Music industry is suing youtube-dl hosters
news.i-n24.com
news.i-n24.com
If something gives us any power at all, they'll sue it into oblivion.
Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.
That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process.
> With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser.
They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.
Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default.
This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients.
If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons.
Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.
But if you build your own Blu-Ray player and distribute the plans for others to do so as well, they'll be legally on top of you in a jiffy.
YouTube-dl is like that homemade Blu-Ray player -- it's something that's working on your behalf, not theirs.
The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."
Take a look at China’s use of AI tech.
And yet... it is entirely consistent with the way the music industry has been acting for over 20 years, since the popularity of Napster.
10 PROFITS = MAX(PROFITS)
20 GOTO 10Every corporation is exactly that. Humans are just the substrate it runs on.
Yeah. It's like a global mass gaslighting. One day there's a video, the other day it's just gone, no mention is ever made of it again and you're expected to just accept it.
Letting everyone do things in their own self interest, unchecked, is rarely found in stable societies. For example, one persons interest (getting music for free) may not align with another's (the starving artist's).
The "starving" or small time artist is an excuse that is useful for corporations when they want to manipulate public opinion. No music label cares even the slightest bit about individual artists or their fair payment, they care about megahits and big sellers.
If you want to support your favourite artist that isn't already a millionaire or multi-millionare paying for spotify isn't it.
To actually support "starving artists" visit their shows, buy some merch (however even this isn't the case anymore for some) or look for independent artists on bandcamp (bandcamp takes 15% of a sold album).
If all you do is pay for spotify or something like that you are not supporting a "starving artist" any more than someone downloading the songs, maybe even less because sharing the music on the right filesharing forums might at least lead to some of the sales (merch/concert) above.
For anyone interested have a look at https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
To add to that: Big labels hurt small time artists immensely. If you are an artist on youtube getting hit with a (false) copyright claim by a large label is a constant threat to you. It even happens to people with songs with millions of views [1]. We have reached a point where using certain chords or chord progression can get you stomped by music labels.
Music labels are not in any way friends or allys to "starving artists", only to millionaire artists.
Computers exist and are networked. Data is trivially and infinitely copyable. The clock will not be rewound back to the dark ages where data was a finite product that people could buy and sell. No matter how much the music industry rages and sues, it won't change the fact that YouTube is just sending me data via HTTP and there's absolutely nothing they can do if I decide to redirect that data to my hard disk instead. It's up to them to adapt to their new reality. If they can't, that's their problem.
So far corporations has been pretty unchecked, maybe that's got something to do with political instability today.
They broadcast free of charge, and when we don't consume that broadcast in the manner they hoped, they use it to justify taking away our right to run software of our choosing. It's obscene.
As in "freedom"?
>is rarely found in stable societies
As in most of the developed world?
Even though videos are the main content, Youtube is also the #1 website in the world for streaming music:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-did-youtu...
https://musically.com/2021/03/22/surprise-youtube-is-the-mos...
e.g. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YQfkm4Vp-1o&list=PLZGh95p3...
This seems to me to be akin to bullying a mouse because bullying the elephant in the room isn't going to pan out.
I don't care about the longevity of the record industry. Music is alive and well, with liberal distribution on the Internet making discovery and independent distribution so much easier. There's more music than ever, and much of it goes straight to YouTube (or Nico Nico).
Music is culture and important. Yes, it is important to be paid for your music, but it is more important for music to be heard. Piracy should live. Fuck the labels, fuck the whole music industry creating plastic „art“ that has no meaning whatsoever. Let‘s make art, not money.
If artists aren't paid for making art, much less art is created. So if music is important to you, you can't just ignore the question of how to pay for it.
It's nice to say "let's make art, not money", great soundbite, but artists are people just like everyone else, who deserve to be compensated for their work. And who can't live without having money to buy food.
Let‘s talk about this differently. The impact of real art is way more important than a few plastic pseudo-art creating „i am special“ people not making money to live a life as an „artist“ / influencer on instagram… Buuut: anyway.
