Very well worded, diplomatic, and 'safe' views. However it is clear that the global leadership and rights holders have discovered that they can take a sledgehammer to the freedoms of collective society and most of us will not even comprehend the real issues in our ennui, and a few will murmur and very few will actively pushback.
In a better society, it ought not have been possible to take down general purpose software with dubious claims of their "clear intent".
It's not even that. This is an ideological fight we should be having. Code is speech and code should be protected by all like free speech is under the first amendment.
Leonard french, the favorite copyright attorney, went over some of the legal parts of the DMCA claim yesterday. https://youtu.be/wZITscblMBA
Philipp sounds very proffessional, and it's obvious that youtube-dl's goal isn't simply infringement of copyrighted music, its also a tool that allows creators to use content within fair use.
I love this man's videos. I have unfortunately needed a lawyer once, and I used Leonard French's services and was very pleased. Can recommend both his videos and his services.
And most websites that host the conferences (such as youtube) will change to break those older versions of youtube-dl. This is the kind of project that needs constant maintenance.
You still can. This takedown is just the first shot across the bow. It remains to see if the repo will remain down - it's likely to be reinstated. Hosting will probably move along. The program is still available from its website and from a million linux distros and other places where it is bundled.
Imho, the real outrage should be about Google/YouTube being so asymmetric (easy to upload, difficult to download). But I guess people consider this an impossible battle.
Easy download would directly hurt engagement and ad revenue, with not much upside. Hosting video is costly and their only line of revenue is ads via repeated site visits .
One could argue that simply visiting the (video-) page downloads the media, and therefore download is much easier than upload any way you look at it - but i suppose you mean "a way to save the actual file that is easily understandable to laymen", and I'd support your claim.
His master's thesis seems relevant here: "Censorship-resistant Collaboration with a Hybrid DTN/P2P Network" (where DTN is "Delay-Tolerant Network"). Also relevant in relation to today's other headline about GitLab blocking access in Iran.
There are so many valuable videos that I would not rely Youtube (and the uploaders) to maintain those videos permanently on their site. For instance interviews with Niklas Luhmann or Feynman or Steve Jobs or Karl Popper and many many more.
It is our right to have tools that could be used for different reasons. It is our right to be able to act not lawful. Just go after those citizens who break law, not those who COULD break law.
Just because a knife can kill someone it's not taken from the market. Or just because a pen and paper could be used to write a demagogic text we don't disallow these tools.
I find the tool analogy very useful, because we _do_ regulate some tools like guns.
I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
The key difference is in what the real world contains, versus the virtual world — the virtual world is so dominated by intellectual property that it is almost hard to argue that youtube-dl isn’t meant to copy IP by the fact that almost everything on Youtube is copyrighted.
The desire for a library style free archive of important videos, I think, is just, but youtube-dl is not a that. I’m not sure what it is, it seems to me unquestionable that it should be legal, though.
> I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
Ah, just you wait. If ever the analog loophole becomes the dominant way to reproduce copyrighted works, it will be difficult to get a camera without a content-recognition and blocking system.
One of our business processes is to scan checks when customers pay and attach the image as part of the record in QuickBooks. We use a sheet of paper folder to redact the numbers of the bottom of the check. Our scanner refuses to color copy some client checks, namely from a govt agency and a startup. Thankfully we can still copy with grayscale. When this happens, we have to fully power off the scanner and boot it back up again. Best I can tell it's this pattern/hologram that triggers it.
For the same reason, I had trouble making a digital copy of my daughter's birth certificate. Before I found the gray scale trick, I ended up taking a photo with our iPhone instead.
Generally, unless the purpose of the image was to disseminate an otherwise copyrighted work contained in the recording, fair use would apply. For example: the famous toddler dancing to Prince video. It recorded a Prince song while the toddler was dancing to it. The primary purpose of the video was to show the toddler dancing, so the recording (and dissemination of the Prince song) was deemed fair use. (There's a bit more to that analysis but that was the gist of it.)
If that was true it would be hard to argue that photocameras on smartphones aren't meant to shoot porn or dick pics by the fact that, well, we know why.
youtube-dl works on many other web sites, not only YouTube, and downloading YouTube videos, even if copyrighted, is not a crime per se in many parts of the World
I think your view of what smartphone cameras are used for is pretty out of whack. Most people take photos of their food, abacus amd whatever they are up to. (I’m keeping abacus but it was supposed to say babies)
The point is that if now abacus is the most photographed thing in the World, it doesn't mean cameras main purpose is to take pictures of abacus(es? I guess being a Latin word it has no plural)
In the same way youtube-dl is a tool used to download videos from hundreds of website and there is nothing inherently illegal in it even if the majority of users used it to download illegal material from YouTube.
> making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
It's not like there are no better alternatives. Instead of making it illegal, just setup a fee and a distribution scheme.
In Germany, we do pay some additional fee (0.5€?) on usb-sticks, printers and hard drives, etc, because those things could be used to copy copyrighted material. These fees go directly to associations that represent copyright holders, like GEMA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization) ). This happens since forever.
So there is already precedent for blanket-regulation of and compensation for possible use/misuse of copyrighted material. In fact, this is what some people proposed as a kind of reasonable alternative to the Upload filters of the EU Copyright directive ("Article 13" and so on)
I'm noticing that this is not really a coherent argument, more of a braindump, sorry.
This was not a copyright claim, the tools that were being hosted in one place (Github) allowed widespread infringement. The tool is not banned. Like cameras are not banned. It's a stupid comparison.
