Music Company Asks Google to Delist 'YouTube Downloader' Wikipedia Article
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
If <thing requesting to be censored or removed or otherwise hidden from the plain view of the public> has less potential effect on an individual than a semi-automatic weapon can have, then the request should be laughed at and/or publicly shamed for its anti-freedom, and therefore anti-US, ideology.
Prefaced on the relative ease that it seems semi-automatic weapons can be procured, and their potential for individual liberty restriction.
(Happy for flaws in my logic to be pointed out, I haven't gone particularly in depth in thinking about edge cases here)
Edited to replace "automatic" with "semi-automatic", thanks for the clarification tempfortwitt90.
I suppose you mean semi automatic weapons.. which is basically 95% of guns in the homes of Americans.
Some, like the famous American 180 (Otherwise known as the Angry Bees) are grand-fathered in and allowed to be used.
You mean an NFA transfer tax stamp. Class 3 SOT is a status given to certain FFLs to allow them to deal in retail sales of NFA restricted items. It does not refer to the NFA items themselves.
Uh, yes they are, there are just more rules in place for them than other firearms. I've been around guns casually for a similar amount of time, and I've shot fully automatic weapons, and can see them pretty much any time I want at the local range. I don't even live in a "gun friendly" state.
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/qa/may-machine-guns-be-transfer...
How about instead of "ease of semi-automatic weapon acquirement" (which could be read as critical of gun regulation), the wording was "comparison of semi-automatic guns" - which is clearly aimed at assisting gun users in assessing guns, and is the direct equivalent of the page at issue in intent and wording?
The company in this article may be misguided or deliberately overreaching - but there is also the possibility they have a point.
I think they do have an interesting point, though I also think it fails on the idea that these tools are necessarily used for ill. Gun owners would argue the same, I suspect.
I'm not intending to be critical of gun regulation, but it's a great example of a big, thick baseline for comparison because it has precedent for being protected as sancrosanct in the US.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I believe the logical fallacy you’ve stumbled upon is termed as “whataboutism”.
If we turned down every complaint just because it wasn’t deemed as harmful as another complaint that was turned down, few things would change.
the real flaw in the reasoning--not the logic, but the reasoning--is thinking it does any good to point out hypocricy. yes, if we can't control guns because of the personal freedom of individuals to own guns then that same reason ought to apply to an individual's ability to access information that's totally lawful for them to access. it's just, you can point out hypocrisy all day, but the fact is what you can do or can't do or what you're supposed to do or have to do is shaped by moneyed interests, not by a pressure to maintain or establish some internal consistency.
Or, maybe we'd think differently about some things that have been normalised and are worthy of re-consideration.
Regarding "few things would change", like all these things, that can be good or bad, it depends on the situation.
> the logical fallacy you’ve stumbled upon is termed as “whataboutism”.
I think they're comparable in this context: "can be used legally, can be used illegally, the freedom of choice is given to the user".
I'm specifically not comparing "why is this an issue whilst animals are still being experimented on by companies that make beauty products". I'm explicitly trying to avoid whataboutism, to provide some logical comparison.
As pasquinelli points out in a sibling comment, the fallacy I did make is that of pointing out hypocrisy and expecting that to be worth anything. Sadly, that's a true fallacy at this point in civilisation. Unfortunately, I'll keep banging my head on that wall until either I'm dead or the wall relents.
I appreciate this really comes down to "well buy the goddamn content" but the thing is, even when we do buy digital content we're frequently told we only bought a licence to use, not the bitstream itself.
The side fight about google allowing us to upload our own music ("our" -the solecism of that word in the context I am speaking about) and then listen to it and higher fidelity bit products in the cloud, but then change the terms and conditions and worsen the experience to drive us off Google Play Music (which they shut down) into youtube music (which is awful)
I moved to tidal. I find it works tolerably close to my expectations, it integrates with plex, I can handle its playlist format, and it at least formally belongs to (albeit a super rich sub-set) of musicians.
Can you give an example of a YouTube video where this happens?
Take for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0ozmU9cJDg
That's a video of a song from the channel of the band that killed the Napster P2P network and software back in the day.
I hear that there is no problem downloading that song with yt-dlp.
Likewise, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FTATjvCJ-Q
That's a video with music from a YouTube channel owned by one of the most copyright lawyered cartoon companies in the world. They successfully made videos of a cartoon mouse stay protected after it was supposed to enter public domain.
Yet, I hear that this video is also able to be downloaded without problem with yt-dlp.
So when these videos are able to download without problem, idk what public videos on YouTube would not be able to be downloaded with yt-dlp.
Parent commenter said:
> Sounds like the don't understand that official music and video content like rental films are DRMed
And that's what I was responding to. Not YouTube Music.
There are plenty videos with music from the original distributors, like those I linked above, on regular YouTube, and which as mentioned will be able to download with yt-dlp.
This is not in reference to copyright. It's in reference to DRM, which isn't present on public videos (but seems to be present on purchased and rented videos).
Since the purpose of the obfuscated URLs and JavaScript is to gate access to the video and audio through a browser hitting the YouTube site where they can't be saved, this scheme constitutes an "effective" copy protection measure. Bypassing this gating mechanism is thus circumvention, illegal under the DMCA.
Just open up DevTools, look for requests to googlevideo.com, find the request with the video or audio (i.e. content-type response of either video/mp4 or audio/webm), copy the entire request URL, remove the range parameter entirely, open the link, and voila!
The lie that Google et al. try to perpetuate is that if your user agent fails to put their interests over yours then it is illegal.
edit: some quick testing confirms these URLs are temporary, but they don't appear limited to the IP that generated them. Your IP is embedded in the URL though, and you can't modify it without breaking the URL, so I'm guessing some IP limits kick in at some point.
