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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

I find the tool analogy very useful, because we _do_ regulate some tools like guns.

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.

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> I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.

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.

Generally, unless the purpose of the image was to disseminate an otherwise copyrighted work contained in the recording, fair use would apply. For example: the famous toddler dancing to Prince video. It recorded a Prince song while the toddler was dancing to it. The primary purpose of the video was to show the toddler dancing, so the recording (and dissemination of the Prince song) was deemed fair use. (There's a bit more to that analysis but that was the gist of it.)

Apple already has patents to block recording of concerts iirc

Why did you remove the photoshop not allowing banking notes editing. Is this true?

Just thought it's maybe not as relevant, but yes it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Very interesting. It mentions the concept was developed in 2004. I wonder how many versions are affected by this and when they started.

One of our business processes is to scan checks when customers pay and attach the image as part of the record in QuickBooks. We use a sheet of paper folder to redact the numbers of the bottom of the check. Our scanner refuses to color copy some client checks, namely from a govt agency and a startup. Thankfully we can still copy with grayscale. When this happens, we have to fully power off the scanner and boot it back up again. Best I can tell it's this pattern/hologram that triggers it.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Color copiers and color printers check for the EURion constellation too. For decades, at least in Europe.

Cameras were the dominant way for nearly 100 years, and that didn’t happen.

> making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.

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.

This was not a copyright claim, the tools that were being hosted in one place (Github) allowed widespread infringement. The tool is not banned. Like cameras are not banned. It's a stupid comparison.

If that was true it would be hard to argue that photocameras on smartphones aren't meant to shoot porn or dick pics by the fact that, well, we know why.

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

I think your view of what smartphone cameras are used for is pretty out of whack. Most people take photos of their food, abacus amd whatever they are up to. (I’m keeping abacus but it was supposed to say babies)

The point is that if now abacus is the most photographed thing in the World, it doesn't mean cameras main purpose is to take pictures of abacus(es? I guess being a Latin word it has no plural)

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.

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