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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Could be a mistake but it could also be in line with their already stated policy of removing hacking information.

I don't care about the distinction you are about to make nor do I care to post an opinion on the matter. Just information for anyone passing by.

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Where will they draw the line? What about channels focused on the physical security like Lock Picking Lawyer?

They won't draw a line. They will just react arbitrarily and rely on the clout of the person they messed with to be the appeals process.

They should be required by law to allow him to download a full archive of all the videos he posted if he doesn't have a local backup, so long as they're not clearly illegal (e.g. child abuse).

Why should that be required by law?

For the same reason a storage company shouldn't be able to burn all the stuff in your unit if they evict you.

But aren’t they? Maybe not literally burn, but aren’t there multiple reality TV shows about repossessed storage units?

That's for the money that's owed them from not paying the rent.

YouTube doesn't charge rent or other fees, and I'm not sure how they'd auction your digital copyrighted IP anyhow.

Yeah, but most places will put your storage unit into "default" for some time, usually 30 days, and make multiple attempts to contact you before auctioning your stuff. Generally speaking, in the U.S. most states have lien laws that dictate how and for how long a company must attempt to contact you before they can auction.

Youtube could do something similar, by providing you 30 days to download your content.

exactly! I see no excuse for YouTube not to allow this, as long as videos haven't been flagged for e.g. sexual abuse (where YouTube itself would be liable for continuing to store it.) I think the only reason they don't do it is because they don't have to and they don't care.

instituting a 30-day retention period to exporting content would be really good for users. shame we can't pass tech laws in the US.

Those are mostly staged. In reality all they find is spiders and bits of cardboard boxes.

A storage company can't burn my stuff because:

1. That's arson, a crime.

2. I have a contract with them (including consideration) to store my stuff.

YT is not a storage company. You do not have a contract with them to store your data with an obligation to return it.

Don't know about where you live but where I do storage units are regulated and could not put a "burn your stuff" clause into the tenant contract even if they wanted to. It's a surprisingly highly regulated business.

That's currently legal, so you just replaced "YouTube" with "storage company" but didn't actually answer the question.

They are required, depending on jurisdiction, to provide the information that they have about you that they have derived from other sources, and if the data you have provided is small enough it makes sense to give a download if everything rather than making an effort to separate it out.

But for a video site the provided content is going to dwarf the other data/metadata stored about a person/account/channel so it does make sense to separate them, and I don't see why they should be required to give over resources so you can download data that in theory you should already have. They are a content hosting service, not a content backup service.

> so long as they're not clearly illegal

That makes things even more complicated. How do they decide, given some things are grey areas almost everywhere and some things are very much illegal in some places but not others?

I dunno, https://codeofhacking.blogspot.com/2018/01/burp-suite-pro-v1... looks pretty illegal to me? No need to immediately take the crime up to 11, using the youtube platform to help people commit software piracy will do.

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