I have to agree. Putting examples of copyright infringement in the README and test cases was irresponsible. What were they thinking? Time for a less reckless group of people to work on a replacement.
Did you actually read the README, or are you just spreading rumors? Because I did and have no idea what you're talking about. BTW the README can be found at https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl if anyone wants to see for themselves.
As for the test cases, this is what the article has to say about it:
> they are automated test cases where the test just downloads the first 10KB, which amounts to a couple of seconds at most. This is certainly fair use, but the project is fully functional without these test cases.
So what part of this article are you agreeing with? I doubt we read the same article.
I guess we’ll find out when the case goes through won’t we? From the takedown notice:
We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.”1
We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto.
Wildly spitballing here: what if somebody took the entire repository and stuck it in a place or places that are secure from takedowns. What if, after that happens, another person set up a public repo called, I dunno, ld-ebutuoy. This repo would contain no source code but would allow collaboration, PRs, issues, and so forth.
Each time there's a push, only the changed files would appear in the repo. Both the private and public repos would be active simultaneously in order to do a build. In other words, your project would have two folders with git active, and the build would combine those folders as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Every now and then the process of taking all of the current master branch and moving it offline would happen again. In this way, you'd never have a public repo that would have anything more than a few files in it.
In this scenario, the only things that are being hosted publicly are tiny bits of source code that are changed in order to keep the base updating. And even then, on a regular basis they would be deleted.
tl;dr: simply because you have to take down a repo doesn't mean you have to take down a location for publicly developing F/OSS software. </speculation>
That is a lot of work considering that you can simply move the hosting to Europe (using cgit and a ML, or gitea, or self-hosted gitlab) and be immune from DMCA requests.
Also probably a way to host a git repo over tor. But that would make life a bit harder for devs.
Sure, not the EU. The EU will cooperate with the US if they want an extradition.
In all seriousness, move it to Russia, China, or some other country that has better freedoms in this particular regard and won't take crap from the US about silly copyright concerns.
Or put the source code on the blockchain and it will never be eraseable.
Even better, build a decentralized Github that is actually based on a blockchain but allows transparent interaction via the "git" command. No matter what the DMCA or RIAA want there is nobody that can erase anything from past commits.
Right Europe will extradite and enforce copyright claims, but the first one would require actual charges to be filed and the second does not apply here. DRM circumvention is a purely American ban, and a European host would not have to pay mind to it.
DRM circumvention is absolutely not "purely an American ban." EU law bans circumvention software under DIRECTIVE 2001/29/EC from 2001.
This is codified into local law in various ways by various member states, but as an example in the UK it became section 296zb of the Copyright Design and Patents Act (as modified by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003), which can be found at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/296ZB.
(1)A person commits an offence if he—
(a)manufactures for sale or hire, or
(b)imports otherwise than for his private and domestic use, or
(c)in the course of a business—
(i)sells or lets for hire, or
(ii)offers or exposes for sale or hire, or
(iii)advertises for sale or hire, or
(iv)possesses, or
(v)distributes, or
(d)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures.
(2)A person commits an offence if he provides, promotes, advertises or markets—
(a)in the course of a business, or
(b)otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
a service the purpose of which is to enable or facilitate the circumvention of effective technological measures.
I shall spare you the rest, which is available at the link. But I would note it's not even a civil offence, it's a criminal one, with a maximum two year prison penalty.
Or, you know, you could just ask the people posting their videos (aka the copyright owners) to make them available for download. Most will if asked. They'd probably even provide the highest-quality versions available.
Why do the solutions on HN always involve complicated technical solutions that ignore the rights of the people affected?
No, most people who post good videos don't respond to e-mail.
Whenever I take a flight or long train ride or are otherwise going to be without reception I often youtube-dl a bunch of stuff to watch. That usually happens a couple hours before the flight, and I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And there are all the times I've used hundreds of downloaded videos as datasets or test sets for machine learning algorithms.
Just because rights can be theoretically violated with a tool doesn't mean we should ban the tool. My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
No, most people who post good videos don't respond to e-mail.
Probably just due to the different industries, but every time I've asked a presenter at a legal conference for a video they have been overjoyed that someone would want a copy. 100% yes rate, except for the presenter at a CLE conference (and in that case, the video was available through the conference organizer).
I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And yet that is what copyright law generally requires. "Convenience" isn't a valid justification for fair use.
My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
No, actually you mentioned a number of infringing uses that wouldn't be protected as fair use except for the training bits.
But the issue for youtube-dl is different: as a tool, the question is whether it is designed to infringe copyright, and the answer thus far appears to be that it is, especially given that they explicitly design for and test this ability.
What it may come down to (if this gets to court) may be the percentage of the user base that uses it for legitimate purposes and the percentage that doesn't. If they can't show that a substantial portion of the userbase uses it for downloading stuff other than RIAA licensed videos, youtubedl is DOA.
> "Convenience" isn't a valid justification for fair use.
Not specifically for fair use, but convenience is a perfectly valid justification in my book to transform, edit, or save content for personal use.
[My body + my electronic devices] is a black box, and nobody has the right to meddle inside the workings of that black box. Once YouTube sends bytes into that black box, the extent of their control is done, and don't get to ask what happens inside after that. They don't get to know whether content got recorded on an organic brain or on a silicon brain within that black box, for example. The black box is private, and is not open for introspection.
They can only require that said black box not re-emit information that came from them, or derivatives of that information, back into the outside world.
