Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296

by luu • 3 years ago

694 247 3 years ago

mastodon.social

archo• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/BzXVx

throw99ii• 3 years ago

streamable.com just removed a random video of mine for “community guidelines”

I use the site to save random Twitter and Youtube videos. They aren’t publicly shared. Kind of disheartening to see a random video removed without knowing which one. And all for paying $108/year for a simple convenience.

Definitely downloading all of them and canceling.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

I selfhost https://github.com/alexta69/metube

I have it sitting on a URL and I have an iOS share shortcut to throw any URL at it and it downloads the video.

Copy-paste from my ansible setup if you're interested, shouldn't be that hard to convert to docker-compose.

    - name: Build metube options separately, avoids inline JSON in metube setup
      ansible.builtin.set_fact:
        metube_ytdl_options:
          postprocessors:
            - key: FFmpegEmbedSubtitle
            - key: SponsorBlock
              categories:
                - sponsor
            - key: ModifyChapters
              remove_sponsor_segments:
                - sponsor
          subtitleslangs:
            - en
            - "-live_chat"
          verbose: true
          writeautomaticsub: true
          writesubtitles: true

    - name: Create metube container
      community.general.docker_container:
        container_default_behavior: "no_defaults"
        name: metube
        image: alexta69/metube:latest
        restart_policy: always
        env:
          UID: "{{ plex_userid }}"
          GID: "{{ docker_users_groupid }}"
          DELETE_FILE_ON_TRASHCAN: "false"
          DOWNLOAD_DIRS_INDEXABLE: "true"
          DOWNLOAD_DIR: /downloads
          TEMP_DIR: /metube-tmp
          STATE_DIR: /config
          TZ: "{{ timezone }}"
          YTDL_OPTIONS: "{{ metube_ytdl_options | to_json }}"
        mounts:
          - type: bind
            source: /stacks/metube/config
            target: /config
            read_only: false
          - type: volume
            source: metube_tmp_location_volume
            target: /metube-tmp
          - type: volume
            source: plex_metube_volume
            target: /downloads
        labels:
          "traefik.enable": "true"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube.middlewares": "authelia@docker"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube.service": "metube"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.rule": "Host(`metube.home.domain.com`) && (PathPrefix(`/favicon`) || PathPrefix(`/add`))"
          "traefik.http.routers.metube-no-auth.service": "metube"
          "traefik.http.services.metube.loadbalancer.server.port": "8081"
        ports: []
        dns_servers:
          - "{{ docker_network_ipv4_bridge_dns }}" # adguard
        networks:
          - name: bridge_ipv4

ec109685• 3 years ago

With YouTube premium being so convenient, it seems like the need to rip YouTube videos would have gone down.

This does look pretty slick though.

Tao33002• 3 years ago

Flashbacks to me waiting for 2Pac - Changes to come on so I could hit the record button on the tape deck.

rzzzt• 3 years ago

Plot twist, it was "The way it is" by Bruce Hornsby.

Tao33002• 3 years ago

That would have been funny, but we already had that one around somewhere.

_Algernon_• 3 years ago

Considering that many countries take a copying fee -- which is intended to cover lost revenue from exactly this use case -- for cassettes, harddrives and other storage media, yes yes it should.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

hiccuphippo• 3 years ago

I'll gladly pay a % of what I pay to download yt-dl

GhostWhisperer4• 3 years ago

    brew install yt-dlp

    alias vget=yt-dlp
    alias aget='vget --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 4'

    # https://opencollective.com/homebrew
    # https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Collaborators.md#collaborators

btown• 3 years ago

Bandwidth isn’t free, folks! Imagine all the carrier pigeons whose valiant effort we call upon every time we git clone! Must they toil in obscurity?

izacus• 3 years ago

I wonder if yt-dl working with YouTube Premium accounts only would fix the issue.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

It certainly solves the ethical debate, but sadly the data storage extortion is nothing more than a means to make you pay for your content multiple times.

I would support a political party that intends to change this, but I don't think any party I vote for actually cares about it.

Cypher• 3 years ago

I do it, come arrest me. I'd download a petrol car too if I could - Come at me tomato soup throwers!

asddubs• 3 years ago

i would download an electric car probably unless the tracker only had petrol ones

GhostWhisperer4• 3 years ago

but would you seed?

cosmojg• 3 years ago

Seed or ban.

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

The problem is that whether or not downloading a YouTube video can be fair use, the RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool. 17 USC 1201(a)(2) does not care about your fair use, it only cares about keeping copying tools off the market.

To bring this back into the home recording of radio, it'd be as if Congress decided to ban the sale of tape decks that could record radio transmissions[0]. That ban would work regardless of fair use.

This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law, BTW - your access to copying tools should not evaporate because of a lack of ability to enforce copyright on you.

[0] How this ban is actually implemented is immaterial, but perhaps radios can't have detachable speakers or audio out ports to hook a tape deck into, or tape decks have to only have an integral speaker and no audio in ports. This wouldn't stop home recording of radio but it'd be significantly worse.

rusk2• 3 years ago

This is a DMCA concept that is presumably recongised by various international treaties … but is it widely implemented and enforced?

