Guerilla Open Tube: A Distributed, Censorship-Resistant Backup of YouTube

https://github.com/obvio171/guerilla-open-tube

by obvio171 • 12 years ago

18 21 12 years ago

Isn't this fundamentally just using GitHub as a torrent tracker?

I can't imagine that GitHub would be entirely happy about this, and it still leaves a third party (GitHub), functioning as registrar of torrents, vulnerable to attack, just as any public torrent tracker is.

timboslice2• 12 years ago

While I agree GH may have a problem with this, in this case they aren't technically a "tracker" as they don't facilitate connections between seeds and peers. They just provide the metadata (magnet links)

tyho2• 12 years ago

TPB hasn't facilitated connections in a long time. They still got shut down.

mindcrash• 12 years ago

"Censorship-Resistant". Until your GitHub account or repository ends up here: https://github.com/github/dmca

sp332• 12 years ago

You can use git without Github.

obvio1715• 12 years ago

Yep, that's the idea. Github is just a nicety to help get things moving.

dmix• 12 years ago

Why is a censorship-resistant tool linking to a Facebook post? I'm not going on FB.

timboslice2• 12 years ago

Text only mirror of the announcement: https://gist.github.com/timelf123/e7bb350a8f93af3f824b

obvio1715• 12 years ago

First place I published it after thinking about it. Didn't know if it would get any attention at all, so just went ahead and did the simplest thing by posting the FB link.

I'll fill out the README a bit more now, thanks for the feedback :)

mankyd• 12 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

"Backup" may be a strong term here. Perhaps you mean "mirror of specific videos"? I suppose in this regard, YouTube is acting as a reference index.

(I feel like such a pessimist today.)

toomuchtodo4• 12 years ago

"cache" would be a much better term to use, as there are specific DMCA exemptions that protect caches:

http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise36.html

obvio1715• 12 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. I've changed the wording in the descriptions.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

The linked page says:

"Subsection (b), service provider caching, exempts service providers’ making local copies of Web pages so that the pages don’t have to be fetched repeatedly over the Internet."

It doesn't sound like random people making copies of specific YouTube videos would qualify as "service providers". In the case of YouTube videos, wouldn't YouTube be the service provider who is allowed to create cached copies, like on a CDN?

From a legal point of view, making copies of YouTube videos available to the public would seem to be a straightforward violation of the video creators' copyrights, except in cases where they license the videos in a way that specifically allows such copying. I'd expect that copyright owners would get upset about this.

Guerilla Open Tube: A Distributed, Censorship-Resistant Backup of YouTube

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