YouTube-DL Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I don’t think higher-ups at the RIAA or MPAA are so naïve as to believe they’re doing the right thing in any situation. They just prefer money and power to being decent.
Wikipedia gives more weight to Mitch Glazier¹ being a lobbyist than RIAA’s CEO. It comes as no surprise that:
> He played a role in drafting the No Electronic Theft Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the Copyright Term Extension Act.
I learned last week when taking my kids to see the Mario Bros. movie that it's no longer MPAA, but now MPA, the Motion Picture Association. I saw it on the green preview cards before each coming attraction. It's a bit scary: they now see their toxic behavior not only afflicting America, but the entire world.
Even though, as an article of basic critical thinking, they certainly aren't.
There are already cases and examples where Cloudflare and other CDNs have kicked sites off of their platform or responded to take down requests.
All it takes is enough money and/or political power.
The thing is this isn't new. Traditional publishing had throttles at the publisher, the seller and the library. Freedom of speech is not requirement to broadcast.
The USSR's constitution specified that not only was there freedom of speech but also freedom/right to "broadcast".
The state would give anyone access to a printing press to disseminate speech.
In practice it was a bit different though.
The American said "I am so free I can walk up to the gates of the white house and scream 'down with Reagan, he stinks'".
"I have that freedom too" responds the Soviet man, "I could walk over to the Kremlin right now and yell 'Down with Reagan he stinks'"
This is what happens when your system is not dumb pipes and can be massaged based on who is currently doing the bossing part.
And this is why I roll my eyes at anyone who tells me 'just do it yourself'. Do what at this point? Roll foundational infrastructure that should be dumb pipes?
Coffee did not kick in yet, but the game is rigged and whatever ideals existed with the emergence of early internet have been gone for a long time now. We are just seeing some of its more visible effects.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/signatures-seized-assets-sold...
> FDIC had told potential bidders that "any buyer of Signature must agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank."
And one of the members of Signature Banks board also claimed the FDIC shut them down without the bank being insolvent. See: https://www.wsj.com/articles/signature-bank-new-york-communi...
You can bet banks will be avoiding crypto.
AFAIK there's no way to say anything on the internet without permission from at least an ISP and DNS... and usually also a webhost and website you don't own. It would be nice to have some legal protections from at least some of those entities.
The state outsources everything, including censorship.
Then it can just say it's out of its hands.
With internet traffic consolidating to just a few major CDNs, the internet is getting more centralized
When did everyone decide they needed Cloudflare for everything? Or is this like how you need to use React and SSR even when you have a relatively simple static site, i.e. cargo cutting?
I think it was when Reddit and other social link platforms were becoming established, the linked sites would go viral and then the traffic would do an unintended DDOS.
Cloudflare and other providers offered free DDOS protection, then it became a defacto standard to have a CDN
When distributed denial-of-service attacks through botnets, sold as a service to anyone by the "owners" of these botnets, became popular. It takes just one person who doesn't like you, or even who wants to take your site down "for the lulz", to cause so much traffic that your site is disabled and removed by your hosting provider as a way to "protect" their other clients. By being widely spread over the global Internet, CDNs like cloudflare have the advantage that each node receives only a small portion of a widely distributed denial-of-service attack, instead of receiving all of it at a single place as would happen without a CDN.
So even though you aren't required to associate any more liberally than you desire--and requiring you to do so would be wrong--it's still true that we need most people to be quite liberal in their associations for this (or any) country to work.
That's all a long way of saying that it's valid to complain about private censorship. It's (generally) not okay to propose that we send in the troops to stop private censorship, but it's fine and good to complain when it happens. It's no different from arguing that some{body|entity} should be nicer, or more careful, or even stricter, for that matter.
My pet peeve however is, "They shouldn't do that" very often leads to, "We shouldn't let them do that." though, which I think we agree is a huge problem.
I call you a name, have I prevented you from expressing your rights? I wouldn't think so.
Apologies from the USA. We don't support the RIAA.