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

WIPO requires signatory countries have some sort of legal protections to back copy protection, but it does not mandate the exact language of DMCA 1201. The WIPO requirement was actually added by the US after the EFF managed to kill a precursor bill a few years prior[0].

Implementation among signatory countries is high enough to laugh when people say "Well, this doesn't affect me because I'm not American." Unless you live in North Korea or Russia, DMCA 1201 applies to you.

Copyright law is so foundational to world trade that the only way 1201 would get repealed would be if there was some kind of mass uprising against copyright overreach in many signatory countries. In that case, so many large countries would have repealed their DMCA 1201 equivalent legislation that nobody would dare actually try to enforce WTO sanctions against them. At worst, a few countries would demand some horse trades[1].

Practically speaking, however, democracies are bad at protecting against small harms exacted against large numbers of people[2], so this never happens. Europe has the Pirate Party but the most successful national iterations of it have had to adopt broader Green[3] and technolibertarian agendas in order to have any semblance of electoral viability. In the US, first-past-the-post is an insurmountable hurdle despite the fragility and incompetence of our two major parties. Here, political issues don't so much form new parties as much as they infect the shambling corpses of existing ones.

Barring that, if only one country decided to repeal their anti-circumvention laws I imagine there'd be a lot of grumbling from the US or Japan, potentially new tariffs, but no outright sanctions. The weird part about world trade is that a lot of these provisions are only enforceable on very poor countries. China blatantly violates WIPO all the time and we, practically speaking, cannot quit them. There is no international leviathan capable of, say, rolling tanks on Beijing and demanding market access and copyright enforcement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_laundering

[1] Term of art for "unrelated and usually minuscule things used to bargain for a larger purpose"

[2] e.g. how Intuit got the US government to not provide tax preparation services or software to the public for a decade and a half so they could sell their own offering. It's a thing that annoys people but not enough to get voters to flip sides.

[3] including German "Green", i.e. "nuclear is bad, so we shut down all our nuke plants and started burning lignite[4] instead"

[4] What's lignite? Lignite balls.

actionfromafar3• 3 years ago

I wonder if a cassette deck connected to the computer is also a copy protection circumvention tool.

I suppose it is?

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

1201(a)(2) prohibits selling tools that are either...

- Only capable of breaking copy protection

- Have minimal commercial utility other than to break copy protection

- Are advertised as being able to break copy protection

If you sold someone an aux cord with the marketing slogan "Copy music off Spotify and stop paying for your subscription", that'd violate 1201(a)(2) because of that third prong[0]. There's also plenty of copy protection circumvention tools that DON'T trip 1201(a)(2) because they aren't marketed as such and have noninfringing uses. For example, Google Chrome. You can use it to bypass right-click blockers because it lets you open Devtools without right-clicking. However, browsers have loads of commercial utility outside of this, and they don't specifically advertise their ability to get around annoying right-click scripts, so they're legal.

We don't normally contemplate this sort of thing because most DRM is specifically designed to be both obvious and separable from other permissible behavior. You cannot accidentally write a DVD decryptor that doesn't trip 1201(a)(2). This has led to people mistakenly assuming that the DMCA requires encryption to be involved or something for a copy protection circumvention tool to be illegal.

[0] I've actually seen this happen. There was someone selling VGA cables marketed as a way to copy Netflix.

nadermx• 3 years ago

Posted this in the other thread, but this thorny topic is up for appeal in the US Second Circuit

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66697744/yout-llc-v-rec...

indymike• 3 years ago

youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool

Wait until they find out that Microsoft has been providing tools like COPY and XCOPY with their OS for decades...

veave2• 3 years ago

COPY and XCOPY are okay as long as they aren't written to intentionally bypass DRM (they aren't)

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

COPY and XCOPY cannot copy a copy protected program.

The Amiga's X-COPY, on the other hand...

Aaargh203184• 3 years ago

RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool

How is it circumventing copy protection? IIRC videos on Youtube aren't DRMed. What protection method do they claim is being circumvented exactly?

cookiengineer3• 3 years ago

Youtube is using base64 "encryption" * and the reason the court decided in favor of youtube in the youtube-dl case was exactly this reason.

The court thinks that base64 is a legitimate way to establish copyright protection online.

Yeah, not kidding you. The lawyers are this stupid.

Honestly I think the law is broken, because it is designed by people not capable of doing technological decisions, for technologically relevant cases. It is gonna take years to unfuck this.

* duh, they don't even know differences of encoding vs encryption...

ForHackernews• 3 years ago

videos on Youtube aren't DRMed

They are: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview

Brian_K_White2• 3 years ago

Where is the button on any official YouTube app or web interface that offers to save a local unencrypted file for an anonymous user?

akira2501• 3 years ago

RIAA is alleging that youtube-dl is a copy protection circumvention tool

"(3) As used in this subsection— (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work"

The argument would seemingly be that youtube is in no way "effectively controlling access to a work." And none of the peculiar details of it's implementation are designed to operate in this capacity. Quite the opposite, it's technology is designed to broadcast, for the purposes of inserting ads, content to anyone who merely requests it.

Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site and has nothing but an ad-hoc system with limited availability that takes action only after content is uploaded. As there are many videos that are past copyright protection or have been explicitly released into the public domain, and they make no distinction in the "technical measures" used in those videos, that they aren't effectively controlling access, and the tools aren't circumventing them for this purpose.

sillysaurusx2• 3 years ago

Moreover, youtube is in no way connecting the "authority of the copyright owner" with the particular videos on it's site

Of course it is. That's the whole point of the three strike system.

extraduder_ire2• 3 years ago

I am startled, and also glad, that record labels haven't put the screws to youtube enough to get them to implement widevine for music videos on youtube.

Probably unworkable for the time being.

Delk• 3 years ago

I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is?

I remember that in Finland, it was debated in courts whether breaking DVD CSS encryption using readily downloadable software was infringement upon an effective copy protection scheme or not. An appeals court decided it was (i.e. CSS was deemed "effective"), but the requirement that the copy protection scheme be "effective" in order for circumvention to be considered illegal is still there in copyright law. (The legislation is based on whatever the EU-wide regulation is and includes provisions somewhat similar to the DMCA such as the prohibition of circumvention.)

I doubt that "copy protection" that can be circumvented by reading the YouTube web page source code would be deemed effective under that law. Does the DMCA not have a similar limitation? Or is the RIAA just trying to play the lobbying and rhetoric game despite having weak legal grounds? (Wouldn't be surprising.)

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

This sounds like a transposition[0] and translation error. The word "effective" has two meanings:

- Is strong enough to keep you from copying the thing

- Has the effect of keeping you from copying the thing

Congress intended the latter meaning and US courts adopted that. The first meaning would be self-defeating: once someone figured out how to break a copy protection system, it would no longer be effective, so you'd only be able to prosecute the first person to break the system.

If effective meant "is strong enough" I don't think DVD CSS would count because they specifically used export-grade encryption. The rule (part of ITAR, AFAIK) was that 40-bits was the max entropy you could have, specifically so the NSA could break foreign-operated encryption systems. But this is kind of silly - computers are getting faster all the time, so it seems odd that a measure considered copy protection yesterday would stop being copy protection today just because we can crack passwords faster.

[0] Transposition is the concept of copying EU regulations into member state law. I'm using the term slightly broader than EU law. While WTO rules don't have a direct transposition requirement, USTR conditioned lots of trade deals on transposing DMCA 1201 into local law.

boomboomsubban• 3 years ago

The DMCA says it needs to be "effective," but then defines it as

technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Which sounds like basically anything they call DRM is DRM.

bitwize2• 3 years ago

I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)?

No. "Effective" is defined in section 1201 as meaning that the technological measure prevents copying "during the normal course of its operation" -- i.e., the "happy path" of the code prevents unauthorized copying. No matter how trivially the code may be broken, breaking it is a felony. A simple bit of JavaScript embedded in a page that prevents right clicks (to download images) would be an "effective technological measure" under the DMCA. If you put up a web page showing how to get around this with Chrome developer tools, you are "trafficking in circumvention tools" and can be found civilly/criminally liable under the DMCA.

Note that there are Library of Congress exceptions for circumventing, but not for trafficking. So you can figure out how to, say, rip DVDs yourself if doing so falls under a LoC exemption. But if you then turn around and publish how to do it, you are still in violation of the DMCA.

ascagnel_• 3 years ago

I don't know or remember the details of the DMCA, but does it not require the copy protection to be of some reasonable effectiveness (e.g. reasonable cryptography)? Or does it consider the "copy protection" scheme protected regardless of how weak the scheme or claim is?

The DMCA has no such provision; if a work is DRM-encumbered, it always enjoys the anti-circumvention protections of the DMCA. It’s one of the main reasons why I think works available only with DRM shouldn’t be eligible for copyright protection: the presence of DRM prohibits the creation of an archive-appropriate copy (in a legal sense, not in the quality sense) that can survive the copyright term of the work. If the owner of a work wants to only release it with DRM, they have to rely on other laws with higher burdens of evidence to provide legal protection.

mpalmer2• 3 years ago

    No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—


    (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

    (B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
    (C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

I'm not a lawyer but how does youtube-dl fit any one of these criteria? despite the name, it's not "primarily designed to circumvent copyright", nor is copyright circumvention its only use (though "commercial significance" seems to be doing a lot of work here).

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

It's not "circumventing copyright", it's circumventing copy protection. The RIAA alleges that YouTube rotating their URLs is a copy protection measure. If that's true[0] then youtube-dl would fit plainly in category (A), since downloading YouTube videos is all it does. Category (B) is there to prevent someone from selling, say, a "DVD decrypting can opener" and then arguing that the can opener part makes the DVD part legal. Category (C) is there to prevent people from selling you the analog hole.

My objection to the RIAA's copy protection argument is that they did not actually create the copy protection measure. They are alleging that some third party's product feature happens to look close enough to copy protection that it should count as such. Would they be able to sue YouTube if they were to stop rotating their URLs? Do social media platforms suddenly have an obligation to continue to maintain features that accidentally frustrate illegal copying of text? Do I have to reimplement spacebar heating?[1]

Another potential objection would be that rotating URLs are not copy protection. This may work, but keep in mind: 17 USC 1201 has no bounds on the scope of copy protection beyond "it has to somehow stop you from copying a thing protected by copyright". Encryption and scrambling systems are explicitly named, but the way the law is currently drafted, anything can be a copy protection measure. There's a lot of language defining existing copy protection systems they wanted to grandfather in (e.g. Macrovision) but nothing limiting the scope of future systems.

