I was thinking the same thing:
The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material.
This is crazy.
This is crazy.
We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs! The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of the music industry with how easily they can be used to create unauthorized copies!
Oh wait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_God_We_Trust,_Inc.#Artwork_...
They could care less about side-effects and collateral consequences for adjacent technologies and use cases.
[1] "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation" https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
There have been plenty of cases where exactly that happened.
There's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, and many are persuaded that when someone hasn't violated the letter of the law, they haven't violated the law.
Judges, lawyers, and juries will vary on this, but in many cases the letter of the law will carry the day, and people will in fact "get off on a technicality".
Intent matters in the law.
After after all, two guns can be physically and functionally identical, but if one is purchased to be used in a conspiracy to commit murder then it's evidence of a crime, and the other gun is still just a gun.
Indian startup taking down dissent, whistle blowers and leaks using take down requests to youtube and social media.
sed s/youtube-dl/firefox/g and voilà, DMCA for Firefox ready to submit...
Let's go further! Let's DMCA the Linux kernel because it runs Firefox/youtube-dl/curl/wget!
A unit test is there to allow the developers to test whether the program is producing expected output from certain inputs.
It doesn't demonstrate that it's intended for circumventing copyright.
They just picked examples to use for in test cases.
Pretty much, yes. No one is going to hire expensive lawyers to enforce copyright on something not generating revenue, although legally they can.
> If that's the case, we should ban all Pi-holes, too
If Pi-hole is anywhere saying or implying "use us to watch $vendor's content without watching their ads" then yes pi-hole is waving a red flag at $vendor who is now motivated to try to ban pi-holes. If there is a legal action they can afford to take they will.
> What if I have YouTube Premium, then I don't see ads, so am I allowed to download via youtube-dl?
No, downloading is a separate "right" from the right to watching without ads. (Downloading is the first step before uploading elsewhere and literally stealing the ad revenue.) But I think there's a legal grey area if you're watching (streaming) with youtube-dl, without saving the file. I'm sure it's against Youtube's TOS though.
Are you sure you want to say it's literally stealing the ad revenue? I would imagine literally stealing the ad revenue would require robbing the bank or safe where the ad revenue money is stored.
Trying to say that's not stealing is like trying to say "Someone hacked into to my bank account and "obtained" my money" is not stealing either just because there was no physical cash involved.
There are at least 5 parties here:
· Content producer (spending time and effort making original content that people watch)
· Platform
· Advertiser
· Content consumers
· Thief
This is the reason Youtube's Content-ID exists.
It also does not decrease the amount of cash owned by the content owner or hosting company (apart from hosting costs, but that's the nature of the internet and they are willfully participating in it). The only cost involved is opportunity cost.
I'm not sure to whom you are referring when you say "thief", but I was under the impression that we were talking about a person watching, but not re-uploading, a Youtube video without viewing ads. This person does not have Y dollars in his account as a result of copyright infringement since they simply watched the video and did not put it up for further distribution.
I wasn't saying "people who download are thiefs", I was saying "thiefs start by downloading". Then I had to explain what a thief is, and why they really have Y dollars in their account that should have been in producers account. In my other comment the thief is a separate party from the content consumers (so actually there are 6 parties, content consumers is split into those who watch ads and those who download without re-uploading).
Well, what do you think weapons are for? I’m not saying arrest them but that isn’t really a great example, considering the sole purpose of weapons is to kill or destroy. Using weapons for anything other than killing or destroying is basically a secondary usage.
But then, when secure boot came, Microsoft was forced to grant every owner of an Intel compatible computer the right to unlock it for antitrust reasons (luckily).
So were is the borderline between a legal tool and an illegal tool? Well, lawyers will find out...
In the meantime youtube-dl needs to be distributed some other channel. Which of course might raise the risk of back-doored or otherwise poisoned version floating around.
FTFY
On a bit more serious note I wonder how much internet traffic is used for "illegal" purposes?
We're talking about an industry that normalized rootkit DRM and persuaded pretty much all hardware manufacturers to implement expensive encrypted pipelines to lock you out from trying to even take a glimpse of content playing.
After a few years of working near this industry I really cannot overestimate how rentseeking and scummy every single part of it is. They will abuse you without a second thought if there's a cent to be made.
Didn't the RIAA put up a considerable effort against torrenting in the early 2000's? I remember quite vividly them going after just about anyone who made music available, even if you owned your own songs and were simply uploading them to a web UI to listen to in the browser (Remember Muxtape?)