So glad I exist in a timeline where youtube-dl exists.
Having culture locked up in these corporate sites that can wipe it out or remove it in less than a second makes me so anxious.
Having culture locked up in these corporate sites that can wipe it out or remove it in less than a second makes me so anxious.
Also, the real problem isn't technical here. P2P file sharing technologies - from BitTorrent to IPFS - work well and efficiently. The problem, which makes the Internet media evolve towards big players owning CDNs and not towards IPFS-like network, is legal liability. When I watch a video of a wrong colour on YouTube, I'm protected by Safe Harbour. If I watch the same movie over BitTorrent, I risk having my life ruined by copyright laws. As long as this can happen, we won't have fully decentralized media.
Look into Proof of Stake (PoS) - people are looking into more efficient blockchains (although there's some controversy over whether it will work)
Current supply[1]:
PoW-mined: 43.5% PoS-mined: 21.8% Development Subsidy: 7.3% Airdrop: 13.7% Dev Premine: 13.7%
Blackcoin is also PoS mined, and NXT reaches consensus using PoS but if IIUC is not mined per se.
https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...
Would something like that be possible with Ethereum or otherwise blockchains in general?
If I've been following the whole Ethereum thing correctly, as an outsider who kind of looks down on it, this is right up it's alley. You write some sort of smart contract which allows for the uploading and downloading of music blobs, charges for the service, and if insufficient coins are garnered for storage deletes the least used files.
I don't think you need a server or any such thing, and the only way to force a take down would be to take down the underlying services.
What's to stop the MPAA/RIAA and ISPs from just suing everyone on the network who's hosting part of the file? If they can sue bittorrent users, what's the significant legal difference here?
It's like if someone started a point-to-point delivery business where they take anonymous, secure packages between different places, no questions asked, and then are surprised when the police show up and say they're pretty sure that a good portion of the packages they've been carrying are drugs and pipe bombs, and ask them to roll on their clients, or at least stop delivering packages. And then the delivery man tries to make a philosophical argument that they aren't morally or legally responsible for the contents of their packages, and in any case it really shouldn't be illegal to distribute drugs or pipe bombs.
If you are building a piracy service a blockchain just complicates things and adds no value.
A pretty good rule of thumb is that if you can replace block chain with a database or anything else and lose no functionality, not to mention remove the whole thing together and simplify your solution it's not block chain but bullshit.
Spotify doesn't have the music I want to listen to.
Compare what.cd to iTunes. Compare Karagarga to Netflix, people actually go out of their way to create the best version of a movie, maybe the western release has incorrect hardcoded subs and awful picture quality. Someone goes out of their way to find the best version of it which may be something obscure like a Japanese laserdisc, rip it, fix subtitles and audio etc and release it for no monetary gain just the pure love of the media.
People actually being paid to release this stuff care far less about it than enthusiasts.
Doesn't even have to be 'verboten' political. It would be easy for an AI bot trained to curtail e.g. 'hate speech' to delete loads of things that are just unorthodox.
PS: I know DRMs are broken eventually. But Netflix seems to be holding its ground for now, and seems to be attacked only through HDCP (the weakest link for now since you can find capture HDMI cards with stolen keys) for the highest-quality content.
I guess it's kinda surprising to me that it still works after all this time, that there isn't some sort of authentication involved to prevent it.
It would also be easy for them to just break the extraction code. The old code used to break every time the signature function changed, and while the current code solves that problem, there are still so many things that they could do to break it, and yet they don't (the current code has only broken a few times that I can think of, and I don't think any of those were intentional on Google's part).
Technically it could violate these parts of the ToS, but they're all grey areas:
- access through anything than the site or 'approved' clients (but youtube-dl does use the site, so it could just be classed as another user agent)
- running automated services against them (running youtube-dl manually is probably fine, even for whole playlists or channels, but running a 'youtube-dl as a service' site like the one in this case is almost certainly not)
- downloading videos (but youtube-dl can also be used for streaming, despite the name)
I'm guessing that Google simply doesn't give a shit, as long as you're not using using it abusively (e.g. offering it as a service or using it to do mass-scraping).
In practice, they could combat the practicality by various methods, like embedding the ads in the video stream, throttling the stream to hurt the use-case of downloading vs watching (they already do this I think).
Ultimately YouTube could start properly DRM-ing all their streams. If you watch a film you've bought from Google Play via YouTube it is protected by Widevine DRM, and youtube-dl fails.
It seems like YouTube feel it's cheaper at the moment to try and frustrate downloading this way, but if they ever feel like it's a lost cause they'll just pull the Widevine lever.