[0] If accepted, this would be the widest reading of DMCA 1201 that I've seen accepted by a court of law (as a non-lawyer). Yes I am counting the printer cartridge and garage door opener shenanigans of yesterdecade. Those were bog-standard "designing the product to commit three felonies a day" kinds of copyright abuse and the courts smacked them both down.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/

stcg2• 3 years ago

Reading this I wonder if a computer program falls under "any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof". Has it been established that a computer program can be a protection circumvention tool?

kristopolous• 3 years ago

Am I the only one that finds it hard to engage with the RIAA as good faith actors?

It feels similar to patent trolls whose business strategy is simply to leverage the court by exploiting poorly executed legislation.

porkbeer2• 3 years ago

As a musician who has dealt with them, no. They are for the big labels and distributors, not the artists.

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

No, they're not good faith actors, far from it. However, the sorts of bad faith actions they engage in are not violations of the law. "Implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing" is a provision of contract law, not copyright law.

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

Oh, copyright monopolists are a million times worse than patent trolls.

Patent trolls don't make the laws, they just exploit them. Copyright monopolists literally make the laws and then complain that the whole world isn't following them. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on lobbyists and essentially buy whatever laws they want. Leverage courts? Copyright monopolists will literally leverage the might of the US government and military to enforce US laws overseas. Look up US Trade Representative reports on "notorious markets" which is all about getting foreign countries to enforce US copyright law as if they had nothing better to do than police imaginary american property. It's packed full of language like "stakeholders" which is code for these monopolists. It's like they're the bosses of the US government.

verisimi4• 3 years ago

This is why Section 1201(a)(2) needs to be struct from the law

Perhaps it is becoming clearer that the law is an ass, written to serve special interests, and nothing to do with some sort of expression of morality or right and wrong. And that is all it has ever been.

For myself, I cannot conceive of the hybris required in writing down a set of words that I would then expect others to follow. Imagine doing this at a family gathering! (I'm not talking about writing a guide or means to help others learn/improve themselves by their own choice.)

The very idea of law is a false one, imo. Who has the moral high ground, who can relay that in writing to others? Is it not actually a subterfuge to allow others to do harm and yet call it good?

Basically, one needs to find one's heart, and follow that. The law is a merely another control structure.

tenebrisalietum• 3 years ago

If what you wrote is true, you should have a good answer to this: What special interest is served by laws against murder?

One's "heart" is at least as exploitable as a democratic law system.

kmeisthax11• 3 years ago

Before we go and enact The Purge IRL, let's step back and think of what actually went wrong.

Hollywood wanted a bill that would make it illegal to make certain copying tools. This was hot off the heels of the music industry getting a technology mandate for copy protection on digital audio tape (which would eventually be mooted by MP3 players, see RIAA v. Diamond). The problem is, technology mandates are difficult to draft and have significant problems (sometimes it's legal to copy things). So instead of banning copying tools altogether, they made them opt-out. If the copyright holder protects a work from copying, you can't sell the tool that makes it copyable.

This created a drafting problem: what constitutes protection? At the time 1201 was drafted the biggest copy protection in force was Macrovision, a system intended to make VCRs copying tapes record an unusable signal. So they just copypasted Macrovision into the DMCA. But there's all sorts of other ways you could copy protect things. Software was the most creative with all sorts of dastardly ways to make nonstandard media, ways to check for that media, ways to check that your checks hadn't been changed, ways to encrypt the binary so you can't disassemble it, ways to check for debuggers so you can't copy the disassembled version of any of the above checks, etc. All of that is way too uncertain to draft into the bill.

Congress's answer was to say that anything can by copy protection as long as it keeps you from copying things. This is extremely, offensively overbroad. And it also triggered a slew of new attempts to turn 1201 into a generalized "contempt of business model" tort. We had lawsuits over printer ink and garage door openers, because it's trivial to just smuggle more software into the design of whatever product you want to 'protect.' Thus nobody wants to touch any sort of adversarial compatibility, because that carries insane liability now, and since everything needs software now we've effectively ended capitalism and regressed to feudalism.

It is a mistake to think of law as a substitute for morality. Obviously criminal does not equal immoral. However, we can think of laws as a solution to coordinated action problems and economic "game balance". If an entity is too powerful and abusing their power, we can use the law to cut them down to size. When Congress makes mistakes in drafting the law, we create the ability to build illiberal empires. But empires are not creatures of the law. They would still exist without it, making their own laws that would be far worse than the ones Congress gives us.

You don't want to know what kind of laws Tim Cook would write if he was freed from having to comply with US law.

musicale2• 3 years ago

The primary error seems to be in applying the anti-circumvention ban to fair use and non-infringing use, and tools used for same.

Because most video is encrypted, this effectively reverses Betamax and bans home video recording with DVRs without authorization from the copyright holder.

