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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this case, to be honest.

On one hand people tend to side with youtube-dl, because everybody claims they did nothing wrong. But it can be argued that the testsuite (and CI pipeline) is the responsibility of the person who implemented. And I agree with that point.

From youtube-dl's perspective, this is an unnecessary attack surface that can be easily removed. I mean, this was bound to happen at some point, don't kid yourself.

With a project so big, I think it is irresponsible to not care for its legality. I mean, they could have just prevented this with a supersimple fix.

0. Use only CC licensed content in testsuite. If necessary, open up your own youtube-dl-tests channel and upload a video of your dog or cat. It just takes less than an hour.

1. Implement a license check, required by all plugins. Default to proprietary if none given. If proprietary, provide a url to Terms Of Service.

2. Let the end user manually confirm that the license is XYZ once it is proprietary and not public domain or CC based. Do this with every download.

3. Introduce a CLI flag like "--agree-to-license" in order to skip that.

4. Document this under legal compliance in the readme, and state that youtube-dl does in good faith try to comply with legal requirements, but that the responsibility is the action of its users that it cannot influence.

Boom. Plausible deniability, and RIAA would have not a single basis for the case.

I mean, this would have been so easy to implement. I don't understand why this wasn't integrated.

View on HN

0. As people have stated before, the whole point of those tests is that they test a specific kind of obfuscation that YouTube only uses for certain partner videos. So unless someone manages to dig up some obscure partner video that has that feature turned on and yet arguably consists entirely of freely licensable or non-copyrightable content, that won't work.

1~4. youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool, it is a library and tool that lots of other software shells out to, e.g. so you can play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player. Integrating ToS links and extra user interaction into that isn't trivial.

As I said, it was a suggestion to remove that attack surface. If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally, then don't cry when the legal system f*s you up.

Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition.

I think there are essentially two problems here that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio in these kinds of discussions.

One is that people often mix political and legal matters in colloquial discussions of such topics. I frequently catch myself doing it too.

It is clearly not in the interest of most people for functionality that youtube-dl offers to be illegal. In fact, most of the time it isn't really illegal, in a de facto sense, since it is never acted upon and prosecuted.

However, sometimes a shady organization such as the RIAA acts upon this legal grey area and tries to push the needle in its own direction. When people then say "There is actually nothing wrong with this, this is definitely not illegal.", they are actually making a political statement without realizing. They are really saying: this shouldn't be illegal because it makes no sense that it is so. Since people actually hold all the power, this act makes this the reality in a way, but in order for this to completely materialize, the will of the people must first be focused so that it is reified into law.

The other problem is that the world is not the US and there are many jurisdictions where circumventing copyright protections and/or downloading a media file for personal use are not problematic at all. This fact also often seeps into the discussion, but sometimes only implicitly, so people often talk past each other.

Overall, in this case you cannot assume to be right by relying on fair use, because fair use as a legal concept implies that there has to be a court decision in order to exist.

And all of the required measurements in order to apply fair use are almost impossible to prove, therefore it is an unlikely case to win in court.

I agree with the political sentiment in this discussion, and I have a biased opinion, too - but when talking about pushing the needle in a specific direction the maintainers of youtubedl did a bad job at doing so.

I mean, they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding, so it is obvious that this was bound to happen and they should have been more careful.

Especially when they, as a project, cannot afford lawyers to fight potential battles in court.

That's why I described it as an unnecessary attack surface, because that's what it is.

Don't give them reasons to push the needle.

>one of the most powerful industries

That's just a reason to not pay them anything ever even you find it desirable, they are obviously incapable to handle the money, powerful and incompetent is just too malicious.

> they have one of the most powerful industries siding against them, with nearly unlimited funding

The music industry through RIAA are aggressive and may be punching above their weight class in litigation and lobbying, but remember that they are not really that large in the grand scheme of things. Certainly not in the class of juggernauts like oil, medicine etc.

https://www.riaa.com/reportcat/sales-revenue/ says the US music industry had $11.1 billion in revenue for 2019, a fraction of many large tech companies.

Although this is fact is probably correct, and is mildly interesting, it has no relevance here because $11.1 billion is certainly a hell of a lot more than youtube-dl has to fight them in court.

> because fair use as a legal concept implies that there has to be a court decision in order to exist.

