GitHub warns devs face ban if they fork DMCA'd YouTube download tool... while hinting how to beat the RIAA
GitHub has warned it may ban users who fork a DMCA'd YouTube download tool on its platform – while at the same time hinting at how netizens can continue distributing the software without drawing fire. Last month, the Recording Industry Association of America, aka the RIAA, asked GitHub to take down the repository of YouTube-DL …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 09:23 GMT NATTtrash
Streisand indeed.
GitHub (MS) making a lot of noise, acting like its the only way to distribute software... while the devs platform on https://yt-dl.org/ has been available all the time. Without any issue. And it's in the normal *buntu repo too as far as I know. Although a hopelessly old version (as usual).
Then again, as this article on TorrentFreak (https://torrentfreak.com/deciphering-youtubes-rolling-cypher-in-your-browser-is-a-piece-of-cake-201030/) already showed, this is a lot of noise about nothing. As it turns out that any 5 year old with just a browser can still DL with just looking at the code a bit. Then again, it's always good to point the finger at somebody else as justification for ones own annoyances/ shortcomings/ anything else...
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 18:18 GMT jake
Re: LOL
Somewhat earlier than that I wore the PGP-in-perl T-shirt out of and back into the USA on maybe a dozen flights from '91 to '93 without anybody even blinking at me funny. Later, I occasionally carried a copy of Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" book containing source examples in the text (which did not fall under the export restrictions) and the disk containing the very same source, which was bound into the cover (and very definitely did fall under those restrictions). Again, nobody even noticed.
This kind of security theater isn't worth the paper it is printed on. Never has been, never will be. Won't stop the idiots in DC passing laws, though.
I stopped trying to get arrested on principle after I grew up and had a kid of my own to take care of. Priorities & all that. Today, she tells me I shouldn't have wimped out ... as a pre/early-teen she wore the shirt into "show and tell" occasionally, to explain to the class why it was considered "munitions". These days, the hand-wringers & namby-pambys would probably have her arrested for bringing weapons to class. The grand-daughter intends to find out next year (assuming we get a handle on Covid, of course).
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Wednesday 4th November 2020 13:20 GMT NATTtrash
Even more fun...
https://github.com/FuckTheRIAA/FuckTheRIAA
...which holds...
Icona Pop - I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) [OFFICIAL VIDEO].mp3
Justin Timberlake - Tunnel Vision (Official Music Video) (Explicit).mp3
README.md
Taylor Swift - Shake It Off.mp3
Oh dear. Looks like Barbara is not amused...
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 10:42 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
But that's not the issue. The DMCA gives copyright holders fairly extensive powers to take stuff down on their say so, whilst indemnifying platforms like YouTube. If YouTube enforced copyright better then it wouldn't be as easy to abuse it. Andrew Orlowski covered this extensively when he was writing here.
Of course, when it comes to music it's difficult to see who stiffs musicians more: the platforms like YouTube or the music labels.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
No, it's exactly the issue. There are no real technical way of enforcing copyright but heavy use of DRM - which with time can be bypassed as well. And you see copyright/licenses breaking code will surface again and again, despite the DMCA takedowns.
Did you mean GitHub should enforce copyright better to protect the published code from being exploited wholly ignoring any license and copyright? And if it doesn't I'm free to exploit it at my will? Are developers exploited more by their employers (and open source projects...), of platforms like GitHub?
You can't decide youself that because musicians are "stiffed" by the music labels is it your right to ignore any of their license and copyright and rip off their music at you whims. If you do, don't complain when someone rip offs your code and applications. It's exactly the same. Chase me with DMCA takedowns, if you like...
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 14:04 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
I don't think code repositories should be the point of enforcement. And, let's be clear: youtube-dl itself does not violate copyright. And, as others have noted, there's nothing in the code that can't be replicated relatively easy or actually break the law.
DMCA granted sweeping powers to rightsholders whilst exempting the platforms that facilitate copyright violation. If YouTube were to have been liable for the copyright violation, things would have developed differently. As it was, the liberal licensing helped establish YouTube's position worldwide and reinforced the largely US cultural hegemony. You could even argue, though I won't, that going after TikTok is an attempt to defend that hegemony.
As things stand, the last few years have shown, that, although copyright violations persist, the market has responded well to subscription models such as Netflix and Spotify. Whether this is good or not for artists is debatable but it does underscore the point that people will pay for convenience, something that Andrew identified early as people moved from CDs to MP3s and I seem to recall some research indicating significant uptick in revenues as well.