Someone's told them that "X million songs per year" are downloaded via youtube-dl. They get $Y in royalties per thousand views, and they have some number Z which is the average number of times an individual will listen to a song. There's been a boardroom meeting where these numbers have been presented as "X million songs per year are being pirated, costing us X * $Y * Z / 1000 per year, THIS must STOP!"
Meanwhile, independent music is thriving thanks to the Internet. Let it burn.
Because to find a counterexample you would only need a single artist who has the opportunity to spend more of their time working creatively (rather than their previous civilian job) because they get a royalty cheque every now and then. I personally know four of five such people.
Honestly, they're probably targeting it because it's easy to find with the Google searches they're trying.
I've got a playlist called music into which I add music. ^^
On my mobile phone I've got Termux with an add-on that allows you to add widgets that run custom code.
I've written a simple script ( yt-dlp -P ~/storage/shared/Music -i -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --no-restrict-filenames --download-archive ~/music_archive.txt -x --audio-quality 0 <link to the playlist> ). Which is ran whenever I press on the widget. I could use crontab, but since I don't add music that often, I prefer to do it manually. ( The -o is for file name, normally the file would have the same name as the source, but for unknown reason so of my files' names for restricted to ~40 chars, doing it the way you see above solves the issue).
Before this system I used to have a similar script on my PC and crontab running it. The script downloaded music into Google Drive and on the mobile phone I had a program that would sync that folder with music to the phones music folder.
But the current system is far superior, for one it doesn't fill up my Google Drive and secondly it doesn't require multiple devices to work.
Being able to use a terminal on my phone makes me really happy! ^^
So when you press the widget it runs yt-dlp on your phone, or is it sending a command to a remote PC?
When I press on the widget it runs yt-dlp on my phone. There are no other devices involved in the process, just my phone.
"You are not allowed to: access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as specifically permitted by the Service; (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders; or (c) as permitted by applicable law;"
2) Large part of world's population can't afford subscription services
3) There's a lot of music that is not on music streaming services but is on YouTube
4) Sometimes you need the mp3 file (for ringtone, for editing, for remixing etc)
5) There are still some people who rather want everything on their HDD
You just described youtube in general. As the old saying goes, "content is king". Look at VHS (if you're old enough to remember). As bad of a quality as it was, everyone used it. Pros would complain about how bad it looked, but the mass populace was just fine with it. Youtube is the same way. In the beginning, the quality was soooo bad, but users didn't care because it gave them endless content.
But more than the quality for the top 100 pop songs almost all the official music videos they now put in like interludes, breaks, talking over and stuff to cut it up so it's not just the song.
Makes listening harder. for those who come to watch the video too.
It works very well with many non-YouTube sites, especially ones hosting “adult” videos.
I assume porn is the most common case, but archiving Stanford lectures might well be second.
I mean obviously I am not the last person to make this decision, but I have a feeling that the population yet to do so are vanishingly small.
For those who don't know, youtube-dl can do this oob if ffmpeg is installed:
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format <best|mp3|ogg|*> <url> [youtube-dl | yt-dlp] -f 140 <url>
RIP my most recent favorite Zelda background music vid.
I do. And I pirate it myself. Though many people around me did get Spotify when it launched here recently.
My choice is usually to just reboot to Windows, fire up iTunes, buy the songs I want and listen to them DRM free. The only Apple product that I use xD
How many copies of youtube-dl and DeCSS and PlayStation 5 private keys and such need to get put onto the blockchain before the Music Industry tries to sue it out of existence?
Also, there's enough money in blockchain to buy out the music industry.
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy:
>17 U.S.C. § 1008 bars copyright infringement action and 17 U.S.C. § 1003 provides for a royalty of 2% of the initial transfer price for devices and 3% for media.[20] The royalty rate in 17 U.S.C. § 1004 was established by the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998. This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. The royalty also applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers. Most recently, portable satellite radio recording devices contribute to this royalty fund.
