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Comment by thomasfl | Hacker News Reader

Why can't YouTube and Alphabet simply provide a download button or a public API? When you are running the worlds largest digital museum of rare video footage, you have some obligations to the society.

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Can't run ads on them, and you risk lawsuits of all kind if you let people easily download copyrighted content. They aren't running a museum, it just happens to be the largest video sharing platform on the planet.

> it just happens to be the largest video sharing platform on the planet.

china might want to disagree

No chance. YT has 2bn+ unique logins a month. China only has 800m internet users max. Further the video streaming landscape in China is much more fragmented than outside the country where YT is dominant.

i stand corrected.

totally forgot about india

Apparently, copyright law makes this an unwise proposition. But the least they could do is offer the Internet Archive with some privileged access so all this can be mirrored and viewed when it's out of copyright in 80 years.

They could at least let you download videos for which the author specified a free license, such as Creative Commons, or videos that are public domain. There are a lot of these videos so why not?

Just discovered that several video sharing sites, like pexels.com, have a download button on videos with creative commons license. They are off course useless for professional YouTubers, but great for everybody else.

It's not copyright law, it's the agreements that YT has with copyright owners. No one is going to license their content to YT if the site allows anyone to download whatever is there.

If it wasn't for copyright law, there wouldn't be copyright owners. So copyright law is ultimately responsible for the status quo.

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