Philipp Hagemeister, former YouTube-dl maintainer re: takedown
news.perthchat.org
news.perthchat.org
In a better society, it ought not have been possible to take down general purpose software with dubious claims of their "clear intent".
This is modern day book burning.
I believe the developer's constitutional rights were violated and I would contact the EFF and ACLU for help.
For some context, at one point:
> the US government designated encryption software as a "munition"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
Philipp sounds very proffessional, and it's obvious that youtube-dl's goal isn't simply infringement of copyrighted music, its also a tool that allows creators to use content within fair use.
It is our right to have tools that could be used for different reasons. It is our right to be able to act not lawful. Just go after those citizens who break law, not those who COULD break law.
Just because a knife can kill someone it's not taken from the market. Or just because a pen and paper could be used to write a demagogic text we don't disallow these tools.
I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
The key difference is in what the real world contains, versus the virtual world — the virtual world is so dominated by intellectual property that it is almost hard to argue that youtube-dl isn’t meant to copy IP by the fact that almost everything on Youtube is copyrighted.
The desire for a library style free archive of important videos, I think, is just, but youtube-dl is not a that. I’m not sure what it is, it seems to me unquestionable that it should be legal, though.
Ah, just you wait. If ever the analog loophole becomes the dominant way to reproduce copyrighted works, it will be difficult to get a camera without a content-recognition and blocking system.
For the same reason, I had trouble making a digital copy of my daughter's birth certificate. Before I found the gray scale trick, I ended up taking a photo with our iPhone instead.
youtube-dl works on many other web sites, not only YouTube, and downloading YouTube videos, even if copyrighted, is not a crime per se in many parts of the World
In the same way youtube-dl is a tool used to download videos from hundreds of website and there is nothing inherently illegal in it even if the majority of users used it to download illegal material from YouTube.
It's not like there are no better alternatives. Instead of making it illegal, just setup a fee and a distribution scheme.
In Germany, we do pay some additional fee (0.5€?) on usb-sticks, printers and hard drives, etc, because those things could be used to copy copyrighted material. These fees go directly to associations that represent copyright holders, like GEMA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization) ). This happens since forever.
So there is already precedent for blanket-regulation of and compensation for possible use/misuse of copyrighted material. In fact, this is what some people proposed as a kind of reasonable alternative to the Upload filters of the EU Copyright directive ("Article 13" and so on)
I'm noticing that this is not really a coherent argument, more of a braindump, sorry.
Paper & slides: https://phihag.de/2012/mt.pdf & https://phihag.de/2012/mtpres.pdf
Copyright law is always a balance between creators and society.
When it comes to being able to watch videos no matter the device
or Internet connection, and doing so for non-commercial purposes,
the balance we should strive for seems clear to me; it should
allow youtube-dl.
And now I can't? This doesn't seem right.
I would not be surprised if YouTube intentionally introduces a breaking change now that the repo is down.
Github can face liability for copyright infringement unless it
> (C)upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
They also have to wait ten days before restoring the content after a counter-claim.
Relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
The problem is the law is terrible. Github's actions are pretty much required as far as I can tell.
Edit: I'd like to add that one thing Github could do is accept liability for copyright infringement and fight against frivolous claims like this in court. Maybe users should start demanding companies protect them from tactics like this, but the existing legal penalties are severely in the claimants favor.
Besides that, there are requirements in 1201 that YouTube and youtube-dl might not meet.
* The technological measure being circumvented must be "effective". There is a possibility that YouTube's poorly encrypted URLs might not meet that bar. E.g. they evidently don't work that well, and only the URL is encrypted, not the copyrighted work.
* Since you can freely receive a copy of the work by ordinarily visiting YouTube, it's pretty questionable that the measures control access at all. E.g. Region restricted videos are blocked based on IP, not using this measure, and so youtube-dl can't download them.
* "use" isn't a right restricted by copyright. There generally isn't a distinction between a copyrighted work that your computer transiently stores or saves (e.g. streaming vs. download). The violation would be in a license that you agreed to that specified additional restrictions beyond those offered by copyright (e.g. TOS violations).
* youtube-dl has to be primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumvention. That seems a little far-fetched since I think it might predate YouTube's technological measures.
I agree that it clearly isn't an access control. I think there's a plausible case that it's effective as a copy control, as well as a plausible case that it's not.
Re license: the control prevents further copies being made, which is clearly a right protected by copyright.
Re your last point, the issue is likely (b)(1)(C), which is about marketing.
However, from my understanding, it doesn't matter if the takedown notice is completely without merit. As long as it meets the requirements, Github has to follow it in order to avoid liability.
As an open source project they do not pay anything (I assume).
Furthermore Microsoft dedpends on good relations with the RIAA and other entities from the rightsholder community and youtube-dl is certainly not an extreme example of a wrongful DMCA takedown.
DMCA simply does not entitle rightsholders to demand third-party removal of a computer program that contains links to copyrighted content. The proper remedy is to sue the youtube-dl team and get injunctive relief.