There are countries where fair use is always permitted unless a court decision prohibits it in that single case.

Then, you can't test that and former youtube-dl maintainer said in an interview that they download just few seconds of it and he believe it satisfy the fair-use but well, he think it should be removed to avoid issues if necessary.

https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/

>If you come up with reasons why it is impossible to comply legally

It isn't illegal. Copyright protects the video/audio content, not the hyperlink. You would have to establish ytdl induces infringement. Grokster induced infringement. An automated test does not induce infringement.

I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that the distinction is important. If you can demonstrate that those links were chosen because there were no viable links that were free of copyright, rather than to encourage users to pirate things, it would strengthen a fair use argument.

Many people are pointing to those links as evidence that youtube-dl was intended to be a tool for piracy (under the assumption that downloading videos from YouTube is automatically a DMCA violation, which I'm not fully convinced of).

> Legality is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition.

Publishing the software anonymously on hidden servers (say, Tor onion Services) is not an option. It is a necessity, by definition, because the legal system will f*k you up.

How does an automated test suite that downloads a mere few seconds of data simply for the purposes of software testing constitute infringement and not fair use? We've allowed this to go way too far. There is no way the RIAA can prove any sort of damages from this. This is an abuse of the copyright system for the sole purpose of attacking a tool they are unhappy with. Given the RIAA's history, are we in any way surprised by this?

It is extremely important to recognize in all this that as a country formed during the enlightenment, the founders of the US understood the importance information sharing holds for a free society. Copyright is intended to protect against wonton plagiarism and illegal redistribution. Fair use provisions exist to prevent abuse of this system and allow for legal redistribution and derivative works. These concepts. Patents and copyrights are at their core, systems designed to encourage distribution, not restrict it. Groups like the RIAA, Disney, the MPAA, and others are chipping away at this.

On what grounds do you think it would constitute fair use?

Fair use isn't some magic pixie dust that lets you do whatever you want with someone else's copyrighted material.

Fair use is a defense you can raise in court, _after_ you have been sued. It is not a presumptive right.

I was quite surprised by your claim, as I'm quite sure it is a right in EU and other countries. It seems you have been correct, though not any more. See quote[1]:

The U.S. Supreme Court has traditionally characterized fair use as an affirmative defense, but in .. (2015) .. U.S. Court of Appeals .. concluded that fair use was not merely a defense .. but was an expressly authorized right, and an exception to the exclusive rights granted to the author of a creative work by copyright law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

No, Tyler's still correct.

Fair use is still a defense to copyright violations, not a right. The 9th Circuit did not hold that fair use was a right in that case (the dancing baby case), only that a copyright holder must consider whether the alleged violation was potentially fair use before filing a lawsuit.

Importantly, the copyright holder is only required to consider whether the violation is fair use. They can still decide that it is not, and proceed with their lawsuit, with the only additional effort required being to state in their claim that they considered fair use and decided that the violation was not fair use.

(Note: while the 9th Circuit precedent is limited to the West Coast of the US, because most tech companies are HQ'd in CA or WA, so as a practical matter this case governs the internet.)

I'll quote from the first paragraph of court's opinion:

We hold that the statute requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending a takedown notification, and that failure to do so raises a triable issue as to whether the copyright holder formed a subjective good faith belief that the use was not authorized by law. [2]

Note that the case was about abuse of DMCA takedowns by copyright holders if not considering fair use. Judge considers fair use as authorized by law, which I would interpret as right, not defense.

Another quote: We agree with the district court and hold that the statute unambiguously contemplates fair use as a use authorized by the law. [2]

Fair use is not just excused by the law, it is wholly authorized by the law [2]

From previously quoted wikipedia article, the paragraph continues:

"Fair use is therefore distinct from affirmative defenses where a use infringes a copyright, but there is no liability due to a valid excuse, e.g., misuse of a copyright." [1]

As for plaintiff considerations, IMO, of course plaintiff is required to argue it's standing, otherwise the case is thrown out, or in this case DMCA is abused. Normally the first bar is to make a coherent argument, then the court gets to decide whether your opinion is right, but that does not lower the defendant's rights to a "defense", even if they are a defense.

[2] Court's decision, hopefully: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=125676491686801...