You will never entirely get rid of copyright violation, so you need strategies to minimise the suspected loss in income. I've still got cassettes of stuff I recorded off John Peel but at the same time I was buying a lof of music and I've bought more in the last two years than in the previous ten (or possibly twenty), though I don't stream. Pleased to have discovered Bandcamp (15% handling fee) recently to assuage my conscience, though I can also live with the guilt.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 18:58 GMT jake
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
I too have a boxfull of Peel tapes ... Yes, I know, there is too much noise & not enough signal on that old rust ... and I did digitize them all about two decades ago. Logic says I should probably just junk 'em. And yet I won't. Memories :-)
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Wednesday 4th November 2020 13:22 GMT NATTtrash
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
Logic says I should probably just junk 'em.
NOOOOOOooooooooooooo!
BTW: https://soundcloud.com/search?q=John%20Peel%20Show%20%2BdB
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 18:55 GMT jake
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
Here's a take on the subject from an industry insider from way back in May of 2002 ... It's mostly about music, but is applicable to this discussion.
Might want to set aside a block of time to read it, and the follow-up. Grab a comfy chair and a cuppa before starting, there is a lot to digest in there.
Note that the author has been recording and selling her music since 1965. I think that gives he voice more than just a little bit of weight on the subject.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 21:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
Friend of mine was in a band. Somewhat popular within its genre. He, in no uncertain terms, forbade me to buy their CDs and would give me ripped copies instead. Of his own music.
Reason for that was the the band saw €0.50 or so between them all for each €10.- CD that was sold. After he explained that I started to help him rip his CDs.
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Thursday 5th November 2020 13:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
2007: "Help yourself to my songs and share them with your friends"
"Friend of mine was in a band. Somewhat popular within its genre. He, in no uncertain terms, forbade me to buy their CDs and would give me ripped copies instead. Of his own music.
Reason for that was the the band saw €0.50 or so between them all for each €10.- CD that was sold. After he explained that I started to help him rip his CDs."
From something I posted here on El Reg in 2007:
Have a look at Tom Robinson's website to see where the money goes from iTunes, and for an interesting approach to "back catalogue" distribution where the rights have returned to the artist: "Free Downloads:
iTunes downloads cost 79p per track.
Writer/publisher get 6p,
Performer 6-8p,
Visa/Mastercard 7p, Apple 12p, and Record Company almost 50p
Sod that. Help yourself to my songs & share them with your friends." (2007 prices)
Quoted from http://www.tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm but that page and the authorised free downloads are no longer available directly. Fortunately that page lives on for posterity in the Wayback Machine,
e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20080216143157/http://www.tomrobinson.com/records/music/index.htm
Meanwhile the authorised no-cost music downloads have moved behind the iTunes paywall.
Thank you for the music, Tom.
Anyone know what the equivalend payouts from iTunes are in more recent times?
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Thursday 5th November 2020 18:15 GMT jake
Re: 2007: "Help yourself to my songs and share them with your friends"
Tom Robinson ... Strange how some music resonates across the decades, while most deservedly fades into oblivion. It would do today's kids well to give 1978's "Power in the Darkness" a good listen. The title track, and the entire album.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 20:05 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Well, no problem, I'm going to rip off GitHub code for my own use....
all we need is ANOTHER LOCATION for the youtube-dl code, maybe somewhere in Finland... or put the tarball on USENET
(why these cloudy repo sites would be so "essential" is beyond me)
And what's to stop OTHER web sites around the world from hosting a mirror? All youtube-dl makers (I use this script myself, so I don't have to watch skippy video) need to do is post a set of links and a set of hashes (along with file size) to verify the thing, and voila! It's not that large anyway (~1.7Mb uncompressed) and consists of a SINGLE python program.
So a paste to USENET might be the easiest way to do it. Now I'll need to subscribe to some of the 'binary' groups
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Wednesday 4th November 2020 22:55 GMT ProphetZarquon
Re: You can refuse a takedown request until there is proof
You're being downvoted pretty hard considering you're exactly right.
Safe Harbor protections are not lost merely by requiring that claims show merit before a takedown request is implemented. In fact, by indiscriminately applying takedowns for spurious claims, a policy of unquestioning compliance with takedowns is in itself a decision to censor and impede an uploader's legal rights.