>Thanks to a precedent established in a 1998 lawsuit involving the Rio PMP300 player, most MP3 players are deemed "computer peripherals" and are not subject to a royalty of this type in the U.S.
>Currently, private copy royalties are generated in the US by the sale of "blank CDs and personal audio devices, media centers, satellite radio devices, and car audio systems that have recording capabilities."[21]
Not saying that I agree with them, but "I use it for a legit purpose" doesn't mean they are going to act sensibly.
The opposite of "quite a few" would be "quite few".
EDIT: on reading some of the linked sources I realise I was wrong about this.
Thanks!
I take it you don't speak English yourself? You can apply "quite" to any adjective, including "few".
(EDIT: TIL from the sibling comments that it always means "super many, lol" which surprised me) (I'm not a native English speaker)
The Streisand Effect didn't save Napster or Popcorn Time. It could only save these people from the RIAA if they actually made enough money to fight the lawsuits and win.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/21/arts/issue-and-debate-roy...
Of course everybody knows that it's practically covering missed royalties from illegally copied content, but according to the letter of the law it isn't.
How much more absurd can this become?
Maybe they do charge the Microsoft fee anyway, but I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't fix that issue.
The article makes a critical point: We already PAID for the right to download this material, and have been paying for decades.
Also, I've known several friends in bands. So far I've never heard of any of them receiving a check for blank-media taxes collected "on their behalf."
If their claims were valid they should have all collapsed in ruin 20 years ago.
Anyway, if they didn't want people to be able to copy their stuff, then they shouldn't have put it on YouTube. The music industry is being as dumb as they ever where, it's fascinating that they've learned NOTHING in the past twenty years. How much money can they possibly lose on youtube-dl vs. how much money they continue the scam out of artists.
At this point who doesn't have a subscription to a streaming service? Those who don't where never going to pay anyway. They aren't losing money.
The obvious and dominant form of music copying was with double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms and bedrooms around the world.
And in the end, the media publishers' lies about "perfect digital copies" were proven to be just that, as profoundly IMperfect MP3s became the real threat.
/s
[1]: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/urheberrecht-musikindustrie-ver...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
English is the Lingua Franca of the tech world.
Except that the copyright of the contents is with the creators, not YouTube. And also something being in the terms of use does not make it legal, and they cannot make fair use illegal.
We're losing the battle for general computing, or may have lost already.
Did you ever work in IT support? Because that's exactly what way too many people think.
That said, they don't know if youtube-dl users are planning to share their files in torrents, upload them to random websites, etc. I think their goal is just to prevent anyone listening to music in DRM-free environments, regardless of how harmful of a crusade they have to go on.
For more than 12 years now I host my web projects (nearly) exclusively with them. I really enjoy the way they are setup and structured.
You pay what 10GB of hosting is worth to you (min 1 Euro). Shared hosting without sudo. Great user support. Really helpful and real knowledgeable people actually trying to help.
I can't recommend them enough.
When I started I couldn't afford to pay more than a few bucks a month. Now using them professionally and hosting client projects there I can support them by paying more per month.
Sadly having to fight in the Hamburg doesn't help. In Germany the Hamburg court is known for their pro music industry stance.
The experience of consuming media via an offline software is just infinitely better for my focus.
I would rather see Youtube die than Youtube-DL. Youtube-DL has a lot of use cases.
Seriously, we're talking of a tool whose purpose is to download publicly available videos. What's the big deal? It's not even used for music piracy, for God's sake. I've never seen anyone download their favourite album from YouTube videos and use ffmpeg to extract the mp3s. Most of the folks just use Spotify.
So what's the big deal? That if we use youtube-dl then we don't see ads and we don't get tracked? Oohh, actually that's the whole fcking point, you know? youtube-dl pisses lots of people in the majors not because it's used to illegally download musical content (I'm pretty sure that's only an insignificant fraction of its usage), but because it hurts their "new" way of doing revenue: ads, tracking, and more ads.