> number of infringing uses
First of all, fair use is enough reason to have a tool.
But regardless, I don't believe downloading a video for offline personal consumption violates the spirit of copyright, and that's all that matters to me.
When Youtube, or anyone, sends any content into my personal LAN I can do whatever I want with that content within my private spaces and for my private viewing in any way I wish. If the law suggests otherwise, I don't believe in that law.
The law also banned women from voting, and colored people from from sitting in the front of the bus, and it's because of people who didn't believe in those laws that we are where we are today. Sometimes the law is wrong, and I firmly believe the law is wrong to say anything about how I'm allowed to save or consume content that was legally transmitted to a device I own for my own private use.
I've seen very little animosity towards Github. The law in this case makes Github respond promptly to any takedown request, even if it's wrong.
Github can face liability for copyright infringement unless it
> (C)upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
They also have to wait ten days before restoring the content after a counter-claim.
This wasn't a takedown request as it didn't include a link to it so github isn't required to take it down. They can legally put it back now. The fact that they did speaks to how they will respond in the future.
I don't understand which of the required elements you think the notice lacks. It identifies both the content which it claims is infringing (linking the repos) and the songs which it claims are infringed (by name).
The problem is the law is terrible. Github's actions are pretty much required as far as I can tell.
Edit: I'd like to add that one thing Github could do is accept liability for copyright infringement and fight against frivolous claims like this in court. Maybe users should start demanding companies protect them from tactics like this, but the existing legal penalties are severely in the claimants favor.
This is a good point. Circumvention is defined in a different chapter[0] than copyright infringement, and there is no language to imply that circumvention is copyright infringement.
Besides that, there are requirements in 1201 that YouTube and youtube-dl might not meet.
* The technological measure being circumvented must be "effective". There is a possibility that YouTube's poorly encrypted URLs might not meet that bar. E.g. they evidently don't work that well, and only the URL is encrypted, not the copyrighted work.
* Since you can freely receive a copy of the work by ordinarily visiting YouTube, it's pretty questionable that the measures control access at all. E.g. Region restricted videos are blocked based on IP, not using this measure, and so youtube-dl can't download them.
* "use" isn't a right restricted by copyright. There generally isn't a distinction between a copyrighted work that your computer transiently stores or saves (e.g. streaming vs. download). The violation would be in a license that you agreed to that specified additional restrictions beyond those offered by copyright (e.g. TOS violations).
* youtube-dl has to be primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumvention. That seems a little far-fetched since I think it might predate YouTube's technological measures.
I agree that it clearly isn't an access control. I think there's a plausible case that it's effective as a copy control, as well as a plausible case that it's not.
Re license: the control prevents further copies being made, which is clearly a right protected by copyright.
Re your last point, the issue is likely (b)(1)(C), which is about marketing.
However, from my understanding, it doesn't matter if the takedown notice is completely without merit. As long as it meets the requirements, Github has to follow it in order to avoid liability.
This isn't a takedown notice under DMCA, is the point. There's no safe harbor for this kind of infringement, so Github doesn't avoid any liability by taking it down after receiving a notice.
But why would Github pick this fight for youtube-dl.
As an open source project they do not pay anything (I assume).
Furthermore Microsoft dedpends on good relations with the RIAA and other entities from the rightsholder community and youtube-dl is certainly not an extreme example of a wrongful DMCA takedown.
DMCA simply does not entitle rightsholders to demand third-party removal of a computer program that contains links to copyrighted content. The proper remedy is to sue the youtube-dl team and get injunctive relief.
GitHub's actions are not required per se, they just need to accept being civilly liable for any alleged infringement if they want to ignore the takedown notice. This requires a high-level decisionmaker, and there are a lot of takedown notices, so only relatively small sites can get away with making decisions on a case-by-case basis rather than doing blanket takedowns of infringing content.
Like, there's nothing stopping you from responding to DMCA takedown requests with "this is clearly non-infringing and/or fair use, if you want to sue us send servicing to the following address". You just have to be a particular kind of ornery and make the judgment call that you're willing to risk being sued over protecting third-party speech.
I wish more companies would take this position, but one barrier to taking this position is that the penalties are so skewed. You can face far larger damages for even minor copyright infringement than spurious takedown requests. Plus there's the cost of litigating.
This whole case is very strange. From my point of view (I studied law, among other things) there is no justification to take action against this tool or its authors. There are various contents on Youtube, whose license allows downloading and offline playback without any problems. What is allowed with the tool in a specific case depends on the country or the jurisdiction of the user as well as on his actually intended actions. What has happened here obviously goes far beyond what an author or his or her copyright collective may demand. The whole thing looks more like a charade.
You must not have studied law very hard, or just missed the classes that taught "reading between the lines" to twist things in your direction.
The fact that the read me provided examples specifically downloading RIAA relevant content is pretty damning. Why in the world the maintainers allowed to happen is beyond me. It would have been so simple to provide examples to anything else. It just wouldn't have been sexy.
How anyone that studied law couldn't see this as a "gotcha" is confusing.
Remain objective (if your personality allows it). What the Americans do is their business, even if it is in the gray area also there. But the cease and desists to (ex-)developers in Germany are simply tasteless. And the project should move to a server in Switzerland.
EDIT: and please be specific which sections of the Readme justify such action by the IP owners or their (effectively legitimate) representatives, or the github responsibles.
According to Hagemeister (source in this article), the tests only download the first 10 KB of the videos, landing this very strongly in the domain of fair use.
