circumvent copy protection for copying.
There's even a filter on youtube for searching for 'creative commons' content. This ruling seems to make it very difficult to download that content (explicitly intended to be shared and remixed) and illegal to work on software that makes it easier.
Yeah but for some reason in the 90s American Judges decided to throw that whole "justice for everyone" thing out the window and now explicitly empower ONLY certain giant rightsholders to have any rights.
I'm waiting for a judge to accept an argument that web browsers should be illegal because they allow you to look at infringing content.
Hopefully some hacker news readers consider Uberspace as a hosting provider for their next side project. From what I see it is all laid out very well. No isolated VPS but ssh access and a ton of well written documentation. On the upside, they are responsible for keeping the base system updated. I’ve been a happy customer for a few months now, with limited requirements and experience, but I like it. Also the legal terms are super fair.
> A German court previously ruled that stream-ripping software bypasses YouTube’s ‘rolling cipher’ download protection. This is seen as a circumvention of technical protection measures, a violation of intellectual property law in Europe.`
Does someone know what they mean by 'rolling cipher' here?
What I don't understand is why aren't these companies suing YouTube/Alphabet?
They're the one's enabling the purported copyright violations. They're the ones profiting. They're the ones with the mountain of money attorneys are generally employed to take from.
If anything these attorneys should be supporting youtube-dl/yt-dlp maintenance and using it in support of their claims. What could be more damming of YouTube's negligence than showing the court a silly headless web browser written in python optimized for video sites can leech copyrighted materials from youtube.com?
YouTube/Alphabet will only get off their asses and _really_ prevent this activity the moment it costs more than the neglect generates in revenue.
Maybe this is some 4D chess, but from where I'm sitting these attorneys look like clowns.
I use mpv to watch videos and streams because my computer and my GPU are old and can't manage the amount of RAM these sites need, their buggy players, or the chat on streams keeps logging and wasting RAM. Without mpv youtube-dl and yt-dlp integration I couldn't watch them.
There are a lot of tools to download videos, some of them integrated in the web browser as add-ons. You could even download them directly using Developer Tools.
This a tantrum against a tool, like the ones against VHS, CD-ROMs, cassettes, DVDs or bitorrent.
I've used it to pull the audio off videos of live jazz performances, so I can run slow-down tools and play along to learn. I could do the same by recording the audio out of my laptop.
That type of thing is not the majority use case for youtube-dl, but for any type of digital media there are plenty of individual, educational use cases that do not involve "pirate" activity (i.e. further distribution). Whether or not that's officially ok or not, I'd assert it is morally ok.
As an aside, if YouTube is the only or canonical source for some material, getting it from the distribution channel (YT) and getting any access to the media in question are now one and the same problem. But let's not get confused about the value YouTube is providing - they are just a distributor, not a creative originator.
Doesn’t matter, saying you can’t download this publicly available video is like saying you can’t copy the text of this article, both are inane to think of.
I've never used it to pirate music, and half of the videos on youtube youtube doesn't own the rights to host. They just index them, surface and highlight them through the most popular (one of the few remaining) search engines in the world, and massively distribute them from some of fastest servers on earth until the rights owner notices and interacts with them personally or through a lawyer to complain.
I used to live in a place with very crappy internet and watching youtube even in 360p was a no go. And youtube doesn't let you buffer entire video since 2012 I guess.
I figured if I feed whatever I want to watch to yt-dlp and give it some time I will be able to watch videos without buffering and in much better quality too
Audiovisual material is the public forum of modern times. It’s important to be able to review and criticize a movie and reupload it on public forums.
Imagine not being able to show the Nuremberg Trial to pupils in class, because it would be copyrighted. It would give free hands to war criminals. Imagine not being allowed to show negative footage of Biden because it’s copyrighted and the White House doesn’t grant the right to anyone.
But youtube isn't a public utility. The public can use it, sure, but they're supposed to abide by the TOS, because it's a privately owned company.
Downloading things from Youtube isn't the solution. Turning Youtube into a public utility is what's needed, in this case. Or even simpler: people need to start using archive.org instead of youtube.
>Imagine not being able to show the Nuremberg Trial to pupils in class, because it would be copyrighted.
the Nuremberg trials were an international affair, they made it public so no one country could do that. If it was a german or american exclusive trial it would have 100% been done off the record, and maybe be uncovered decades later like some declassified CIA document.
>Imagine not being allowed to show negative footage of Biden because it’s copyrighted and the White House doesn’t grant the right to anyone.
yes, that is the first amendment, the government cannot overstep a citizen's freedom of press. So that makes sense.
Just like how military soldiers don't get the same rights as private citizens, private companies don't need to care about freedom of press.
http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
I've moved on to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp anyways.
But this is still an infuriating move. youtube-dl wasn't doing anything infringing on its site, was it?