And you know what? I'm more than happy to hurt such a shtty way of doing revenue!
--extract-audio --audio-format mp3However cutting the full albums apart and tagging the resulting songs is serious work that I don't think a lot of people would do realistically in times of spotify.
-f251
I'm afraid of naming them here because not sure of the repercussions
Might not be the best place to ask this, but its something I wonder about a lot.
The only time it's allowed is when they have the appropriate licenses. (sync license under DMCA for music synchronized to live streams)
Streamers were doing this without repercussion 5 years ago because the streaming industry wasn't large enough for the music industry to care about. That changed about two years ago.
The same holds for cam models, it's just that they're not getting claims for whatever reason. Maybe the music industry just isn't that focused on live pornography?
Like, for example, how at the beginning of January 2022, Sony Music Entertainment had got ALL the legitimate Youtube videos of the Vienna New Year's Concert forbidden to stream in Japan...
This is yet another example of abuse of the fact that Youtube, confronted with a copyright infringement report, will first just block the reported video, and only after that will consider appeals...
So now all these videos are allowed again. (took several weeks)
I could argue that the software is a web browser, admittedly one tailored around a specific use case.
I feel the music industry has to do a better job explaining how downloading a youtude video via the youtube-dl user agent is different than downloading the same video via the firefox user agent.
They're not like us, they don't know or care what user agents are. The only thing that matters to them is control. To them, the idea that someone might do something they didn't approve of is an atrocity that must be combated at all costs. They actually think that browsers are glorified passive content consumption platforms where they get to set the rules and it's take it or leave it. Even something as basic as user scripts is an affront to them because it means the user is not a passive consumer anymore.
What's the music industry's fear? People making their own remixes and becoming too powerful, rhythmically? No. They don't like people not paying. People don't like paying. Therefore they avoid it. It's not courageous nor morally repugnant, but the motivation is entirely self-interested and the result is mildly negative for the actual people working in creative industries.
This "drivel" means exactly what I wrote: there is no acceptable explanation for anything they do. Nothing they say will ever change the fact that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with the 21st century, the age of free flowing information.
> It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?
Shallow?
These corporations have robbed the whole world of our public domain rights. They lobbied the US government multiple times until they made copyright duration functionally infinite. They use the US government to impose their copyright on the rest of the world. They work on DRM which means they are completely opposed to the computing freedom we all enjoy today and are atively working to undermine it. And on and on.
Of course copyright infringement is active citizenry. It's civil disobedience and at this point it's a moral imperative. To pay them even one cent is to empower them to do even worse.
Yes, actually. It's not uncommon for remixes to be taken down.
MPA tried to get the source code repository for Nyaa.si removed from GitHub by saying "the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows)."
It was completely bullshit since they forgot to mention that the project provides everything necessary to engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows EXCEPT the actual copyrighted motion pictures and television shows. The repo is back up after a reversal: https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/
Only once regular people can no longer write dangerous code will the music industry finally be safe.
I think we can agree at least that countries which ban communication tools have worse human rights records than countries which don't restrict them as much.
Also, I don't dispute the media industry's premise that a government which had complete control over all software installed on people's computers could decide to reduce the amount of copyright infringement.
youtube-dl -f bestaudio [url]
then convert to 12kbps Opus with
ffmpeg -i [file] -b:a 12K [file].opus
I could even do this from my phone over SSH but eventually made a simple web frontend for it. I haven't opened it to the public though, because of, well, news stories like this one.
Plus, I haven't studied this but I don't think they reencode all old content. New videos seems consistent but older videos can have varying things available. Using bestaudio & ffmpeg will definitely get you a consistent result. I can't promise hard-coded -f options for specific formats will be reliable.
They'd probably have the same issue if youtube added a "download as audio" button to every video without paying studios.
Most people, including the court, would easily see through this as trivial sophistry. It's not much of a legal strategy.