Like, there's nothing stopping you from responding to DMCA takedown requests with "this is clearly non-infringing and/or fair use, if you want to sue us send servicing to the following address". You just have to be a particular kind of ornery and make the judgment call that you're willing to risk being sued over protecting third-party speech.
The repo owners should be able to file a counter notice to reinstate the repo.
Hopefully, youtube-dl project will remain alive.
the collective dream we had of the internet as a species-level advancement has, in fact, been a mirage. the idea was that the internet would allow free and uncensored communication across the world, perhaps allowing the citizens of the earth to organize against injustice, corruption, and repression, and to share information freely. in fact, what we see now is a global internet and computing backbone compromised to the core by nation-state actors, and a centralization of internet services controlled by an oligopoly.
not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea of a "global commons" or "collective good" cannot coexist with a world economy of globalized capitalism. the capitalization of the internet is a situation that is unprecedented in human society - we may have crossed an event horizon where societal control has grown to such a level where the very ability of people to fight repression and organize a more equitable society has died.
anyway, happy sunday
Seems to me that the best method of retaliation would be to let the code + issues + PRs become decentralized and this policy changed.
Each time there's a push, only the changed files would appear in the repo. Both the private and public repos would be active simultaneously in order to do a build. In other words, your project would have two folders with git active, and the build would combine those folders as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Every now and then the process of taking all of the current master branch and moving it offline would happen again. In this way, you'd never have a public repo that would have anything more than a few files in it.
In this scenario, the only things that are being hosted publicly are tiny bits of source code that are changed in order to keep the base updating. And even then, on a regular basis they would be deleted.
tl;dr: simply because you have to take down a repo doesn't mean you have to take down a location for publicly developing F/OSS software. </speculation>
Also probably a way to host a git repo over tor. But that would make life a bit harder for devs.
In all seriousness, move it to Russia, China, or some other country that has better freedoms in this particular regard and won't take crap from the US about silly copyright concerns.
Or put the source code on the blockchain and it will never be eraseable.
Even better, build a decentralized Github that is actually based on a blockchain but allows transparent interaction via the "git" command. No matter what the DMCA or RIAA want there is nobody that can erase anything from past commits.
This is codified into local law in various ways by various member states, but as an example in the UK it became section 296zb of the Copyright Design and Patents Act (as modified by the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003), which can be found at https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/296ZB.
(1)A person commits an offence if he—
(a)manufactures for sale or hire, or
(b)imports otherwise than for his private and domestic use, or
(c)in the course of a business—
(i)sells or lets for hire, or
(ii)offers or exposes for sale or hire, or
(iii)advertises for sale or hire, or
(iv)possesses, or
(v)distributes, or
(d)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. (2)A person commits an offence if he provides, promotes, advertises or markets—
(a)in the course of a business, or
(b)otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the copyright owner,
a service the purpose of which is to enable or facilitate the circumvention of effective technological measures.
I shall spare you the rest, which is available at the link. But I would note it's not even a civil offence, it's a criminal one, with a maximum two year prison penalty.
That's the grey area.
Why do the solutions on HN always involve complicated technical solutions that ignore the rights of the people affected?
No, most people who post good videos don't respond to e-mail.
Whenever I take a flight or long train ride or are otherwise going to be without reception I often youtube-dl a bunch of stuff to watch. That usually happens a couple hours before the flight, and I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And there are all the times I've used hundreds of downloaded videos as datasets or test sets for machine learning algorithms.
Just because rights can be theoretically violated with a tool doesn't mean we should ban the tool. My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
Probably just due to the different industries, but every time I've asked a presenter at a legal conference for a video they have been overjoyed that someone would want a copy. 100% yes rate, except for the presenter at a CLE conference (and in that case, the video was available through the conference organizer).
I can't be bothered to deal with e-mailing National Geographic and Coyote Peterson and Smarter Everyday and their ilk and pray that they'll send me a high-res video file. They probably won't.
And yet that is what copyright law generally requires. "Convenience" isn't a valid justification for fair use.
My use of youtube-dl is legit as far as the copyright claims of video creators go. I'm not reusing or redistributing their content without permission.
No, actually you mentioned a number of infringing uses that wouldn't be protected as fair use except for the training bits.
But the issue for youtube-dl is different: as a tool, the question is whether it is designed to infringe copyright, and the answer thus far appears to be that it is, especially given that they explicitly design for and test this ability.
What it may come down to (if this gets to court) may be the percentage of the user base that uses it for legitimate purposes and the percentage that doesn't. If they can't show that a substantial portion of the userbase uses it for downloading stuff other than RIAA licensed videos, youtubedl is DOA.
Not specifically for fair use, but convenience is a perfectly valid justification in my book to transform, edit, or save content for personal use.