Although hosting & linking services tend to treat DMCA as "guilty until proven innocent", there is NO requirement that they abide by all claims regardless of validity, & the decision NOT to implement a viable method to pursue counter-cliam *prior* to any takedown taking effect is self-evidently a prima facie decision in favor of all possible claimants (legitimate or not), to the deficit of all uploaders (legitimate or not).
There is no requirement that spurious claims (such as this) must be taken at face value (& in this case, the claim *has* no face value, being improperly filed).
GitHub is making it their policy to censor first, & leave asking questions, to those harmed by that censorship. Baseless, (seemingly ignorant but more likely disingenuous) claims such as the one against YouTube-DL are themselves a violation of copyright law; unfortunately, no prescribed penalties exist to appropriately penalize this (particularly rampant) form of fraud. Nonetheless, entities like GitHub could (& should) offer reasonable avenues of counter-claim prior to effecting any takedowns. They do not. Instead, takedowns are implemented via automation, with very little recourse given whatsoever to reverse it, until a lengthy legal battle is concluded. This flies in the face of due process & does ongoing harm to creators & users alike.
Applying takedowns without requiring a period for response (much less applying takedowns that are obviously false or inapplicable) is a criminally negligent practice.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 10:39 GMT Charlie Clark
Re: I can still remember how I was chastised
Who reads T&Cs?
GitHub's T&C's have always been anti-developer in cases like these, where infringement is alleged, by requiring them to provide proof that this isn't the case. It was largely because of this that I kept my repositories on BitBucket.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 09:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Probably something to do with the way YouTube does streaming of the video. It also wraps a bunch of options nicely so you can say what video/sound quality you want, if you only want sound, etc, and integrates with ffmpeg to produce an mp4.
Honestly, it's quite a useful tool (I use it for grabbing instructional videos I will need to refer to later, so I don't have to try to find them again)
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 09:33 GMT NATTtrash
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Honestly, it's quite a useful tool...
I agree. Then again, I can't escape a deja vu moment, where I see kids nowadays enter their (digital) cassette tape in their (digital) cassette player (simple screen recorder? audacity?), and wait to press RECORD just when that annoying gentleman stops talking...
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 12:26 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Well, clearly, Home Taping Killed Music. So now it's YouTube-DL killing the already dead Zombie Music. Again.
Obviously the solution is to add a 10% surcharge[1] to anything capable of downloading content from the internet, such as YouTube-DL, curl and wget so it can be put into the RIAA coffers for the execs bonuses.
[1]What's 10% of nothing?
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 09:10 GMT _LC_
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
You can't download live-streams like that, for example. In order to download live-streams, you need to download them packet wise and put them all together afterwards. This is what youtube-dl does. It also allows you to pick the streams. That is, if available, you can pick your 720p MP4 video or chose the 1080p AV1 stream instead. Likewise, you can pick your audio stream the way you prefer.
With wget (or rather uget) you can't do most of this and furthermore, it is unable to download (fresh) live-streams.
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Wednesday 4th November 2020 09:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
RIAA references the decision of a german court (here) that the "rolling cipher" is an adequate copy-protection measure under german law.
That could make development and distribution of youtube-dl illegal in Germany under §95a. I don't expect the Ass. to go all the way and sue package mirrors but they apparently would have some legal justification to do so.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 17:03 GMT genghis_uk
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Sorry Charlie, not quite true... DMCA Section 1201 is all about breaking content protection:
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24881/dmca-1201
While a US law, it is recognised widely and you can expect something to be taken down on a DMCA notice even if not hosted in the US... Unfortunately! :(
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 19:12 GMT jake
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
A beer to those of you who helped answer my question.
For the record, I have never had any issues downloading videos for people who have suddenly learned that youtube isn't a backup device. I used the afore mentioned wget, curl & perl ... I have never used the "live" side of youtube, and so didn't even think of that when I asked my question.
To the downvoters who didn't even bother to try to educate myself or others, thanks for the .... instruction. The bozosity is high in all y'all.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 20:05 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Shirley wget or curl already does a more than adequate job?
youtube-dl de-obfuscates the actual video URLs, downloads higher resolution video than your connection might be capable of live-streaming, AND creates a convenient '.mkv' out of it all [in most cases]. It ALSO does NOT require a java player to view the videos, so for SECURITY, it is MORE than ideal.