The law firm (Rasch) in this case is also no stranger to copyright and piracy dealings. If you search for its name you find websites dealing with their "Abmahnungen" (roughly Cease & Desist) [2, German].
[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2016/05/18/das-hamburger-mon... [2] https://www.abmahnung.org/rasch/
I'm a big believer in intellectual property rules and I hate piracy. These actions don't strike me as "censorship" because my enforcement of IP doesn't stop you from expressing yourself in any way. Oh sure, it stops you from pirating me, but that's not censorship. That's me stopping you from being a plagiarist and a copycat.
If anything, tough enforcement encourages people to actually express themselves because they can't just pirate someone else's hard work and pretend they did something of value for society.
Quit reading this. Go make your own content and enjoy all of the power that the Internet gave you. Then enjoy the control over your hard work that IP laws give you.
/me gets popcorn
You do know that most of the people here make their own IP every day, right?
This is a super slippery slope and we're sliding fast
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/texas-republican...
Attempting to conflate copyright with property and property crimes is not only illogical it is highly immoral
copyright may be worth defending, in a very limited way, but it certainly is not on the same level of property nor should it be considered such.
Copyright to the extent it is worth defending should be returned to the original US Constitutional limits and applicability, and returned to the timespan of the original copyright law (14 years, and 1 extension of a human author of 14 years.. meaning corporations get 14 years, humans can get upto 28 years and no more. and All copyright ends at death of the author. )
When I get tired of my video host or get locked out of my account, I should be able to download all of my own videos to put them on another host, regardless of whether the old host chooses to make that easy.
Journalists should be able to download every video of a politician making a false statement so they can play it back in a year when the evidence of that lie becomes better established.
Works by US Government entities like NASA are in the public domain. Anybody should be able to do what they like with them.
These things are distributed on the same services as anything else. A download tool can't evaluate the copyright status of a work or make a fair use determination. Prohibiting the tool is prohibiting all of the uses that should be allowed.
Stop giving your rights away! You do have those rights, until you agree to give them up.
The third-party who uploaded the video already waived their own rights, and by accessing the site, the journalist also agreed to be bound by the T&Cs.
What is your solution here for the average schmoe who isn't tech literate but is potentially a citizen documenting corruption?
Sure, there's secure drop software etc, but do you really think the average person is going to be able to do that in the field from their cellphone? Also consider the footage that comes out of warzones on YT.
We need to stop pretending that these so-called "agreements" are good faith meetings of the mind negotiated between parties of roughly equal power. The consumer's only options are take it or leave it. There's a huge power imbalance and no ability for the powerless party to negotiate. That's not an agreement, that's a unilateral policy.
I see this as the very definition to entitlement; that you must be allowed to use something, even if you don't want to use it the way the owner of the thing wants you to use it.
We are talking about intangibles here (often described by the politically and philosophically loaded term intellectual property) I find it unreasonable to treat them as private physical property. It restricts the true potential of the digital, i.e virtually zero distribution costs.
In my view, digital content resembles a ’commons’ in their use and cultural significance. I believe the interest of IP-holders should take a back seat to the far more important free flow of information.
”Intellectual property” has always been stolen and copied and I would argue that the world is better of that way. So much of our art and technology would not exist without these ”thefts”. Intellectual property is only property because a state uses its monopoly on violence to enforce someones monopoly on an idea/concept/information. It is not because of any divine right of an owner to restrict what others do with intangible objects of information.
Also, there is a spectrum. No one would think it just if the Fourier transform was subject to licensing.
Consider the case of VCRs/DVRs: the cable companies said "this is for live viewing", but people wanted to record video. There was big pushback, but it was ruled that people have the right to use the video that way, even if television channels don't want them to.
We don't have a right to the labor of someone else, but if we're consuming the fruits of that labor, there's a case to be made that we should be allowed to do so how we see fit.
For instance, your current fork is "if you don't like the company's terms, don't use the company's products". Another fork that we could use might be "if companies don't like the users' consumption practices, they can exit business or change their product".