If true, that actually is relevant to the fair use analysis outlined in 17 USC 107 (factor (3)).
The problem though is that as a tool it is subject to a different analysis, 17 USC 1201, and so it must be evaluated on the basis of whether it is intended to circumvent a copyright, and that is why many of us keep bringing up the fact that they include RIAA-focused tests: it shows that at least part of the purpose of the tool was to download music videos.
The presumption that anyone in some test has accessed material on youtube that might not be allowed to be downloaded in the USA does not justify the removal of the project's repositories, as it was done with the support of Github.
EDIT: If this were legal, any communications program that was used for a disputable action once (so each browser), could be closed off from the public as well.
If this were legal, any communications program that was used for a disputable action once (so each browser), could be closed off from the public as well.
No, because that's not the test under 1201. The test is whether the tool is designed and/or offered for the purpose of circumventing copyright. If it's designed for other purposes but can incidentally circumvent copyright, that's fine. (For example: calibre is designed to organize ebook libraries, and offers itself for that purpose. They make no mention of the separate plugins that can be used to crack Amazon DRM.)
> The test is whether the tool is designed and/or offered for the purpose of circumventing copyright
It is not more designed and/or offered for this purpose than any other communication tool. At least I didn't see an evidence. The fact that it could be used is not sufficient. The goal of the whole exercise was probably more to set an example and to intimidate people a bit.
EDIT: That is probably why they called in the RIAA, which is quite peculiar. The RIAA is no copyright collective, is it?
It's literally designed to download content from sites that don't allow downloads. It's not even remotely the same thing as a browser or other communication tool.
> It's literally designed to download content from sites that don't allow downloads
That's not per se illegal. First there are countries where it is not illegal to download copyright protected content for personal use. Second even in countries where this was illegal (but where it is by no means clear what the difference between "download in the browser" and "download in another tool" should be) Youtube contains content which is CC-BY licensed (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/RochusKeller) which can be legally downloaded and used.
> I don't understand the RIAA bit.
RIAA is no copyright collective (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_collection_s...), but just an industry organization. In order to be able to represent the rights of the IP owners in court or in actions like the present one, the organization needs appropriate powers of attorney. This must also be provided for in the statutes. This is not the same as lobbying. If I was a representative of the other party, the first thing I would doubt is that.
>It's literally designed to download content from sites that don't allow downloads.
Any video you watch requires you to download it, the only difference from a browser is how it stores the file. And section 1201 does not outlaw tools used for circumventing copyright, it outlaws tools used to circumvent copyright protection.
> It's literally designed to download content from sites that don't allow downloads.
You can't simultaneously offer a video for people to watch and still "not allow downloads". What you actually mean is that they do not explicitly offer a downloading feature. That's true, but that's what the tool is for and it's not in itself illegal.
> Copyright law is always a balance between creators and society.
Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts.
Current copyright law is a horror that's totally skewed towards hoarders of intellectual property who only want to take away more and more from the public all the time. Garbage like DMCA 1201 should never have been allowed to exist.
Reverting this mess back to the original intent would be hugely beneficial for the public.
Copyright should be exactly like any other contract and should be treated as a breach of contract if you infringe on it, if you signed it.
If you're selling your work to millions of people you're probably making a decent amount of money. The difficulty of enforcing millions of contracts at the same time are nothing but a market way to tax your profits.
The less you sell, the easier it will be to pinpoint the culprit and sue him.
As a creator you're in your right to sue whoever breached your contract with them and redistributed / copied your work / didn't respect your conditions, but is it going to be cost efficient (especially if you consider the marketing side of piracy)?
Someone pirating your content without entering into a contract with you is not breaching any contract and, despite being highly immoral, is not doing anything wrong. The original copy must have been sourced from somewhere though, so I would consider it fair to put the entire cost to whoever breached the contract first.
If as a society we create regulations that allow big corporations and their friends in the government to infringe on people's freedom, we're not only losing our freedom but also increasing inequality.
Copyright isn't a contract though. It's a government sanctioned ability to control the use of information. It shouldn't exist in the first place, unless public gets something in return, which is progress and useful arts.
> Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts.
No, it wasn't.
That's the justification for the US Constitution allowing the US Congress to create US federal IP laws, but copyright law is older than the US, and was very much not created for that purpose. (And, despite exercising a power expressly created for that purpose, it's pretty clear that the actual present US copyright law wasn't created for that purpose, either.)
That was the stated purpose. Other purposes didn't make it into the law and never should have made it. Public doesn't need to grant some control over information to hoarders of IP so they could make profit on it if it doesn't benefit the public.
Copyright is always a close kin to censorship and is unhealthy in general, unless there is some trade-off that public gets in return. It should never be "to allow profit for IP holders" idea.
Copyright law, and trade protection law, has existed for hundreds of years, and indeed patent protection was one of the things that gave England hundreds of years of technological advantage over its larger adversaries in France and Spain. (The period from which England benefit lasted for hundreds of years, the actual individual advantages were a few years to a few decades depending on the invention at issue.)
If you want to argue against the past 600 years of human history in favor of the imaginary history in your head, that's your prerogative.
Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful
Patent law protections in England absolutely were a factor in England's dominance of France and Spain, despite the hugely disparate sizes and resources of those countries. Moreover, the US's early embrace of patents is why so much of modern life can be traced directly to inventions created in the US. Electricity, modern manufacturing, computers, the radio, television, air flight, all traceable to private individuals and companies incentivized to invent in the US because the patent system rewarded them for doing so.
