Hacker News Reader

> Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?

My understanding is that basically anything at all, if it is in any way "technical" and shows intent, will be accepted as a "technical protection measure" if you go by what has worked so far.

Much more absurd and blatantly bad faith arguments have been accepted, "conspicuously not supplying the feature" is a very strong case in the absurd world of the DMCA cases.

I mean it has to be that way because it would be silly to lose copyright protection just because you have crappy security.

Whoa there. The DMCA is not “copyright protection”. The DMCA is a bunch of additional obnoxious protections on top of copyright.

That is not the argument, though. Your copyright is protected regardless of the strength of your security measures. But it is also, separately, illegal to circumvent these measures. This latter prohibition becomes more far-reaching and has more collateral damage the weaker the security measures it applies to, which is worrying.

Outlawing the methods of committing a crime also (instead of just the crime) requires a balancing act between their legitimate and illegitimate uses, which seems precariously absent when talking about technically laughable “security measures” that can be circumvented by pressing F12.

But the trick is to put a crap lock around both something that can be copyrighted but is unimportant and things that cannot be copyrighted.

Now all legal uses of everything behind that lock are illegal for circumvention reasons.

It's a way to apply the DMCA to literally anything digital. The quality of the software doesn't matter, because it isn't for security, just a legal hack.

The fact that youtube wants people to come back to the site and use servers, miles of wires, electricity, network machinery instead of letting them download videos so they can watch them from thumbdrive just says to me this company is unethical and harms environment. Any business model that forces people to be on the network without any reason other than greed, should be illegal. If you can stream the file, download option should be mandatory by law.

People forget that Youtube is a _business_. The reason they maintain all of those servers and network machinery is to serve ads, otherwise why would they provide that service for free?

No. But they shouldn't harm environment. If business is harmful then should be illegal.

Well that's a pretty simplistic view.

That doesn't mean there isn't some truth to it. ;)

How is it possible to legislate electricity caps on google, according to some imagined threshold of "harm to environment"? Sounds like the number of lawyers involved would be the real harm in this scenario.

Company will have to justify what is their business need for particular use of electricity.

Once you download a video, you don't need their service anymore to watch it again. But they want you to remain dependent on them.

All businesses run on financial incentives (or what you call 'greed'). How is it possible that profit motive and associated laws that facilitate buying/selling be written off as unethical?

There is a "Download" button in the mobile Youtube apps (if you're paying for Youtube Premium).

Except it doesn't give you the actual file, it's still only playable offline through the app (unless you have root I guess).

I have YT premium and an android phone so I checked this out. It looks like they don't store a single mp4 or anything and instead store it in chunks. I am not sure though if they are actually encrypted and stored using some sort of copy protection or if you could assemble the pieces into a single video using some algorithm without a special key.

I would guess it’s similar to the chunking they do when streaming in the first place. Assembling the pieces is one of the main functions of youtube-dl.

Youtube does have a "download" feature in YouTube studio. Where you can download a heavily compressed version of any video you've uploaded. But only videos you've uploaded.

IANAL IANAT yet the video I am watching isn't being stored in my browser?

The data obviously must make it to your computer. A distinction that can be made is whether it is possible/easy to use it separately, outside of YouTube.

They come as regular media files, the chunking would cause issues for most people but it's easy to view. I don't think difficulty is what is important though, what matters is if they were to need some kind of decrypter from the copyright holder.

> Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?

The law is so vague on this point so as to include practically anything. Here is the text:

> 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.

> Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?

an actual court in germany ruled that: https://openjur.de/u/2194436.html

sadly german only. lots of fud and hamburg is often pro copyright owner. not sure if that would hold at the highest instance.

The decisions of a German court would have no impact on a US court.

As mentioned in the notice, the RIAA is specifically claiming youtube-dl's deobfuscation of youtube's request signatures is what's infringing, which a german court ruled to be an effective technological protection measure.

I seriously doubt they read the source code.

> It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn't exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their site if you want to rewatch a video.

Lets be clear though - the only reason copyrighted material is allowed on Youtube is because the owners then grant a license for the content in exchange for ad revenue. Offering a download link severly damages the "owners are paid for their content" part of the equation.

This is true and still applies in the case where you pay for YouTube Premium. Even if you use YouTube Premium you are also helping pay the content creators [1]

> # How YouTube Premium supports creators.

> Creators are the heart and soul of YouTube. To make sure they're compensated for their work, we share ad revenue with them when you watch ads on YouTube. If you're a YouTube Premium member, you won't see ads, so we share your monthly membership fee with creators. Best of all, the more videos you watch from your favorite creators, the more money they make.

So, to reply to the gp you technically aren’t just paying “evil” and “greedy” big corps, but your also helping all the YouTubers.

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7060016?hl=en

The button doesn't exist, but apparently they do have a link that lets you download the video, it is just obfuscated. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874277>

You are able to download YouTube videos on your phone, if you subscribe to YouTube premium. I haven’t made any deep investigation of this but I kinda assume the videos are protected by DRM.

>Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn't supply a download feature constitute a "technical protection measure"?

Yes, they have some sort of DRM, albeit a very weak one.

Hmm, so maybe it's legally enough if YouTube does have a protection mechanism and the material is copyrighted, even if the protection mechanism isn't necessarily intended to protect copyright?

Last I checked normal youtube videos are just a MPEG-DASH/HLS stream, with no DRM.

What youtube-dl essentially does is reading the playlist and concatenating chunks together, there is no DRM circumvention here.

Sure, but the URL that needs to be requested is encrypted even if the stream itself is not.

The embeded js that YouTube provides gives your browser the link in clear.

It's no more encrypted than any other https resource. What is the argument you are trying to make?

My argument is that the URL address for the HLS stream you access is not in clear text in the html code youtube sends you. Javascript code is executed to decode it (which changes constantly, hence the need for youtube-dl to be updated constantly) and that is a form of DRM which youtube-dl breaks.

That's not DRM, and not encryption as you originally said. DRM would be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions.

Anything that limits your choices of what to do with some contents is DRM. It does not matter how naive it is. Even product keys are considered DRM.

I would also argue that something that is ciphered and then deciphered is encrypted.

In that case every OSS project is in some way DRM:ed since they require a compiler, interpreter or some specific instruction set to run. That is not at all how the term DRM is used, and if you want to think of it that way you should also know that when speaking to others they have another definition of what DRM is.

As I said it is as encrypted (no less, no more) as all other https traffic. Please note that normal https does no verification of the client, the client verifies the server not the other way around (client verification is of course possible but almost no public sites use it). So the encryption in this case verifies that the content comes from youtube or other sites that it supports but youtube itself does no attempt at verification of the client. This is in contrast to real DRM where the content is encrypted in such a way that it is hard to decode it without running the Content Decryption Module, which are proprietary plugins and that can check HDCP and similar ways to only allow playback on "trusted" devices.