You mostly just restated what I said. The decision merely requires the copyright holder to consider fair use. It doesn't require them to accept that the alleged violation is fair use or even to do a detailed analysis:

In order to comply with the strictures of § 512(c)(3)(A)(v), a copyright holder's consideration of fair use need not be searching or intensive. We follow Rossi's guidance that formation of a subjective good faith belief does not require investigation of the allegedly infringing content

As for the quote, Fair use is not just excused by the law, it is wholly authorized by the law

The court is referring to 17 USC 107. Fair use exists in the context of whether something is a violation of copyright, in the same sense that self-defense is authorized by the law but is still a defense to criminal charges. Notably, I didn't call it an affirmative defense because it is not one.

> On what grounds do you think it would constitute fair use?

It meets at least 2 of the fair use factors:

1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;

> Fair use isn't some magic pixie dust that lets you do whatever you want with someone else's copyrighted material.

I didn't claim it was? I said this specific use seems to be a fairly good example. See above factors.

> Fair use is a defense you can raise in court, _after_ you have been sued. It is not a presumptive right.

Not correct. This has been challenged in court and it was found that fair use is a right and not simply a defense.

> On what grounds do you think it would constitute fair use?

Can you take a few seconds of a video and show it to a class of students for educational purpose?

Yes, you can

Can you do the same to test a software feature?

Yes, you can

The video is never used or displayed for its commercial value, but only to learn something from it.

> youtube-dl isn't just a user facing tool

it sure is on my end

The keyword here is "isn't just". It is, but there's more. For example, I use the commandline tool youtube-dl to download videos, but I sometimes also use mpv to play YouTube videos transparently (it invokes youtube-dl internally). The former use is user-facing, while the latter one is not.

> play YouTube videos from your favorite standalone player in better quality than using a web player

Mildly off topic and poor timing I guess, but can you recommend any?

VLC uses youtube-dl. https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube

Which is then in violation of YouTube ToS

Any use of youtube-dl is in violation of the ToS, no?

An existence of a github repo can't be in violation of YouTube ToS, because it doesn't use YouTube service.

Surely Fair Use exceptions and DDA provide legal reason for downloading any media in USA. A particular download might lie outside those exceptions, but it's not a thing you can deduce from code, you need to know who is running out and what the context is.

This comment is my personal opinion, not legal advice, and in no way relates to my employment.

>As people have stated before, the whole point of those tests is that they test a specific kind of obfuscation that YouTube only uses for certain partner videos.

what is the purpose of this obfuscation? I mean if it is to hide the licensed content then legally speaking it doesn't sound like a great argument.

I didn't dive in the code that much but I think it is a cost effective DRM, a protection you can't remove accidentally by renaming a file on your computer (ie you need to break it specifically even if removing said obfuscation is easy) and thus is protected by DMCA. In my opinion, it is the only argument in RIAA letter that is relevant.

So to have a "nice" youtube-dl, just remove those tests and more importantly the DRM removal (not sure it will benefit RIAA in long term though...)

It's not DRM. It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access. The purpose of obfuscation is the opposite, it makes sure that you can still for example run the obfuscated code, but it's just hard to understand what's going on.

The reality is that there is no "circumvention of protection measures", like RIAA is claiming. Youtube provides a javascript to decrypt their cipher, youtube-dl runs it just as intended and that's it, that's just what a normal browser does.

It can't be DRM, obfuscation is never a valid measure to restrict access.

From a technical (code) perspective, obfuscation may be an inadequate protection. But legally, the DMCA only requires some technical measure, and obfuscation satisfies that requirement. It is irrelevant that youtube-dl waits until after Youtube decrypts the content, since the law as written is agnostic to the specific technical details of how copyright protection schemes are implemented.

The content itself is not encrypted in any way as far as I know. They encrypt some kind of URL, to the actual content I think.

If this is truly the case, then every web browser that can access YouTube and supports JavaScript is guilty as well.

It's like distributing an encrypted video along with a python script that decrypts it and then saying that anyone who executes that script on linux is circumventing the copy protection. It's ridiculous.

No, that's not how the DMCA or copyright works at all.