I argue against demagoguery. Harm of abusive patents is well documented and it totally held back progress more than once. So your argument that patent law is necessary for progress is outright false. It could be useful for progress and it could also be harmful.
"No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?", by Frank Thadeusz at Der Spiegel.
Eckhard Höffner explores the question of whether Germany's lack of any real copyright law served to accelerate the spread of knowledge and industry
[O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.
Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
The emergence of Germany as a major technical and industrial power by the end of the 19th century was quite remarkable, considering it was a not only agrarian, but not even a single state. German in 1800 was a collection of independent principalities and states, corresponding roughly to the present-day states of unified Germany plus Austria, and parts of Switzerland, France, and Poland.
The Statute of Anne was not the first copyright law. Its antecedent was the Licensing of the Press Act[0], which had the explicit purpose of restricting the right to make copies (i.e. to run a printing press) "for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses"—in a word, censorship.
Note that the Wikipedia article for the Statue of Anne says "the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties" (emphasis added). It was not the first copyright, just the first one where the government handled enforcement directly. Before that enforcement (including, but not limited to, government-mandated censorship) was handled by the printers' guild, with the government licensing the printers.
If the standard for what counts as "copyright law" is "what we would nowadays refer to [as] copyright" then it is of course trivially true that all "copyright" statutes, past, present, or future, share the same purpose as modern copyright. However, more generally the term "copyright" refers to "the right by law to be the entity which determines who may publish, copy and distribute a piece of writing, music, picture or other work of authorship"[0], and for that the Licensing of the Press Act qualifies.
The Statute of Anne was intended as a modernized replacement for the LPA; it represented an evolution in the concept of copyright away from its origins as a means of censorship and toward a more lenient and democratized commercial model.
As written in the Constitution, the provision granting Congress the authority to create copyright laws on its face does not include anything about fair use.
In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights, and at the time, fair use was not part of the (limited) intellectual property base of law in the States or the UK.
Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.
Fair use should simply be a clarification of cases when copyright shouldn't apply in the first place for those who think it might apply there.
To put it differently, when copyright starts being harmful to the public, fair use is a more explicit way to rein it in and keep things as they should be.
In theory, if the law could be defined with 100% clarity, you wouldn't need fair use as an additional tool to prevent abuse. But things are rarely that clear.
> Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.
Fair use was introduced by the courts as an alternative to copyright being deemed altogether unconstitutional as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. If the fair use exceptions were to be eliminated then we would be back to copyright itself being unconstitutional.
Personally I think the courts were too quick to capitulate. A few narrow fair use exceptions are not sufficient to reconcile the inherent censorship of copyright with freedom of speech.
> In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights …
What the text actually says is that "The Congress shall have the Power To … promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not say that "creators" have exclusive rights automatically; that requires action on the part of Congress. And whatever Congress enacts in this area must comply with the rest of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment. Even if that means that copyright effectively cannot be implemented at all.
Indeed. My main use case for youtube-dl is via mpv -no-video. I am blind. I can not always use a web browser to access a lecture. Being able to play YT videos on the terminal is a godsent feature for me.
> In my time as maintainer, I declined numerous requests to support piracy sites and DRM-protected content. I can not speak for the project in the last years, but from what I've seen that policy has remained. To me, this is the right policy any legal project should follow.
Seems to me that the best method of retaliation would be to let the code + issues + PRs become decentralized and this policy changed.
Copyright law is always a balance between creators and society.
When it comes to being able to watch videos no matter the device
or Internet connection, and doing so for non-commercial purposes,
the balance we should strive for seems clear to me; it should
allow youtube-dl.
what we've seen over the past decade or so is the creation of commons on the internet; however, these commons, like Youtube, Twitter, or Instagram, are centrally managed, owned, and controlled. the buy-in to these commons has grown and grown, and now that they are essential parts of the way the world communicates and consumes information, they're being "tightened down", with ever increasing ad loads, censorship, and "steering" (influence via search and recommendation visibility). as global inequality increases ever more starkly, these services represent a powerful means of control over a disaffected and disenfranchised populace - everyone has been herded into the walled garden.
the collective dream we had of the internet as a species-level advancement has, in fact, been a mirage. the idea was that the internet would allow free and uncensored communication across the world, perhaps allowing the citizens of the earth to organize against injustice, corruption, and repression, and to share information freely. in fact, what we see now is a global internet and computing backbone compromised to the core by nation-state actors, and a centralization of internet services controlled by an oligopoly.
not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea of a "global commons" or "collective good" cannot coexist with a world economy of globalized capitalism. the capitalization of the internet is a situation that is unprecedented in human society - we may have crossed an event horizon where societal control has grown to such a level where the very ability of people to fight repression and organize a more equitable society has died.
i'm usually not so pessimistic, but i was in a bad mood, especially because youtube-dl is such a essential tool for me. things aren't hopeless. they just feel that way sometimes.
126 comments
[ 141 ms ] story [ 2792 ms ] threadIn a better society, it ought not have been possible to take down general purpose software with dubious claims of their "clear intent".
This is modern day book burning.
I believe the developer's constitutional rights were violated and I would contact the EFF and ACLU for help.
For some context, at one point:
> the US government designated encryption software as a "munition"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
Philipp sounds very proffessional, and it's obvious that youtube-dl's goal isn't simply infringement of copyrighted music, its also a tool that allows creators to use content within fair use.
Hopefully, youtube-dl project will remain alive.