It's particularly disappointing that the copyright office has flatly refused to authorize 1201 exemptions for non-infringing format-shifting or space-shifting.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

time to upload the source and compilation instructions on ipfs

mdaniel3• 3 years ago

a friendly reminder that (a) ipfs is only as alive as there are seeders and (b) seeders ips are public just like bittorrent

There was a recent Cult of the Dead Cow release that claims "encrypt all the things, Tor but for phones" or some such but I haven't studied it to know how much is aspirational https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid#welcome-to-veilid https://twitter.com/VeilidNetwork https://nitter.net/VeilidNetwork

Sparkyte• 3 years ago

I didn't think either was fair use. I think fair use applies to the utilization not the acquisition of. For example if I bought a movie and I used it with the intention to discuss it with clips, I can recode it because I physically own the medium. The fair use chimes in when the clips are in use. However when I download something with a tool from Google (YouTube) I'm violating their ToS. I might also be violating something in the middle that opens up some legal issues. So when you go to use a video only for fair use, you should ask the poster or the source for an unencrypted one. Also they should do the responsible thing and provide it.

rocqua5• 3 years ago

Fair use applies to neither acquisition or utilization. It applies to publication. Copyright only starts to matter when you (re)-publish a work.

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

In almost every case stupidity is never a defense for violating the law, but stupidity is a valid legal defense against questions of intent. Breaking copy protection is a question of intent.

deltree7• 3 years ago

The hypocrisy of download defenders is exposed when re-distribution is the concern. Most content producers and publishers are fine with downloading as long as you don't re-distribute (which is theft), but we have no way of preventing that, so they are forced to close the download gate

kstrauser• 3 years ago

That’s historically wrong. The story of DRM is littered with claims that reasonable things like format shifting are immoral and theft.

Also, unauthorized distribution is unauthorized distribution, not theft. Theft has a special legal meaning, and that isn’t it.

ShadowBanThis013• 3 years ago

You neglected to state what the "hypocrisy" is here. Cite the passage that promotes downloading and redistributing.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

so they are forced to close the download gate

They don't get to do that.

Also what's the hypocrisy?

stcg2• 3 years ago

That is not theft. It's communication. You can't "steal" ideas, information or facts [footnote]. To "steal" means to physically take someone's property without their consent.

Instead, you seem to mean a violation of copyright. Copyright exists "to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good." "The main purpose of the Copyright Act is the public good of use and access to works of art, even if such a public good comes at the expense of the author of the work." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Century_Music_Corp._...).

And then my opinion: In this age, copyright fails at that. It even has the opposite effect of resulting in less use and less access to works of art. I think it would benefit the public if copyright were abolished (or at least shortened to 20 years, similar to the amount of years that a person gets from a patent to exclusively produce and sell their invention before anyone may do that). I do think however that it should be a duty to mention the source or original author when sharing a work.

[footnote]: but you can neglect to mention the source, or uncover and share information someone wants to keep private

giantrobot• 3 years ago

It's not fucking theft. That is a literally insane and irrational position to take.

ShadowBanThis013• 3 years ago

For anyone with self-respect, it is. Come get me, media-conglomerate scumbags.

Remember how they whined against DAT and basically had it killed (abetted by Congress), claiming that "perfect digital copies" would destroy their business? Meanwhile, everybody on the planet knew that essentially all "piracy" took place on double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms.

And sure enough, even when "piracy" went digital, it was in the form of lossy MP3s... far from perfect. So their story was a lie from top to bottom... but we've seen our "representatives" abet ever-greater crimes against consumers at their behest. The absurd tax on blank media, and the DMCA (and even more-egregious proposals since) stand as disgraceful examples.

Do you remember when Circuit City or Best Buy offered "every CD $10.99 or less?" The idea was to bring people into their stores, where they'd buy other stuff. But all of a sudden that deal disappeared. It turns out that the record companies threatened those retailers with financial sanctions (by withholding cooperative advertising funds) if they continued to offer those prices.

The record companies were sued for this behavior, which prosecutors said ripped off consumers for $400 million. Gee, this is the same figure that the record companies whined that Napster cost them. Karma is a bitch.

I still have the stub of my $13 settlement check from these assholes.

Buttons840• 3 years ago

I want a machine learning enhanced analog loop. I want to be able to point a device at a screen and have the machine learning clean everything up and restore high quality sound and video.

Training data would be easy. Take a bunch of videos, play them on a screen, record the screen. You now have the input and the output, x and y. It's just supervised learning from there.

I know there are better options currently, but in the end we have this, unless they take away general purpose computing (but that would a huge blow to our economy).

amelius• 3 years ago

This only works as long as the silicon used for deep learning cooperates.

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

They can just tattoo all celebrities with EURion constellations on their faces. Don't worry, it's only a short-term measure until the replacement models are fully trained.

jwilk• 3 years ago

The TorrentFreak article discussed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37089545 (> 220 comments)

eye-robot• 3 years ago

"should be"....

gamblor956• 3 years ago

This is actually correct, since recording a song from the radio by itself generally doesn't fall under fair use. The purpose of the copy is what makes it fair use, for example, as a sample played in a classroom, or for reference for readers/viewers as part of a critical work.

fortran77• 3 years ago

I didn't think recording a song from the radio was "fair use" either.