The problem is that youtube and the other video sites are busy TRYING TO OUTWIT IT, by changing things frequently, like a moving target. Last week thd tool worked. Next week it MAY NOT. and GOOD LUCK finding out what URL the video is REALLY on without excess MANUAL EFFORT.
This is why the script is SO BRILLIANT and SO POPULAR.
Youtube should just have a "download" button anyway.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 20:25 GMT logicalextreme
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
Another thing to add to the existing answers is that downloading things from YouTube is only a tiny fraction of what it can do. You can throw it at pretty much any page you see with AV content and have a pretty good chance of it getting that AV content for you. Streaming tech is a lot more complex than just a video file hosted publicly on a web server, and this tool knew* everybody's tricks.
* that is to say, clever hardworking people coded around those tricks for free to benefit the web's entire user base
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 21:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why is such a tool needed?
"You can throw it at pretty much any page you see with AV content and have a pretty good chance of it getting that AV content for you."
So a bit like the sorely missed original KeepVid website then, except that back then KeepVid didn't really run much code on the client machine?
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 15:17 GMT genghis_uk
Actually Laws Apply
LDS - you need to know the facts here...
The RIAA did not use the DMCA to take the code down for infringing copyright, it mentioned copyright works to get the ball rolling. They actually used section 1201 which is the part about circumventing copyright protection.
Quote:
"The youtube-dl source code available on Github (which is the subject of this notice) circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted audio files, in violation of YouTube’s express terms of service,and in plain violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §1201"
So they are not complaining about actual copyright violation, but that the code _could_ be used to download copyright material. There is a small problem with this - the code could also be used to download any number of non-copyright works too which means the Supreme Court ruling about video tapes applies -
From Sony vs Universal:
"[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses."
This basically says, if the equipment has significant non-infringing uses then you can't use copyright infringement to stop it.
The problem with the DMCA is that it is a sledgehammer so, once issued you have to take the item down while everyone argues.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 13:35 GMT Tempest
If I can see it on my Screen, ít's as Good as . . .
mine.
No anti-copying / encryption technology has been invented / designed that ís infallible.
I live within 2 kilometres of a Tetra base (bzzz, bzzz, bzzz) and with 2 SDR transceivers and a computer I am able to listen in clearvoice.
What I like about digital ís that it is so susceptible to interference. Most jammed encrypted voice users switch to clearvoice in frustration. An fine example of encryption failure ís the USA P25, also known as APCO25 and ASTRO25, project to whom the word Mattel is a dirty word. The scrambled satellite TV broadcasts can easily be viewed.
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 14:27 GMT StargateSg7
Re: If I can see it on my Screen, ít's as Good as . . .
".....What I like about digital ís that it is so susceptible to interference. Most jammed encrypted voice users switch to clearvoice in frustration. ...."
---
Not against MY bit-folded multi-spectrum, frequency-hopping and NOISE-based voice and video encryption/signal modulation system where external interference, active jamming and RF noise IS part of the signal modulation schema!
I love my custom scheme that is nigh-well unbreakable by jamming since the jamming signals themselves BECOME part of the signal modulation and propagation system! Waveforms are waveforms and with modern DSP, even in high-threat, active radio jamming environments, I can STILL get a useful signal by employing DSP techniques that USE noise and jamming as part of the carrier signal itself. Digital or Analog waveform. I don't care! I just obtain useful bits and bytes out of NOTHING by using complex DSP that obtains clarity from noise!
Meh! Been There Done That!
V
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Wednesday 4th November 2020 22:55 GMT ProphetZarquon
Re:Not against MY bit-folded multi-spectrum...
If only everyone had hardware capable of running a white-space SDR transceiver with over 1 mile single-hop transmission range...
Oh wait, we do! We're just locked behind closed-source firmware.
It's almost humorous to me, how robust high-density wireless technology has made its way into military, hobbyist, & now corporate networking strategies, but almost all consumer communications equipment & services remain wholly reliant upon overcrowded centralized last-mile infrastructure.
"That would be funny, if it weren't so sad." - GLaDOS
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Tuesday 3rd November 2020 21:13 GMT Version 1.0
Re: Jealousy
Back in the days, I thought that cable TV was selling all my watching habits so I cancelled my cable subscription and spent the subscription money on DVD's instead - I now have about 2,000 and the fun thing is that some of them are now worth about 20 times what I originally paid for them - LOL.
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