And now I can't? This doesn't seem right.
I would not be surprised if YouTube intentionally introduces a breaking change now that the repo is down.
Paper & slides: https://phihag.de/2012/mt.pdf & https://phihag.de/2012/mtpres.pdf
It is our right to have tools that could be used for different reasons. It is our right to be able to act not lawful. Just go after those citizens who break law, not those who COULD break law.
Just because a knife can kill someone it's not taken from the market. Or just because a pen and paper could be used to write a demagogic text we don't disallow these tools.
I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
The key difference is in what the real world contains, versus the virtual world — the virtual world is so dominated by intellectual property that it is almost hard to argue that youtube-dl isn’t meant to copy IP by the fact that almost everything on Youtube is copyrighted.
The desire for a library style free archive of important videos, I think, is just, but youtube-dl is not a that. I’m not sure what it is, it seems to me unquestionable that it should be legal, though.
Ah, just you wait. If ever the analog loophole becomes the dominant way to reproduce copyrighted works, it will be difficult to get a camera without a content-recognition and blocking system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
For the same reason, I had trouble making a digital copy of my daughter's birth certificate. Before I found the gray scale trick, I ended up taking a photo with our iPhone instead.
youtube-dl works on many other web sites, not only YouTube, and downloading YouTube videos, even if copyrighted, is not a crime per se in many parts of the World
In the same way youtube-dl is a tool used to download videos from hundreds of website and there is nothing inherently illegal in it even if the majority of users used it to download illegal material from YouTube.
It's not like there are no better alternatives. Instead of making it illegal, just setup a fee and a distribution scheme.
In Germany, we do pay some additional fee (0.5€?) on usb-sticks, printers and hard drives, etc, because those things could be used to copy copyrighted material. These fees go directly to associations that represent copyright holders, like GEMA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization) ). This happens since forever.
So there is already precedent for blanket-regulation of and compensation for possible use/misuse of copyrighted material. In fact, this is what some people proposed as a kind of reasonable alternative to the Upload filters of the EU Copyright directive ("Article 13" and so on)
I'm noticing that this is not really a coherent argument, more of a braindump, sorry.
As for the test cases, this is what the article has to say about it:
> they are automated test cases where the test just downloads the first 10KB, which amounts to a couple of seconds at most. This is certainly fair use, but the project is fully functional without these test cases.
So what part of this article are you agreeing with? I doubt we read the same article.
We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.”1
We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto.
And you also don't need to "find out" whether you've read the README and the article or not, you should know the answer yourself.
Also, per HN guidelines, please don’t insinuate that I can’t read.
Each time there's a push, only the changed files would appear in the repo. Both the private and public repos would be active simultaneously in order to do a build. In other words, your project would have two folders with git active, and the build would combine those folders as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Every now and then the process of taking all of the current master branch and moving it offline would happen again. In this way, you'd never have a public repo that would have anything more than a few files in it.
In this scenario, the only things that are being hosted publicly are tiny bits of source code that are changed in order to keep the base updating. And even then, on a regular basis they would be deleted.
tl;dr: simply because you have to take down a repo doesn't mean you have to take down a location for publicly developing F/OSS software. </speculation>
Also probably a way to host a git repo over tor. But that would make life a bit harder for devs.
In all seriousness, move it to Russia, China, or some other country that has better freedoms in this particular regard and won't take crap from the US about silly copyright concerns.
Or put the source code on the blockchain and it will never be eraseable.
Even better, build a decentralized Github that is actually based on a blockchain but allows transparent interaction via the "git" command. No matter what the DMCA or RIAA want there is nobody that can erase anything from past commits.
This is codified into local law in various ways by various member states, but as an example in the UK it became section 296zb of the Copyright Design and Patents Act (as modified by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003), which can be found at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/296ZB.
(1)A person commits an offence if he—
(a)manufactures for sale or hire, or
(b)imports otherwise than for his private and domestic use, or
(c)in the course of a business—
(i)sells or lets for hire, or
(ii)offers or exposes for sale or hire, or
(iii)advertises for sale or hire, or
(iv)possesses, or
(v)distributes, or
(d)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. (2)A person commits an offence if he provides, promotes, advertises or markets—
(a)in the course of a business, or
(b)otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
a service the purpose of which is to enable or facilitate the circumvention of effective technological measures.
I shall spare you the rest, which is available at the link. But I would note it's not even a civil offence, it's a criminal one, with a maximum two year prison penalty.
That's the grey area.
Why do the solutions on HN always involve complicated technical solutions that ignore the rights of the people affected?
No, most people who post good videos don't respond to e-mail.
Whenever I take a flight or long train ride or are otherwise going to be without reception I often youtube-dl a bunch of stuff to watch. That usually happens a couple hours before the flight, and I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And there are all the times I've used hundreds of downloaded videos as datasets or test sets for machine learning algorithms.
Just because rights can be theoretically violated with a tool doesn't mean we should ban the tool. My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
Probably just due to the different industries, but every time I've asked a presenter at a legal conference for a video they have been overjoyed that someone would want a copy. 100% yes rate, except for the presenter at a CLE conference (and in that case, the video was available through the conference organizer).
I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And yet that is what copyright law generally requires. "Convenience" isn't a valid justification for fair use.
My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
No, actually you mentioned a number of infringing uses that wouldn't be protected as fair use except for the training bits.
But the issue for youtube-dl is different: as a tool, the question is whether it is designed to infringe copyright, and the answer thus far appears to be that it is, especially given that they explicitly design for and test this ability.