If you make content available via HTTP, then obviously any HTTP client will be able to access it. It doesn't matter that they "meant" for the content to be accessed through browsers.
If they had a proprietary client that wasn't a browser, they wouldn't be complaining at all. So why does it matter? It's about control. It's the fact that user agents act in our behalf in order to do what we want and protect our interests. They want to force us to use something that acts on their behalf, does what they want and protects their interests.
This isn't about "human judges". Those are all paid for. Industry lobbyists literally create the laws that they blindly enforce.
No, this is about a stealthy war that's being fought for the control of our computers. There will never be peace between us. Either the entire copyright industry will be destroyed or we will lose the computing freedom we all currently enjoy and the entire concept of "hacking" will be a footnote of history.
While I like youtube-dl, it's clearly not an intended way to interact with YouTube.
I'm curious how you reached that conclusion. The maintainers of YouTube-DL would certainly disagree!
And as long as DRM software is in browsers it's a somewhat understandable confusion.
I understood that reference.
This is the system in other places (eg. Germany) and greatly prevents legal bullying
Companies can still calculate the costs of losing the case and come to the conclusion that the benefit of the intimidation alone is worth it.
I think we sorta want more proactive and aggressive state attorneys that will prosecute seen injustices for the public good. I've pondered this a lot and I can't really see any obvious other path that doesn't have even worse potential consequences.
Make both parties start in non-binding arbitration, where the plaintiff pays.
If either party chooses to escalate, they'll be on the hook for all the fees, including the original arbitration, if they loose.
Plaintiffs could purchase insurance or some other vehicle to de-risk their claims if they believe, but aren't certain, that they'll win. This will help smaller parties that get infringed upon.
Could this be solved if we moved towards more % based monetary penalties?
Anyways, less extreme would be that we could go back to reasonable copyright terms as existed a hundred years ago. It seems likely at this point that our current 'experiment' with extreme copyright enforcement is going to produce an entire 100+ year range where the only works that will survive will be those owned by massive corporations who hold perpetual ownership of the work instead of their actual creators.
Yes, it means no more Disney movies or AAA games. I'm personally quite ok with that.
[0] This is largely for the sake of argument, although I do definitely lean this direction.
There's nothing wrong with protecting trade secrets, etc. but that is the onus of the secret holder to employ proper security measures. If someone assaults those measures, you prosecute them for those specific assaults (physical, cyber, etc).
But you don't prosecute people merely for being in possession or distributing "intellectual property" i.e. ideas and symbols. Only a backwards society would allow that.
If people don't have to sell their creative work for profit to live, you don't need copyright.
A tool is not piracy.This is not even an argument, let alone a stupid one ,alongside the idiocy of one who believes it.The web already becomes cancerous enough with DRM [Ex: Try installing a FOSS-only system, let's say fedora + librewolf and try playing anything w/o installing flash or drm plugins].
I would sincerely have thought that youtube-dl would be hosted on some random non-cooperative country, instead of Germany. That it wasn't, came out as a surprise to me.
If these interfaces go away, the future of music won’t be nearly as much fun as it is now.
It can be confirmed that someone at samsung is using youtube-dl.
All this to say this is all about retaining control for the rich execs and companies and not for the artists.
But please do think of the artist and support bandcamp and other such stores. Not these thieves because of whom even taylor had to re-record her songs
Many of us had to start doing that - some, particularly as DRM made purchases unfeasible (you buy a container and it only works on a section of Pioneelips models, or it works on the PC but not in the car stereo etc).
The problems are the music industry, the Majors (Sony, Warner, Universal), and ultimately, copyright.
Those are what we'll have to change or extirpate.
[0] https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/72/encrypted-traffic...
https://twitter.com/freezeframebot
YouTube themselves have blocked my IP too many times so it sadly remains inoperative.
If you have money and an army of good attorneys, you usually get what you want.
On a similar premise, there is a novel where aliens have been pirating music from Earth and are contemplating their options with respect to their legal liabilities.
(Thanks, Douglas...)