I dispute that I agreed to any such thing.
It's weird to me that folks now feel entitled to content in the way that piracy allows. The concept that you simply cannot watch a show or movie if you haven't paid for it is genuinely foreign to many people, but it is the only reality that results in those shows in the first place.
Content has to produce revenue for its creators, or they're not able to create that content, or as much of that content, or as high quality of that content.
I don't "hate" piracy, and I don't think it even cracks the top 1000 problems in the world right now, but to think it's morally justified seems silly to me.
They shouldn't, but that is not at all what this case and discussion are about.
The scenario here is an unrelated third party being accused of being complicit in a crime merely for hosting a general-purpose tool that could be used for piracy but can be used for many other things.
The equivalent analogy would be if Home Depot is convicted of being a participant in every home burglary in their area simply because they sell sledgehammers and drills and other tools that could conceivably be used by someone to break into a house.
If you're genuinely curious why this view tends to be "so negatively moderated", it's this ridiculous notion.
Lots of people want to listen to good music, watch good shows, and read good books. Some people are capable of producing those things. Supply, meet demand. You think that without IP everybody is just going to give up on making art happen? Even expensive, large scale art? It's absurd, and it's propaganda.
Technological advancement has made this the best time in history for patronage of the arts. Subscription services would be perfect for this. Subscribe to get a vote on what gets made; subscribe to have your review of it count after it's done. Subscribe for ease of access.
I don't know if these industries shrink (or even grow) with the elimination of IP. But the notion that any product people enjoy today just stops getting made at all is crazy.
The only reason you're able to pirate in the first place is because you rely on other people not to pirate, so the artist still gets paid. That seems to be working out, which is why I really don't see piracy as a meaningful problem, but if the scales tipped to where most people were obtaining content in violation of IP laws, then you would absolutely see a strong chilling effect on content creation.
It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Without the ability to depend on others to provide those services, artists will have to do other things besides create art to convince the people creating food to give them some.
But why? Why full stop? There's no argument here, just an assertion. I want artists to create things. I will pay them to do it! There are many others like me in this regard!
> It's the underlying premise of capitalism; I focus on making art in exchange for a shared currency I can then use to buy housing and food from people dedicated to those things.
Yes, we agree there. You should make art in exchange for currency. You should not make art and then try to extract currency from people for looking at it.
In an alternate reality, Netflix produces shows that it streams to its subscribers. Subscribers review those shows which influences which shows continue to be developed. Just like in our reality, some people are "freeloaders" who watch the shows without paying for them (but it's not illegal). Still, many people subscribe because it's broadly understood that shows only get made if people subscribe.
In this reality (much like our own), production houses release pilots. If nobody wants to watch the show that would follow the pilot, then it's a sunk investment. But if they do, then they have to pay for it to get made (which they do, because that's how capitalism works). The rest is just a coordination problem, which the Internet trivializes. Need $5 million to make a season? Don't make the season until you've got it. If you're on the other end of the transaction: Do you want that season to get made? Then do your best to get it paid for.
I'm happy to listen to an argument for why this model would result in a smaller industry, and a subsequent argument about why a smaller industry is so unacceptable that we need IP law. But I won't accept proclamations like "...cannot creeat the content you love, full stop." The market is not so totally uncreative that it can't match up broadly distributed demand (I want to watch good TV) to concentrated supply (I can make good TV).
https://www.businessinsider.com/super-troopers-2-crowdfundin...
That seems to come from a viewpoint of "everything must be controlled in order for things to work properly".
The reality of the world is that it's messy, and it actually tends to work better for everyone when it's not overly controlled.
Trying to be a control freak about things often just leads to bad outcomes for everyone involved. Both the people doing it, and the people on the receiving end of the control freak. :(
Ironically though, control freaks still seem to blame everyone else but themselves after things turn to shit.
Have seen this happen multiple times, unfortunately.
I'm certainly not arguing otherwise. However, I am arguing that things like YouTube-DL have legal and legitimate uses. Assuming that even its primary use is for piracy is a pretty huge assumption.