What it may come down to (if this gets to court) may be the percentage of the user base that uses it for legitimate purposes and the percentage that doesn't. If they can't show that a substantial portion of the userbase uses it for downloading stuff other than RIAA licensed videos, youtubedl is DOA.
Not specifically for fair use, but convenience is a perfectly valid justification in my book to transform, edit, or save content for personal use.
[My body + my electronic devices] is a black box, and nobody has the right to meddle inside the workings of that black box. Once YouTube sends bytes into that black box, the extent of their control is done, and don't get to ask what happens inside after that. They don't get to know whether content got recorded on an organic brain or on a silicon brain within that black box, for example. The black box is private, and is not open for introspection.
They can only require that said black box not re-emit information that came from them, or derivatives of that information, back into the outside world.
> number of infringing uses
First of all, fair use is enough reason to have a tool.
But regardless, I don't believe downloading a video for offline personal consumption violates the spirit of copyright, and that's all that matters to me.
When Youtube, or anyone, sends any content into my personal LAN I can do whatever I want with that content within my private spaces and for my private viewing in any way I wish. If the law suggests otherwise, I don't believe in that law.
The law also banned women from voting, and colored people from from sitting in the front of the bus, and it's because of people who didn't believe in those laws that we are where we are today. Sometimes the law is wrong, and I firmly believe the law is wrong to say anything about how I'm allowed to save or consume content that was legally transmitted to a device I own for my own private use.
https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb-intro
Github can face liability for copyright infringement unless it
> (C)upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
They also have to wait ten days before restoring the content after a counter-claim.
Relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
The problem is the law is terrible. Github's actions are pretty much required as far as I can tell.
Edit: I'd like to add that one thing Github could do is accept liability for copyright infringement and fight against frivolous claims like this in court. Maybe users should start demanding companies protect them from tactics like this, but the existing legal penalties are severely in the claimants favor.
Besides that, there are requirements in 1201 that YouTube and youtube-dl might not meet.
* The technological measure being circumvented must be "effective". There is a possibility that YouTube's poorly encrypted URLs might not meet that bar. E.g. they evidently don't work that well, and only the URL is encrypted, not the copyrighted work.
* Since you can freely receive a copy of the work by ordinarily visiting YouTube, it's pretty questionable that the measures control access at all. E.g. Region restricted videos are blocked based on IP, not using this measure, and so youtube-dl can't download them.
* "use" isn't a right restricted by copyright. There generally isn't a distinction between a copyrighted work that your computer transiently stores or saves (e.g. streaming vs. download). The violation would be in a license that you agreed to that specified additional restrictions beyond those offered by copyright (e.g. TOS violations).
* youtube-dl has to be primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumvention. That seems a little far-fetched since I think it might predate YouTube's technological measures.
0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
I agree that it clearly isn't an access control. I think there's a plausible case that it's effective as a copy control, as well as a plausible case that it's not.
Re license: the control prevents further copies being made, which is clearly a right protected by copyright.
Re your last point, the issue is likely (b)(1)(C), which is about marketing.
However, from my understanding, it doesn't matter if the takedown notice is completely without merit. As long as it meets the requirements, Github has to follow it in order to avoid liability.
As an open source project they do not pay anything (I assume).
Furthermore Microsoft dedpends on good relations with the RIAA and other entities from the rightsholder community and youtube-dl is certainly not an extreme example of a wrongful DMCA takedown.
DMCA simply does not entitle rightsholders to demand third-party removal of a computer program that contains links to copyrighted content. The proper remedy is to sue the youtube-dl team and get injunctive relief.
Like, there's nothing stopping you from responding to DMCA takedown requests with "this is clearly non-infringing and/or fair use, if you want to sue us send servicing to the following address". You just have to be a particular kind of ornery and make the judgment call that you're willing to risk being sued over protecting third-party speech.
The repo owners should be able to file a counter notice to reinstate the repo.
The fact that the read me provided examples specifically downloading RIAA relevant content is pretty damning. Why in the world the maintainers allowed to happen is beyond me. It would have been so simple to provide examples to anything else. It just wouldn't have been sexy.
How anyone that studied law couldn't see this as a "gotcha" is confusing.
EDIT: and please be specific which sections of the Readme justify such action by the IP owners or their (effectively legitimate) representatives, or the github responsibles.
Anti-circumvention law (and bluntly copyright law in general) is a lot stronger in Germany than it is in the US.
That's not a fact, that's baseless rumor. Here's the actual README:
https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
And furthermore:
https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#can-you-add-support-f...
So what was that thing about "twisting things in your direction" again?
The problem though is that as a tool it is subject to a different analysis, 17 USC 1201, and so it must be evaluated on the basis of whether it is intended to circumvent a copyright, and that is why many of us keep bringing up the fact that they include RIAA-focused tests: it shows that at least part of the purpose of the tool was to download music videos.
EDIT: If this were legal, any communications program that was used for a disputable action once (so each browser), could be closed off from the public as well.
No, because that's not the test under 1201. The test is whether the tool is designed and/or offered for the purpose of circumventing copyright. If it's designed for other purposes but can incidentally circumvent copyright, that's fine. (For example: calibre is designed to organize ebook libraries, and offers itself for that purpose. They make no mention of the separate plugins that can be used to crack Amazon DRM.)
It is not more designed and/or offered for this purpose than any other communication tool. At least I didn't see an evidence. The fact that it could be used is not sufficient. The goal of the whole exercise was probably more to set an example and to intimidate people a bit.