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

Learn the new "meta". Just collect the songs and then run your own commentary on top of them. Thus instantly turning them something legal. Even if you just post them to place no one listen to.

ShadowBanThis013• 3 years ago

It doesn't fall under fair use. It's otherwise protected, though, most likely by the Audio Home Recording Act: https://www.songtrust.com/music-publishing-glossary/glossary....

doublepg23• 3 years ago

It feels very human that we have a nearly post-scarcity delivery mechanism that we still optimize for rent seeking.

userbinator5• 3 years ago

Corporate greed knows no bounds. If they could erase your brain of "their" IP, they advocates would.

jrm4• 3 years ago

I love the precision with which you've said this - but I also I really need to feel like we need a better "general public" way to say it? I haven't figured this out yet.

ssklash2• 3 years ago

I've always thought that reality has made their business model obsolete and untenable, so instead of adapting, they lobby and get laws written to protect it. Essentially "rejecting reality, and substituting their own".

charcircuit• 3 years ago

Creating the content is much harder than delivering it. The rent seeking is to encourage creation.

MostlyStable• 3 years ago

Yes. By design. Copyright law, and basically all other IP law, is explicitly and purposefully about allowing rent seeking. The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public. The issue is with how far this rent seeking goes, and where the balance between social good and private good falls. I'm very firmly in the camp that most IP law has, in the modern day, gone too far. But I do think that conceptually it is beneficial to have and maintain some level of rent seeking.

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

I think IP laws make lot of sense and so does allowing protection of such. It is only effective way to stop corporations from exploiting creators they do not have direct relationship with.

Not that the current term we have isn't extremely too long. And whole concept of lifetime being involved isn't just weird.

redwall_hp• 3 years ago

Of course, we now have a torrential supply of available media, which markets strongly say is worth little to nothing. Apparently, given mass distribution tools and sufficient level of education, the public creates things on such a large scale that it can hardly be argued protectionist policies are necessary for them to exist.

We also see that even with these protectionist policies, only a select few are ever even able to be economically viable, let alone successful. Art's opportunity cost is so front-loaded that it's difficult to produce things while working full time, so the majority of potential successes are prevented from even starting. And then the artistic process is impeded by these laws, as rentiers cry "similarity" over the most absurd things, which creates a chilling effect. It's particularly bad in music.

The best way to support the arts is UBI and the abolition of copyright.

colordrops• 3 years ago

The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public. Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this.

This reasoning is taken at face value in most discussion but should be challenged. A lot of assumptions and potentially specious logic is embedded here, and it's not clear and obvious that any of the following are true:

* it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public

* Paying people to encourage making ideas public increases the amount of value

* most ideas are worth anything at all

* that the most valuable ideas will be made public even with these protection regimes in place

It's arguable that even though there was less information out there before copyrights and patents became a thing, that people were still driven to create art and science, and the quality per unit might have even been higher. And even with patent and copyright in place, truly valuable ideas are still kept secret.

The core value proposition of copyrights and patents is to make middlemen money.

surgical_fire• 3 years ago

So we allow rent seeking, with limits

Funny joke. Everybody laughs.

laserlight• 3 years ago

Since making ideas public is good for society, we want to encourage people to continue to do this. Paying people is how we encourage people to do things. So we allow rent seeking, with limits, as a way to pay people even though they make their ideas public.

This is naive reasoning. People have been publishing content without any DRM and have been earning money regardless. There are even people who don't care whether they make money or not. So, monetary incentive is not a must for ideas, or any kind of work, to become public. To the contrary, such incentives drive out good ideas, or works, in favor of bad ones, which only care about the money and not the benefit of the society.

sph• 3 years ago

The idea is that in a completely unregulated market, it is impossible to make money from ideas after they are made public.

Ain't that some bullshit.

lucubratory3• 3 years ago

We'd been around for two million years without anything like this. Rent seeking is a very modern invention in the lifetime of the human species, let alone establishing it over non-scarce ideas. It's very bourgeois, not very human.

blowski• 3 years ago

I’m not sure it’s so modern. Every tollgate in the ancient world was effectively rent-seeking. Even in prehistoric societies, it seems there were protection rackets and shamans with “monopoly access” to the gods.

mr_toad• 3 years ago

But for most of human history information was difficult and unprofitable to copy. Copying manuscripts by hand was expensive, and few people could read anyway so the market was limited. It’s no accident that copyrights were invented after the development of the printing press.

chpatrick2• 3 years ago

We've been around for two million years without anything like this. Electricity bad!

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Mastodon without Javascript enabled:

https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/embe...

38• 3 years ago

... also without comments. I appreciate the idea, but without the discussion its basically Twitter since they also hide replies with anonymous requests.

BentonE2• 3 years ago

In principle, if you want the post and comments without JS you can just pull the underlying ActivityPub document (application/activity+json). I made a command-line browser based on this idea: https://github.com/bentonedmondson/servitor

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Text-only:

     curl -A "" -40s https://mastodon.social/@HalvarFlake/110883667162838296/ \
     |sed -n '/./{/property=\"og:url\"/,/name=.description.>/{
     s/. name=.description.>//;
     s/<meta content=.//;
     s/\".*//;
     s/&quot;/\"/g;
     p;};}'

Ekaros3• 3 years ago

My understanding is that people purely downloading are very rarely if never prosecuted or even part of civil suite. So it is not very big issue and likely is "fair use".