BUT yeah the issue is how people use the tool, not the tool itself, and this is for sure a huge overreach by the RIAA.
To repeat, this would mean the innocent have to go through the trouble to prove their innocence in the face of bullies who are given maximum leeway instead of the watchdogs having to thoroughly substantiate their claim to demand removal in unclear cases.
It makes the watchdogs de facto sovereign censors of the Internet, and turns any idea of due process into a pleasant fiction for most people.
It's also worth noting that ISPs are pretty low on the internet services stack, and as such should be much closer to a water or electricity company than to a newspaper.
OK fine ... but then there's a non-insignificant amount of responses, indicating genuine engagement with OP's position.
Now you have to squint to read the greyed-out post if you're interested in what the discussion is about, and likewise with your response, which is again well-expressed if not popular.
IMO, moderation should exist to keep discussions within HN guidelines, which these posts clearly follow. Instead it's plainly "I don't agree with you so I'm going to try to vote your view out of existence", which doesn't even work as folks still engage/respond.
Is there any way out of this? HN is famously the best-behaved discussion site on the internet, but this seems to be an unfortunate tendency that happens fairly often.
He violated no IP because he didn't download, he just wrote a program to store data that already is on your computer.
Unfortunately, we do. Year after year, we collectively allow and enable these ravenous corporate interests, and their lobbyists and spooks, to further capture our institutions and strongarm smaller economies around the globe. I wish we didn't, but we do.
> Invidious is a free and open-source alternative frontend to YouTube. It is available as a Docker container, or from the GitHub master branch. It is intended to be used as a lightweight and "privacy-respecting" alternative to the official YouTube website.
There are multiple online mirrors, some with web download that even works on iOS.
https://gonzoknows.com/posts/Yattee/ & https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
> Yattee is an advanced video and audio player that can be used to play local and remote files and media links. It is available on the Apple App Store and is marketed as such. However, its core purpose is to function as an ad-free and sponsor-free YouTube app, allowing users to watch and subscribe to any YouTube channel. Due to the strict terms of service of the Apple App Store, Yattee cannot advertise this aspect of its functionality.
I find that I enjoy YouTube a lot more with that kind of semi-personalised experience, in the same way that Hacker News has a collective but remarkably distinctive feeling compared to other forums/link aggregators.
https://freetubeapp.io / https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Alternatively copyright could just require the original creative work being put in escrow, so that it's available after the limited monopoly period.
Fortunately, they can (and do) get overruled, but it'll take more time and money.
We really need some form of process to retire judges that clearly haven't kept up with the times and still think in terms of 'series of tubes'. It can't be the only solution to promote them to a different court and hope they'll do less damage.
Should the water company be liable if say, some serial killer uses their tubes to drown his victims?
Should the electricity provider be liable for powering the computers that ran the servers?
These aren't new legal questions or anything - pretty common to come across them in law school. Ianal but I've taken some basic classes and even I've seen them!
The rulings, instead, are a consequence of the personal interest and personal ideology of the jurist. We need to collectively create something better then the assumed good faith enlightened monarchies that we call the court systems.
The results they produce seem to have chronic problems
And yet that slippery slope has been totally taken for granted in recent decades for banking and finance…
Unfortunately it's a very thin line trying to do that the "right" way and having it look like a complete authoritarian purge
Instead, just make a network where you can't just pull out a plug, or click a button to erase information just because somebody somewhere is upset.
But the typical web is just built for mass consumption and is easily manipulated.
The technology alone will never be enough or widely available if the judicial or legislature keep attacking and restricting their use.
yt-dlp doesn’t have a standalone website so they’ll have to deal with Microsoft directly.
Edit: I wasn't aware development has resumed. The latest release is still stuck way back in the past though.
Also typoed 'yt-dlp' as 'youtube-dlp' in the original comment; now fixed.
Granted, I haven't kept up on whether original youtube-dl eventually got around to getting its primary functionality to work. The several-month interregnum that definitely occurred seems like a good reason to consider it "dead".