EDIT: That is probably why they called in the RIAA, which is quite peculiar. The RIAA is no copyright collective, is it?
I don't understand the RIAA bit.
That's not per se illegal. First there are countries where it is not illegal to download copyright protected content for personal use. Second even in countries where this was illegal (but where it is by no means clear what the difference between "download in the browser" and "download in another tool" should be) Youtube contains content which is CC-BY licensed (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/RochusKeller) which can be legally downloaded and used.
> I don't understand the RIAA bit.
RIAA is no copyright collective (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_collection_s...), but just an industry organization. In order to be able to represent the rights of the IP owners in court or in actions like the present one, the organization needs appropriate powers of attorney. This must also be provided for in the statutes. This is not the same as lobbying. If I was a representative of the other party, the first thing I would doubt is that.
Any video you watch requires you to download it, the only difference from a browser is how it stores the file. And section 1201 does not outlaw tools used for circumventing copyright, it outlaws tools used to circumvent copyright protection.
You can't simultaneously offer a video for people to watch and still "not allow downloads". What you actually mean is that they do not explicitly offer a downloading feature. That's true, but that's what the tool is for and it's not in itself illegal.
Fair use affirmative defences and tests (of which several apply) address the infringement claims.
Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts.
Current copyright law is a horror that's totally skewed towards hoarders of intellectual property who only want to take away more and more from the public all the time. Garbage like DMCA 1201 should never have been allowed to exist.
Reverting this mess back to the original intent would be hugely beneficial for the public.
If as a society we create regulations that allow big corporations and their friends in the government to infringe on people's freedom, we're not only losing our freedom but also increasing inequality.
No, it wasn't.
That's the justification for the US Constitution allowing the US Congress to create US federal IP laws, but copyright law is older than the US, and was very much not created for that purpose. (And, despite exercising a power expressly created for that purpose, it's pretty clear that the actual present US copyright law wasn't created for that purpose, either.)
Copyright is always a close kin to censorship and is unhealthy in general, unless there is some trade-off that public gets in return. It should never be "to allow profit for IP holders" idea.
Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful.
Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful
Patent law protections in England absolutely were a factor in England's dominance of France and Spain, despite the hugely disparate sizes and resources of those countries. Moreover, the US's early embrace of patents is why so much of modern life can be traced directly to inventions created in the US. Electricity, modern manufacturing, computers, the radio, television, air flight, all traceable to private individuals and companies incentivized to invent in the US because the patent system rewarded them for doing so.
Eckhard Höffner explores the question of whether Germany's lack of any real copyright law served to accelerate the spread of knowledge and industry
[O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.
Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
The emergence of Germany as a major technical and industrial power by the end of the 19th century was quite remarkable, considering it was a not only agrarian, but not even a single state. German in 1800 was a collection of independent principalities and states, corresponding roughly to the present-day states of unified Germany plus Austria, and parts of Switzerland, France, and Poland.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l...
> No, it wasn't.
The stated purpose of the very first copyright was "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books" and "other Writings".
* http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Note that the Wikipedia article for the Statue of Anne says "the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties" (emphasis added). It was not the first copyright, just the first one where the government handled enforcement directly. Before that enforcement (including, but not limited to, government-mandated censorship) was handled by the printers' guild, with the government licensing the printers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
It seems to me that the LPA was more primarily a 'business licensing' system. Sections I to IV are about who is allowed to print:
* https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp428-...
Only one section (V) pertains to what we would nowadays refer to copyright, i.e., ownership of the content.
The Statute of Anne was intended as a modernized replacement for the LPA; it represented an evolution in the concept of copyright away from its origins as a means of censorship and toward a more lenient and democratized commercial model.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/copyright#Noun
In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights, and at the time, fair use was not part of the (limited) intellectual property base of law in the States or the UK.
Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.
To put it differently, when copyright starts being harmful to the public, fair use is a more explicit way to rein it in and keep things as they should be.
In theory, if the law could be defined with 100% clarity, you wouldn't need fair use as an additional tool to prevent abuse. But things are rarely that clear.
Fair use was introduced by the courts as an alternative to copyright being deemed altogether unconstitutional as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. If the fair use exceptions were to be eliminated then we would be back to copyright itself being unconstitutional.
Personally I think the courts were too quick to capitulate. A few narrow fair use exceptions are not sufficient to reconcile the inherent censorship of copyright with freedom of speech.
> In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights …
What the text actually says is that "The Congress shall have the Power To … promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not say that "creators" have exclusive rights automatically; that requires action on the part of Congress. And whatever Congress enacts in this area must comply with the rest of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment. Even if that means that copyright effectively cannot be implemented at all.
Seems to me that the best method of retaliation would be to let the code + issues + PRs become decentralized and this policy changed.
the collective dream we had of the internet as a species-level advancement has, in fact, been a mirage. the idea was that the internet would allow free and uncensored communication across the world, perhaps allowing the citizens of the earth to organize against injustice, corruption, and repression, and to share information freely. in fact, what we see now is a global internet and computing backbone compromised to the core by nation-state actors, and a centralization of internet services controlled by an oligopoly.
not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea of a "global commons" or "collective good" cannot coexist with a world economy of globalized capitalism. the capitalization of the internet is a situation that is unprecedented in human society - we may have crossed an event horizon where societal control has grown to such a level where the very ability of people to fight repression and organize a more equitable society has died.
anyway, happy sunday