Youtube-dl will not win this argument based on technical details on how content is provided by a licensee to an end user. That's irrelevant to how copyright law works. The entire history of copyright law has been about preventing the unauthorized copying of protected works through technical means, so copyright laws are deliberately agnostic to how the technical details are implemented. In the case of the DMCA, all that is required is that some technical effort went into restricting the unauthorized copying of licensed content.

A lot of HN commenters have pointed out that the technical efforts were quite simple: obfuscating the name of the cache file in the browser's cache folder. But for legal purposes that is sufficient. And if it's not, then in the very near future Youtube will no longer store RIAA music videos (or possibly any content) in an accessible cache folder, and congratulations: youtube-dl (and its competitors) won't work at all for it's namesake site.

I mean, sure, but the argument is that it circumvents the protection measures. If you willingly give someone a dedicated tool that decrypts your content, I just don't understand in what world using it is considered to be a circumvention of protection measures.

I have no idea how American courts usually work, but what a given program actually does seems pretty relevant to me, if you allege something like that. But I guess that's just my opinion and the American law really is that fucked. Thanks for your answer.

If you willingly give someone a dedicated tool that decrypts your content, I just don't understand in what world using it is considered to be a circumvention of protection measures.

No, they don't willingly give someone a dedicated tool that decrypts the content. Youtube simply does that for expediency.

The end result if youtube-dl wins on these technical access grounds is that Youtube will be forcedby the RIAA and other content licensors to stop caching content in accessible form. Youtube-dl will win the battle and lose the war.

The point is that they provide the tool for clients to decrypt the URL. And youtube-dl is a YouTube client, just like Chrome or Firefox is. If you have a key to a locked house, unlocking the door doesn't mean that you "circumvented the door" and went in through a window. I really don't know how else to put it.

I might be missing something, but I'm not sure what's the caching thing is about. YouTube tells you under what URL you can access the specific video or audio file, you download it and that's it. Whether the downloaded data is saved to a file or temporarily stored in RAM or whatever is up to the client. And the way everything is structured right now, I really can't see any other way they could do it without creating some kind of proprietary YouTube client.

> I really can't see any other way they could do it without creating some kind of proprietary YouTube client.

The next step is probably go with Widevine: but YouTube probably doesn’t want to go there unless it has to.

It looks like a measure against hotlinking, but not against execution of the script as intended, if that's what youtube-dl does. Is it what they call winedive or something else?

Probably a dumb question but could they remove the tests and put them in a different repo?

That's what I was thinking. It can optionally integrate youtube-dl-tests or whatever.

Former lead developer Philipp Hagemeiste:

These videos were never fully downloaded anyways; 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.

https://news.perthchat.org/youtube-dl-removed-from-github/

I know this is an unpopular opinion and I probably get downvoted for this. But I stand my ground that I think the assumption of fair use for this copyright circumventing algorithm is wrong.

------

First off: Fair Use does not exist. It is an assumption, not a defined situation as it requires legal evaluation in court to apply. And on top of that: It is a regional difference and is therefore completely unpredictable whether it applies or not.

Assuming fair use on a platform with a proprietary license that even forbids downloading, while downloading proprietary content specifically to circumvent copyright protection, while fair use does only exist as a "possibibility" inside, and only inside, the US and only after a legal case was decided in at least state level court ... really?

You get sued for downloading 512kB of porn illegaly, just as you can get sued for downloading 10kB of copyrighted youtube videos.

As I said, this was just a suggestion to remove that attack surface. Another attack surface is the trademark violation, but that's a different case.

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— ...

-- 17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

How can you prove that youtube dl is used specifically for, say, classroom purposes? Can you prove it? Probably not.

Is circumventing a copyright mechanism an educational or journalistic purpose? In a testsuite? ...

Even when siding with you, you would need a court case to evaluate whether fair use applies or not.

Again, as I said, unnecessary attack surface. I don't care whether you or I am right or wrong. Nobody of us can be right unless a court case has been made.

It's unnecessary and could have been prevented.

You made a bald assertion that Fair Use does not exist, and is not law. U.S. Code demonstrates otherwise.

You might wish to show the sportsmanship of admitting your previous error before embarking on further ones.

Fair Use is a circumstancial definition in the law. It is not clearly defined and needs a court case in order to apply.

Therefore I still think that the assumption of Fair Use to apply is wrong. However, the assumption of copyright to apply on the other hand is correct.