It stopped being able to download videos from youtube. That's not the only functionality, but -- given the name of the software -- I'd say it should have been fixed. All the repo activity in the world won't balance out the inability to do the only thing you advertise that you can do.
yt-dlp is a better maintained fork.
The I can't believe it's not youtube-dl quasi unofficial fork yt-dlp has a most recent stable release 2023.03.04 (last month).
Of the two one is keeping up with the month by month twists and turns of websites altering their video embed methodologies to defeat CLI rippers .. and the other one isn't.
yt-dlp still claims to keep track with the parent project. Most would use it for the additional functionalities it provides over youtube-dl.
That shim layer between the core ripping engine(s) and the manifold ways of embedding access to a stream is what is being kept current in yt-dlp releases (and -U updates).
Original most recent official youtube-dl (December 2021 release) can no longer find its update service.
You're making it very difficult to take you seriously. Have you actually used youtube-dl?
/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory
$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV8WFvSNYE
[youtube] 5pV8WFvSNYE: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug. Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
Edit: I went through the repo and found that this bug has been reported two months ago [2]. I understand that the project is not dead in the sense that they are still looking at bugs, but if a major feature is not working for two months now then I think it's reasonable for people's faith in the project's future to be shaken.
I you need python3 the you need to put python3 in the shebang
iirc. homebrew on OSX installs python as a python3 executable, no python exeutable.
Hopefully no-one should support python v2 in 2023 ?
$ file /usr/bin/python
/usr/bin/python: symbolic link to python3
Then when that program is packaged for other distros, you get this error.
Not a huge deal by any means, but the non-standard behavior can add a bit of friction.
I expect this has filtered down to RHEL9 now.
Multiple version are supported with "python2.7", "python3.9" etc. if a version older than the current default is required.
Your install is not configured properly. This is a googleable fix. (One example is to use `which python3` as part of your command https://stackoverflow.com/a/73610228)
> ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id;
This is a known bug and already has a fix but has not been packaged or released for youtube-dl but you can fix it yourself or use a different pacakge. https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530
That link above as it is presently ... issues/31530 ... lists the following as the fix, below - https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530#issuecom...
Now my problem is I'm not running Win 13 or the latest linux distro but still I have the best up to date browser I've yet to find that runs on my old system ... and that link does nothing ... if I put the link in another it simply opens back at the top of the parent.
I figure I could copy every recent file one by one from the git repo and play at fooling with my own, but since someone commenting on this topic actually compiled the given source - only to land some old 2021 problem - sigh.
Now I have flipped though what I see in the above ... no fix info ... fucked and bye bye time. The next option touted as the fix sadly does not run on my old system, it could work with the online server but ... how long until ...
It is of course easier for people like me who are no longer or were ever competent programmers, let alone being well versed in python, to pick some other program - I've been told such as IDM will handle youtube antics fine as well as being compatible with older systems, so it may well be worthwhile to purchase a copy.
Oh well youtube-dl .. thanks for the fish.
There's a reply made to the current thread here which, to me anyhow, means the listed full source code at github has not been updated.
There are updated individual components - however it's been in the order of 16 years I've decompiled and adjusted and recompiled. It might be worth the effort ... if only youtube-dl was going to keep on sailing onwards. The nah moving to something else commentary informs me that sooner or later updates will probably get slower until such point people won't bother reporting issues - better for my old system to make the move sooner rather than later.
yt -dlp is probably relevant to the cheap online server I use with the latest python installed. I generally didn't use youtube-dl on it, unless the download was going to take some time and better to let the server accumulate it over a few hours. yt-dlp supposedly fixes the trick youtube used to try and discourage cli downloaders.
These days yt-dlp covers my needs instead, and unlike youtube-dl, they the seem to be accepting patches, making yt-dlp work (and keep working) on more sites and services than youtube-dl does.