Entirely different question is does offering a tool for this process constitute as fair use as well. Specially if there is DRM involved. Or does tool need to work in specific way to qualify? For example you could record video on your own machine while watching it, but could not directly download a copy?

userbinator5• 3 years ago

There's technically no difference between downloading and streaming, and in fact nearly all of the videos I "download" from YouTube don't get retained after I watch them --- I'm just doing so in order to be able to use alternative software that respects my freedom.

Since we're talking about video, I think a better analogy would be using a VCR to record broadcasting, and there was certainly a legal battle over that too.

zarzavat• 3 years ago

A VCR is not circumventing anything. It’s more like the DeCSS code required to watch a DVD in VLC.

The solution is to host the software in a country that doesn’t have laws against distributing circumvention code, this is how VLC does it. If you host on GitHub then you’re at the mercy of US law.

slowhadoken2• 3 years ago

Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?

StanislavPetrov• 3 years ago

Does it matter if it’s fair use if the copyright law can’t be enforced on a person by person basis?

You mean, "hasn't yet been enforced on a person by person basis". If history has proven anything, it is that the government and their corporate masters will do everything they can to expand their powers by passing new laws and enacting new regulations so that they can extract every dollar they can.

slowhadoken2• 3 years ago

If history has proven anything it's that any lock that can be made can be broken.

hrdwdmrbl• 3 years ago

Singing in the style of another singing should be as legal as training an AI to do it.

mkl95• 3 years ago

A ton of history and literature has been basically wiped out over the centuries. That fact alone should make downloading media and storing it privately a natural right, just like monks copied writings in the middle ages to preserve them. Distribution is an entirely different topic.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

Downloading video = Downloading a song Recording a video = Recording a song

Either case distribution should be protected.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

You wouldn’t download a car

IceHegel• 3 years ago

Agree, sharing is what should be restricted.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

That is it, I am going to record youtube videos onto VHS.

jedberg• 3 years ago

It's important to keep a few things in mind:

- When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore)

- Your copy was a lot worse quality than what you could otherwise buy

- You could at best distribute it to a few hundred or maybe even 1000 people if you were really well connected.

With videos on YouTube you can:

- Get an unaltered copy

- In exactly the same quality as the original

- Which you can easily redistribute to millions

It's not exactly an equal comparison. An equal comparison would be copying on VHS from analog broadcast TV. Which was also legal.

cornfutes• 3 years ago

The similar comparison would be doing a screen recording of the video versus downloading the byte stream.

ndiddy• 3 years ago

To save bandwidth, Youtube does lossy compression that drastically reduces the video quality (especially for SD videos) compared to the original file.

bensecure• 3 years ago

- When you recorded off the radio, you usually had someone talking over the beginning, end, or both (and this was by design, because the radio station knew that if you had a good copy you wouldn't listen to the radio anymore)

If such adulteration was sufficient to prevent my listening to the recording, than I wouldn't listen to the radio in the first place. Radio is at least no better than my recording if it always contains such effects.

With videos on YouTube you can:
- Which you can easily redistribute to millions

Which platform might I use to perform this redistribution? And how am I to compete with the copy retrievable from the bands own youtube page?

bitwize2• 3 years ago

Recording a song from the radio is not fair use.

In Sony v. Universal, the usage of the VCR was justified based on a very narrow, very uncommon use case: if there were a TV show that aired exactly once, and for some reason you wanted to see it but couldn't, and it would never air again, you had the legal right to record one copy for later viewing. (I'm not sure if you had to destroy the copy after viewing it.) On that basis, and that basis alone, was the VCR ruled to have a legal use case. Otherwise it was pretty much a copyright violation device. Justice Blackmun, in his dissent, was clear that even making a single copy for personal use violates copyright law.

Fair use covers making excerpts of a work, not copying a full work, for purposes of reporting, criticism, parody, and the like. If you record or download a full song or video without permission, YOU ARE INFRINGING ON COPYRIGHT.

pers0n• 3 years ago

Whats to stop me from playing a video full screen while I have a screen recorder? There are plenty of sites out there that can already convert youtube to mp3s

squeaky-clean• 3 years ago

At least with some services/apps, screen recording only captures a black box around the video you want.

elif• 3 years ago

Copyright is just one of the impractically odious pillars of capitalism buckling under the stresses of late capitalism. Trying to "make it work" is a temporary measure at best, but I think more relaxing of the restrictions at least behind the advancement of technology by at least a couple of decades will be the only chance it has to remain relevant. The laws that stopped people from running bootleg vinyl presses are laughable when applied to copying a file from one of my computers to another.

The current experiment of seeing how many $10-$20 corporations consumers are willing to pay monthly ends either with monopoly/oligopoly of art or a new golden age of piracy.

pickingdinner• 3 years ago

Before even download, can we at least acknowledge that Youtube is the greatest copyright infringement platform on the planet?