[My body + my electronic devices] is a black box, and nobody has the right to meddle inside the workings of that black box. Once YouTube sends bytes into that black box, the extent of their control is done, and don't get to ask what happens inside after that. They don't get to know whether content got recorded on an organic brain or on a silicon brain within that black box, for example. The black box is private, and is not open for introspection.
They can only require that said black box not re-emit information that came from them, or derivatives of that information, back into the outside world.
> number of infringing uses
First of all, fair use is enough reason to have a tool.
But regardless, I don't believe downloading a video for offline personal consumption violates the spirit of copyright, and that's all that matters to me.
When Youtube, or anyone, sends any content into my personal LAN I can do whatever I want with that content within my private spaces and for my private viewing in any way I wish. If the law suggests otherwise, I don't believe in that law.
The law also banned women from voting, and colored people from from sitting in the front of the bus, and it's because of people who didn't believe in those laws that we are where we are today. Sometimes the law is wrong, and I firmly believe the law is wrong to say anything about how I'm allowed to save or consume content that was legally transmitted to a device I own for my own private use.
As for the test cases, this is what the article has to say about it:
> they are automated test cases where the test just downloads the first 10KB, which amounts to a couple of seconds at most. This is certainly fair use, but the project is fully functional without these test cases.
So what part of this article are you agreeing with? I doubt we read the same article.
We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.”1
We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto.
Copyright law was created for promoting progress and useful arts.
Current copyright law is a horror that's totally skewed towards hoarders of intellectual property who only want to take away more and more from the public all the time. Garbage like DMCA 1201 should never have been allowed to exist.
Reverting this mess back to the original intent would be hugely beneficial for the public.
If as a society we create regulations that allow big corporations and their friends in the government to infringe on people's freedom, we're not only losing our freedom but also increasing inequality.
No, it wasn't.
That's the justification for the US Constitution allowing the US Congress to create US federal IP laws, but copyright law is older than the US, and was very much not created for that purpose. (And, despite exercising a power expressly created for that purpose, it's pretty clear that the actual present US copyright law wasn't created for that purpose, either.)
Copyright is always a close kin to censorship and is unhealthy in general, unless there is some trade-off that public gets in return. It should never be "to allow profit for IP holders" idea.
Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful.
Patent law can also be seen as something that holds back progress. So it's quite moot to claim that it's always useful
Patent law protections in England absolutely were a factor in England's dominance of France and Spain, despite the hugely disparate sizes and resources of those countries. Moreover, the US's early embrace of patents is why so much of modern life can be traced directly to inventions created in the US. Electricity, modern manufacturing, computers, the radio, television, air flight, all traceable to private individuals and companies incentivized to invent in the US because the patent system rewarded them for doing so.
Eckhard Höffner explores the question of whether Germany's lack of any real copyright law served to accelerate the spread of knowledge and industry
[O]nly 1,000 new works appeared annually in England [during the Enlightenment] -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.
Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.
Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.
The emergence of Germany as a major technical and industrial power by the end of the 19th century was quite remarkable, considering it was a not only agrarian, but not even a single state. German in 1800 was a collection of independent principalities and states, corresponding roughly to the present-day states of unified Germany plus Austria, and parts of Switzerland, France, and Poland.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-l...
> No, it wasn't.
The stated purpose of the very first copyright was "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books" and "other Writings".
Note that the Wikipedia article for the Statue of Anne says "the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties" (emphasis added). It was not the first copyright, just the first one where the government handled enforcement directly. Before that enforcement (including, but not limited to, government-mandated censorship) was handled by the printers' guild, with the government licensing the printers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
It seems to me that the LPA was more primarily a 'business licensing' system. Sections I to IV are about who is allowed to print:
* https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol5/pp428-...
Only one section (V) pertains to what we would nowadays refer to copyright, i.e., ownership of the content.
The Statute of Anne was intended as a modernized replacement for the LPA; it represented an evolution in the concept of copyright away from its origins as a means of censorship and toward a more lenient and democratized commercial model.
In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights, and at the time, fair use was not part of the (limited) intellectual property base of law in the States or the UK.
Reverting back to the original intent would likely eliminate fair use altogether.
To put it differently, when copyright starts being harmful to the public, fair use is a more explicit way to rein it in and keep things as they should be.
In theory, if the law could be defined with 100% clarity, you wouldn't need fair use as an additional tool to prevent abuse. But things are rarely that clear.
Fair use was introduced by the courts as an alternative to copyright being deemed altogether unconstitutional as a violation of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. If the fair use exceptions were to be eliminated then we would be back to copyright itself being unconstitutional.
Personally I think the courts were too quick to capitulate. A few narrow fair use exceptions are not sufficient to reconcile the inherent censorship of copyright with freedom of speech.
> In fact, the Constitutional text is quite explicit about creators have "exclusive" rights …
What the text actually says is that "The Congress shall have the Power To … promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not say that "creators" have exclusive rights automatically; that requires action on the part of Congress. And whatever Congress enacts in this area must comply with the rest of the Constitution, including the 1st Amendment. Even if that means that copyright effectively cannot be implemented at all.