There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
The new maintainer has put demands in place to support python 2.6 and up, which is fucking bonkers. Nevermind the fact that 2.6 is even deader than 2.7 ever was (which was the version of python2 officially deprecated three years ago). A side effect of this is that the new maintainer also rejects any patches that introduce new dependencies (existing ones being used is fine though), which has killed support since nobody wants to reimplement certain things to work with a python version that is pretty much only used by one guy still running Windows XP (who began to whine on the issue tracker about being ignored even though XP hasn't even been enterprise supported by Microsoft since 2019 but I guess this one guy is a valuable user?)
yt-dlp on the other hand follows the "reasonable" road of compatibility, which is "current python3 version + 5 minor versions going back" (which is also the standard used for deprecating things in the python stdlib and security patches). Much better and it seems to have healthier contributors as a result.
This sounds a lot like what happened to XFree86 when X.org forked it.
>There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
Yeah, I gave up on youtube-dl a while ago when I discovered yt-dlp. The latter actually works really, really well, while the former is broken. I'm not sure why anyone still bothers with youtube-dl, but then again there's still a few weirdos who won't give up on XFree86 after all these years, and a few other weirdos who still refuse to abandon OpenOffice.org.
They = RIAA.
There's no way to determine whether Uberspace's activity was illegal without involving the party who's rights are allegedly being violated or the alleged principal distributing the tool.
https://basic-tutorials.com/news/leipzig-regional-court-dns-...
German courts are known for technical bullshit decisions.
In the early days of the internet, they decided that you were responsible for what ended up in your inbox. This was before spam filter s were widespread.
Oh sure, some like GitHub and co since they are easy but my dear FLOSSers having your data in your hand is valuable and it's a thing you all know. So please try.
Try to AVOID GitHub and ANY other code hosting, as well, because it does not matter if is run by some "evil" company or some friendly one, it's not your system. Almost any FLOSS dev have enough iron and bandwidth to share hes/shes bits in a P2P system, do that. If you are unsatisfied by some classic distributed development models (like git patches over a ML) develop something else BUT distributed or being able to run on top of something distributed.
If you do so, you not only protect yourself and your users from some evil actors BUT you also brake the leg of all corporate power who try to put anyone in walled garden. FLOSS is the most comprehensive and valuable codebase in the world, if it manage to be independent of top players they are TFU simply by the fact the rest of the world know and understand they are not essential and something better like classic decentralized internet do work better than them.
They annoy us with some actions? We can break us entirely killing their most important asset: the band of sheep who thinks we can't live without being on the shoulder of the giants.
Aside MANY new tools will rise, paving the way for a came back of classic desktop model.
No need to wonder: "AI-generated songs on Apple Music and Spotify breach copyright, says music label UMG" https://9to5mac.com/2023/04/12/ai-generated-songs/
To be fair to the creators whose IP powers this generative AI, I think it's worth noting that model makers continue to expect to build their wealth on others' IP with no consequences: https://www.billboard.com/pro/universal-music-asks-spotify-a...
> Some of these songs are AI-generated covers of existing songs [...] Chatbots might use entire phrases, sentences, or more, from human authors. Similarly, music bots might replicate both music and lyrics from human artists
There is "learning" proper, as having assimilated the important elements of the experience (allowing to use those principles for further creation), and there is "copying".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ronson#Lawsuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony#Credits_...
Is this not what record labels do?
> Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal
> A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
> Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.
> Following public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs and the suspension of CD copy-protection efforts in early 2007.
It's not that German laws are particularly "bad"; it's built on different social norms and standards, so some things legal in not-Germany might be not in Germany, AND vice versa. The Internet has to evolve to adapt to this reality.
Sometimes it really should be Germany. "Development" is everywhere; "evolution" is pretty much bound to be such; "progress" is where the best slope is. Evolution is sometimes not a progressive development - but it'd better be.
No, when it comes to copyright they're bad - both the laws and the enforcement machine.
That sounds strange. There's no "fair use" doctrine in German copyright law.
If it only allows a paying user to make a local copy against the company’s wishes, we would have about the same situation as today. And maybe also a lot of banned YouTube/google accounts when detected.