Whatever the "excuse" of the uploaders and the host of those uploads (youtube), the sheer number of copyright protected material uploaded in clear sight should be the main concern of any copyright enforcer, not those who download.

a-dub2• 3 years ago

"downloading a video" probably sounds almost as weird to a gen-z as "recording a song from the radio" sounds to a millennial.

pretty wild when you think about it.

mike31fr• 3 years ago

You're shooting yourself in the foot with this example. Millenials did record songs from the radio to audio tapes. I did it (I was born in 1985), my little sister did (she was born in 1990), etc.

djhn• 3 years ago

But then again TikTok has a 'save video' feature (yet another small example of how it's a better product than YouTube, whether you're a power user or not) which exports videos into you filesystem.

classified• 3 years ago

It's the law, logic doesn't enter.

_trampeltier• 3 years ago

Of course it should be. Special this was a german court and we pay for private copys on every medium (tape, cd, hdd)

Private copying levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

EchoReflection• 3 years ago

I make no claims as to the presence of malware (or lack thereof) in the links in this comment, and I'm not condoning or endorsing anything, nor am I stating an opinion on the ethics of downloading YouTube videos for any purpose, but for the sake of adding information to the table, there are still options available:

https://newpipe.en.softonic.com/android/download?utm_source=...

and,

https://yt3-music-downloader.en.softonic.com/android https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

and: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-...

And I'm sure many others. I guess as long as the situation is such that it is not stupidly easy to figure out how to get around the restrictions that "prevent" downloading YT videos, workarounds and options will continue to be available. Information is very hard to lock away if it is on the internet and available to the public to some degree. I imagine he situation is considerably different in more totalitarian countries like China and North Korea, where content and online activity is scrutinized/monitored by the government more "thoroughly".

It seems hard to find a line in the sense that recording technology is becoming more and more common, as is the trend of social media companies wanting the masses to "share" their experiences on social media. Hypothetically, if I record a concert with Snapchat spectacles and then upload the snap to YouTube, am I committing some kind of copyright infringement or am I simply sharing an experience with my "followers"? I have actually had videos of concerts that I recorded on my phone taken down from YouTube, even though it wasn't like I recorded with a professional camera or even that the recording sounded particularly good, but I guess some content management stoolies on YouTube (and I imagine Vimeo and maybe LBRY/Odysee/elsewhere) are paid to try to take down content that appears to be bypassing the creators' ability to collect money for their material.

3cats-in-a-coat• 3 years ago

Well "it should be" implies we have no leverage to implement this and we're merely daydreaming about alternate universes.

Catching someone in an inconsistency is not a path to winning anything in business and politics. They don't care if they're consistent.

villgax• 3 years ago

If it's not behind a paywall then no point whining about it

dontupvoteme• 3 years ago

The youtube-dl ruling was at the Hamburg level, does anyone know if they can appeal to the federal courts in Germany? Apparently Hamburg is nightmare tier for this sort of thing.

JacobSeated• 3 years ago

Depends on how said material was purchased. E.g. Most YouTube videos would not be okay to simply download, since you did not technically pay money to obtain a copy.

However, things you buy on YouTube movies really should be downloadable.

PontifexMinimus• 3 years ago

This reminds me of about 10-12 years ago when a Republican staffer suggested that party's platform should include legalising file sharing, on the grounds that the RIAA and MPAA align Democrat so there's no point in the Republicans kowtowing to them.

At the time it was immediately shot down, but if someone made the same proposal now I suspect it might not be. It would certainly liven US elections up.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

Artists should create music for me to enjoy for free! It’s only fair use!

dumpsterdiver• 3 years ago

I don't normally read articles here, but for some reason this time I did. I'm very disappointed that the fine article amounts to nothing more than a fatalistic tweet.

Edit: Fixed the typo in the word "normally".

oneeyedpigeon• 3 years ago

Coming from the UK, I was surprised to hear that recording a song from the radio is allowed under 'fair use'. Especially given that I grew up during the time when that was actually relevant, it was drilled into us remorselessly that recording stuff onto tape was basically illegal, even if it was impractical to enforce. It looks as if the law was amended in 2014 to allow for 'private copies', but I think that still excludes copying from the radio, etc.

betimsl• 3 years ago

Like everybody, I'm also a fan of free (anything). But you did not ask for the waves that pass through you (so you have the right to record it); but, you have to request a file from a server, not the same thing.

aethertron• 3 years ago

There is no such thing as streaming without downloading.

With DRM it's possible for platforms to offer streaming, which necessarily involves downloading, but without consumers retaining streamed content on their devices in a usable format, and that's an acceptable deal for some content people. But there are always going to be potential circumventions, especially if these devices are general purpose computers. We can have have computers we control, or effective DRM (= computers that somebody else controls).

DRM bad.

tdullien2• 3 years ago

Oh wow, my toot on HN, rated higher than any of the cool things I have done :-)

musicale2• 3 years ago

Nearly 40 years after Betamax, they've basically succeeded at banning video recording.

As noted elsewhere, section 1201 should not apply to non-infringing uses.

Downloading a video should be “fair use” as recording a song from the radio

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