But, referring to whether fair use exists or not, I agree with you that technically it exists.

But as the rest of the very same law criminalizes by default, you can still not refer to fair use if you do not have the required-by-law evidence at hand for it to apply.

I think that fair use is almost always nearly impossible to prove, that's why I wrote my statement like this. And I agree that it was worded badly.

If I claim you violated my copyright and you disagree, it will be determined in court. If I claim you violated my copyright and you claim it's fair use, and I disagree, it will be determined in court.

What's the difference?

Fair use is not a “right” (as in a well defined thing you can do freely) but rather a “defense” if someone claims a copyright violation. It’s defined in terms that need to be evaluated by a judge case by case (e.g., if there is an economical damage).

Rights can be challenged too.

17 USC 108(f)(4) states "Nothing in this section— ... in any way affects the right of fair use as provided by section 107". Emphasis added.

Your claim is contradicted by statute.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108

Yes, Fair Use is an affirmative defence, not an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. I clearly state this in the article. (Author)

Actually, in Lenz v. Universal, Fair Use is more than an affirmative defence:

we hold — for the purposes of the DMCA — fair use is uniquely situated in copyright law so as to be treated differently than traditional affirmative defenses. We conclude that because 17 U.S.C. § 107 created a type of non-infringing use, fair use is "authorized by the law" and a copyright holder must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification under § 512(c).

-- 9th Circuit

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=125676491686801...

"Educational" isn't a blanket license to copy. Otherwise there would be no textbook publishers, or companies that make films for classroom use.

(I have a friend who makes a living as a choral composer. Churches, he finds, are the biggest thieves! They believe they don't have to pay for music because they're a Church.)

As another comment pointed out, youtube-fl is not _circumventing_ the mechanism, it is merely using it as intended by its creators. It does exactly what a web browser must do to play the said videos. Just like a browser is allowed to do the same thing to get the right video, put it right there in plain data on your computer and play it - no proprietary DRM ever steps in the process! - , youtube-dl follows the same steps. So youtube-dl is no different from a browser that also has a "download to your computer" button - every other behavior is the same.

> First off: Fair Use does not exist. It is an assumption, not a defined situation or law.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Copyright_Act_of_1976#%C2%A7_...

Further recommended reading: Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.

Is the problem with copyright or drm or they are the same thing?

Universal's sole textual argument is that fair use is not "authorized by the law" because it is an affirmative defense that excuses otherwise infringing conduct. Universal's interpretation is incorrect as it conflates two different concepts: an affirmative defense that is labeled as such due to the procedural posture of the case, and an affirmative defense that excuses impermissible conduct. Supreme Court precedent squarely supports the conclusion that 11331133 fair use does not fall into the latter camp: "[A]nyone who ... makes a fair use of the work is not an infringer of the copyright with respect to such use." Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 433, 104 S.Ct. 774, 78 L.Ed.2d 574 (1984).*

-- Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., 801 F. 3d 1126 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2015

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=125676491686801...

no it's not. intent is also taken into account of fair use and the intent of those test cases is to make sure their program gets around a specific counter measures youtube as put into place so people cannot directly download the media and are forced to stream it.

look... i love the project and everything, but philip is just plain in the wrong and doesn't want to admit it.

The statement is relevant regards one of RIAA's three claims; that youtube-dl infringes RIAA member works in executing its test suite.

That averred infringement is a specific claim. Though weak, it's the strongest specific claim RIAA makes.

Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed in the testing itself, contrary to RIAA's claim.

The infringement does not occur in the source code or test suite itself, it occurs inccidental to testing functionality of the software (that is, it is inherently functional, not expressive), the copies made fall within existing limitations to exclusive rights (§112, §117, §512(a) and (b)), and tests (1), (3), and (4) of §107 fair use.

RIAA's standing on anti-circ §1201 is separate from this question, poorly justified, and likely lacks standing.

dude... you just dug your own grave with your statement:

"Hagemeister's comment establishes that minimal copying is performed..."

bottom line... they are still downloading and copying the file, regardless of what for or how much which is exactly what the RIAA is claiming. you can cite whatever it is you want, the fact is that youtube-dl is DEAD wrong in what they are doing.

Since when did fair use mean "no copying at all?"