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...
Blockchains are not the be all and end all of decentralization. In fact, most decentralized use cases don't require (and performance would suffer significantly if used) blockchains at all.
I'm not hating on blockchains, they have some important uses. But decentralized communications ala the Fediverse[0] wouldn't gain anything from blockchains, and ActivityPub[1] is most certainly decentralized, and while I suppose someone could bolt a blockchain onto it, it's unclear to me what value could be added.
And there's this one weird thing I heard about the other day. It's so outlandish I thought it was somebody's psychotic fever-dream. Supposedly, there are these things called "websites." Not sure what they are, but apparently, just about anyone can set up/own/run one (or more) all by themselves on skinny hardware without any blockchains. I heard about this and just snorted derisively because that's clearly bullshit -- no one could ever do anything like that. /s
> And there's this one weird thing I heard about the other day. It's so outlandish I thought it was somebody's psychotic fever-dream. Supposedly, there are these things called "websites." Not sure what they are, but apparently, just about anyone can set up/own/run one (or more) all by themselves on skinny hardware without any blockchains.
Before we start talking about Tor (which is awesome) I'd like to remind that onion addresses are absurdly horrible and would never be adopted by mainstream, the only way to have limited domains per physical person (and thus the abillity to choose a somewhat good looking domain) is for them to cost something, and cryptocurrency is the decentralized way we have to do it for now, thus that's where Unstoppable and ENS come from.
Better examples of decentralized social platforms might be Bluesky or Farcaster. The former relies on DNS (which has some central points of failure) and the latter relies on Ethereum (which does not have the same central points of failure).
Really? No one can force me to post (or not) anything on my Pixelfed[0] instance. And if they wanted to, they'd need to commit felonies (using violence or breaking into my premises physically or over the network) to do so.
You're seem to be under the misapprehension that self-hosting isn't viable. I don't believe so (and self-host many services), but I respect your opinion.
Don't like what "a few powerful admins that control the majority of users and speech that flows through the network?" Don't use or federate with those instances.
As I said, I run several ActivityPub instances and I don't even know who such "powerful admins" might be. Nor do I care.
I get your point, but (not attacking you here, just the idea that you have to interact with "big" sites not under your control, that (might) make moderation decisions you don't like).
If your goal is to reach the largest number of people, presumably for commercial purposes, I suppose that you might feel limited by folks who don't want your unsolicited commercial posts on or federated with their sites.
That could be limiting. But the vast majority of us just want to share and interact with people we know about non-commercial stuff. Setting up you own instance is absolutely decentralized (go ahead -- block my Pixelfed site -- I don't care -- I don't know you and I don't want to interact with you).
There are many use cases and perspectives here, but your assertion that ActivityPub (AP) (as a protocol, not any specific instance, which is why I separated the applications that run on top of AP) isn't decentralized isn't accurate.
The existence of instances with large (relatively speaking) numbers of users is irrelevant to whether or not the protocol and the platforms that rely on it are decentralized or not.
Feel free to disagree -- As I said, I get your point, but it's not relevant to any of my use cases. If the current AP ecosystem doesn't meet your needs, you have other alternatives as you mention -- But AP is definitely decentralized.
Edit: Fixed grammar. Clarified my thoughts.
The people that built the Internet are not the people that will keep building the Internet. Their hunger was fed long ago by the yields harvested by their contributions to technology.
The Internet will remain on pause mode until someone disrupts it with new technology that cannot be contained by social solutions. Something that outpaces laws, outpaces cease and desists. Technology that is unaffected the current rules but uses the Internet as its substrate.
It sounds like anarchy but it's just what the Internet was one full human generation earlier. (Arguably pushing on two generations now).
If we invented the Internet today, we'd consider it an insidious invention designed to pry control away and redistribute it to institutions that shouldn't own it. Could we do it a second time?
They tell what we eat, what we talk, how we behave, who can get a job and who can't and it goes beyond.
A censored code repository is just one more thing.
> although I was not aware that youtube videos use browser DRM