I do not interact with obfuscated URLS, JavaScript, opening any kind of console or dev tools, and no source code.
I save it just as I would save a photo or a pdf.
How is this circumvention? I'm using a feature offered by my browser and using it in a way intended by the creators. The media files are already on my computer (memory or storage, who cares, its been copied already) I am just renaming some metadata like its directory and filename.
But I'm quite confident you can't view or download YouTube videos if your browser doesn't run JavaScript. They require the client evaluate intentionally obfuscated JS in order to determine the video content URL's signature. Whether this counts as DRM or not, I don't know, and I hope it doesn't, but it's clear that YouTube is making it difficult intentionally.
I meant no JavaScript as in me meddling with the js.
You can right click on YouTube videos to download them? That sounds slick! How did you set this up? Is something YouTube-specific happening or is it generalized and just happens to work on YouTube? That's totally something I'd like.
I have no idea what that means legally, but to me it certainly supports the argument that doing something so simple clearly isn't bypass DRM/violating the DMCA. (though I'm sure the media industry would argue that whatever browser/extension making this possible is guilty of defeating DRM. )
What browser is that?
That is, any <video> HTML element can be right clicked and downloaded, at least in Chrome and Safari where I tested. Interestingly this even works when for `<video controls controlslist="nodownload" ...>` elements where the developer tries to prevent downloading. (in Chrome that removes the download option from the video player's controls, but not from right-click)
Firefox is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request, download a video and then show it.
youtube-dl is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request and download a video
Youtube has no authentication, nothing is being circumvented.
Browser names/standards/whatever are not codified in law. youtube-dl is no different than Google Chrome in this regard. Good luck proving otherwise. If the video had legitimate copy protection and used encryption, etc. I could understand it, but the videos can be pulled by anything that can interpret Javascript. Ask Oracle and Apple how those lawsuits turned out.
While only paid content and some special videos use the serious DRM that requires browser extensions like WideVine, all YouTube videos require a pretty complex process to download.
Famously, yt-dlp has its own minimal JavaScript interpreter which is needed to evaluate the obfuscated JS script[0] that YouTube provides so the client can determine its actual video download URL. The end of the process does just result in figuring out an obfuscated URL but that URL is temporary and limited per-client. Here's the yt-dlp JS interpreter (though I don't know in which situations it actually needs to use it): https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_d...
[0] Some of YouTube's obfuscated JS: https://www.youtube.com/s/player/bbe1b497/player_ias.vflset/...
I believe youtube-dl simulates the browser Javascript client and yt-dlp emulates the Android client, though I'm not 100% sure of the modern workings.
on the other hand, if you have yt premium, you have yt music
However, the implementation is really wacky.
If you are online and you go to watch a video that you have previously downloaded, then instead of serving you the locally cached version through the service worker, instead the frontend redownloads the whole video.
Again, and again, every time you watch it.
So if your goal is to save mobile data, or if your goal is to save a video that might possibly be deleted in the future, it is not working.
- I can play the entire OST on company / otherwise awful internet, where bandwidth is not free
- The player doesn't pause midway through every 3rd track to obnoxiously ask me if I'm "still listening"
- When the OST inevitably vanishes from youtube, I still have it to listen to
(Mind that many of these OSTs are not available for purchase where I live, so this isn't a "vote with my wallet" sort of situation. Nintendo in particular is real bad about this.)
There are other more elegant solutions, but unfortunately the means through which I've purchased the game's soundtrack the normal way (the game itself) is generally a poor means to actually listen to it. I would pay for this service if it existed; where's spotify for soundtracks? But no, it doesn't exist, so tech solutions get to deal with the problems. I do at least pay for YouTube Premium, that's the closest thing, but I'm not going to suffer its various inconveniences if there's a better option for the actual playback.
I want to write a song about video game music and I’d like to, erhm, “borrow” parts of your life story. :D
I didn't expect any downvotes, but it seems I hit a nerve.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone, that wasn't my intention, I just don't know anything about the kinds of people who would listen to video game soundtracks. I figured there might be some stories to share.
I don't have a particularly interesting story to share. The music is familiar and brings back good memories; it is energizing; and it is easy to listen to.
In the original game setting, the music would play in the background and hype you up for whatever task you were trying to accomplish. Nowadays, instead of attempting to defeat the Warlock Lord, I'm trying to finish a section of a research paper. Both tasks, at least in my view, call for the same mood.
I also listen to a lot of video game music when coding. Why? One night, years ago, I got talking to an Uber driver about music and he shared a Spotify playlist of video game tracks. Years later, I generally listen to the full soundtracks of the games he included in that playlist (most of which I’ve never played or even heard of). Thanks Munib!
I think I also just get bored of a lot of songs if I listen to them too much. I don’t get bored of game music though. I am not sure why.
No life events really, it's just that when I code I prefer my music to not have lyrics, and soundtracks are pretty much perfect for that. They're often designed as background tracks anyway, and a given soundtrack tends to have consistent atmosphere, good for setting the mood for some task.
Youtubedl is a great technological solution, but does nothing to nullify Google's desire to fight it and enshitten the internet.
If every download was accompanied by a request to the uploader to also upload their video to peer tube or sth (and also consider different funding streams), Google would not only NOT present such obstacles to their users, but they'd bend over backwards trying to improve the experience to prevent losing their viewership to open solutions.
(Well, that and they'd try some shitty legalese on top and lobby for laws against double uploads, no doubt)
Now replace child porn with another things that’s illegal
Now suddenly it’s censorship?