Fair use copying, in any amount so deemed, "is not an infringement of copyright". The statute lists four tests. Any one of these, or other conditions, may be sufficient.

The third test is "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole".

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

Again, Hagemeister establishes that a bare minimum copying is performed, sufficient to verify code function. A fact which would overwhelmingly tend to a fair use finding.

i'm gonna say it again...

you can cite whatever it is you want, the fact of the matter is, that those test cases are going to seal their doom. any lawyer worth their salt can use those as evidence of them writing specific code to target and bypass security protections so they can download copyrighted works.

i can guarantee within the upcoming weeks we will see a lawsuit filed against everyone involved in youtube-dl... and guess what, they are going to lose that case.

Youtube-dl is executing code provided by Google/YouTube, for World Wide Web user agents, as a World Wide Web user agent, and meant to be accessed and run by user agents in order to access YouTube content. That is, youtube-dl's operation is entirely within YouTube's technical design and intent.

From TFA.

and your article means absolutely nothing. the bottom is, we need to wait and see how is thing will play in court which i guarantee is where it will be heading soon.

>test cases are going to seal their doom. any lawyer worth their salt can use those as evidence of them writing specific code to target and bypass security protections so they can download copyrighted works.

Doesn't this apply to all browsers too? A browser has to actually download the copyrighted work to play it back, regardless whether it's "streaming" it or not. Chunks of the file get downloaded and those protections will have to be bypassed to be able to play it back, no?

We know that different media players rely on youtube-dl to be able to play back videos from YouTube. Are they not allowed to be able to play back YouTube content then?

> any lawyer worth their salt

Any statement that includes this phrase can be ignored as bad legal advice.

> they are still downloading and copying the file, regardless of what for or how much which is exactly what the RIAA is claiming. you can cite whatever it is you want, the fact is that youtube-dl is DEAD wrong in what they are doing.

This doesn't make any sense to me as an attack on a fair use defense.

Fair Use is, by definition, an affirmative defense against copyright infringement. To invoke it, you assume (even if arguendo) that the copying did take place. Fair Use is a legal justification of the copying, not an argument that copying did take place.

So, pointing out that copying took place and spiking the football as if that's the end of the conversation is nonsensical if you're arguing against a Fair Use defense.

> intent is also taken into account of fair use

And the intent of tests is to test the functionality of this software.

i totally agree with you, however the specific tests that the DCMA complaint is referring to is testing that the program circumvents protection to make sure the program can download specific copyrighted videos.

The issue isn't how much of the music videos were downloaded during testing. That may or may not fair use.

The issue is that they were testing the ability to download music videos in the first place, meaning that the tool was intended at least in part to download music videos subject to copyright.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dredmorbius

As a user, I would really like youtube-dl to not break on random videos. I have a number of machines that can't handle watching youtube directly in firefox but using youtube-dl with mpv works fine. If RIAA can't handle people watching their videos then they should go build their own hosting site and force people to download some .exe DRM to watch them.

The RIAA should provide me with a dedicated device and pay me for any and all traffic use that is unrequested/ad-related, instead of trying to hack the PC and network connection that I am paying for to force me to watch ads.

Maybe the venn diagram of "people who create wild things and throw them out there" and "people who are legally cautious and circumspect" might show only minor overlap. It's sort of the opposite of creativity.

I just thought of a clearer way to say this.

Creativity is about what can I do. Legal caution is about what can't I do.

It wouldn't surprise me if a fork popped up and did most of these things right. It would also be the right time to drop the 'youtube-dl' name for something better.

Something like 'VideoArchiver' if you want to be safe.

Or MultimediaArchiver, AFAIK it works with some audio only sources as well.

Working off my "Swiss army knife" metaphor, something evoking that.

- mediaswak

- mediablade

- sonicscrewdriver (say, "ssdr" for short)

- mediamultitool (mmt)

- webMediaFlexiTool (wmft)

For me the first thing that comes to mind for "multimedia Swiss army knife" is ffmpeg. I think that right keywords here are "web", "media" and "download" (although it can do things other than downloading, like extracting stream URLs or just querying available formats).

StreamingSlayer

freedomdownloader

https://github.com/dvoyakiy/youtube-dl-reborn

You send all the calls to invidio.us servers, period. Problem solved.

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