YouTube-Dl Site Goes Offline as Hosting Provider Enforces Court-Ordered Ban

They said they moved on to yt-dlp

The main difference in the fork is that yt-dlp uses the android interface and youtube-dl uses the web interface.

That was a completely different thing, this is a court order ruling youtube-dl a circumvention tool and that somehow means hosting a website that links to their github is unacceptable.

Shh… don’t tell anyone about the other project.

You have to build it from source to avoid the 60kbps limit. There hasn't been a release since Dec 2021 and there have been some updates since then that implement the 'puzzle' to get the right value of the url parameter.

It's worth noting that YouTube is trialling a new player and a lot of applications (invidious, new pipe, etc) are experiencing some issues in the last couple of weeks.

Correct, the only ones claiming YouTube's "rolling cipher" is an anti-piracy control are the RIAA. YouTube themselves have not claimed this to my knowledge.

Microsoft has largely stopped giving a fuck about piracy of their consumer products.

py-kms is freely available on GitHub, and so are Windows Activation Tools.

While arguably py-kms doesn’t violate anything, as it’s a cleanroom implementation of the KMS server, Windows Activation Tools definitely does.

Either way, MS could eradicate all of those repositories, they aren’t doing it.

Microsoft did not face a court order, if they did they would surely immediately comply. They faced a seemingly fraudulent DMCA takedown notice, as takedowns are not designed to target circumvention tools.

They did a good thing restoring youtube-dl, but I'd hardly say it puts them in "freedom fighter" territory, more so compared to Uberspace who are actively fighting for youtube-dl.

They can resolve that by not using absolute URLs maybe

Shame it merely responds with HTTP 403 and not 451.

It seems fitting that it was a German court who handed down the braindead ruling.

That’s pretty much how all payment processors work. The issue for them is that letting fraudsters continue making payments will lead to big Ls for the payment processors, since they end up being on the hook for the money that card networks will clawback or liability from regulations and money laundering laws.

You're free to try running a payment processor with a mantra of "Innocent until proven guilty."

You'll be a honeypot for every scammer, fraudster, and con artist ready to take advantage of that policy, your processing fees will be through the roof because of chargebacks, and the only people who will use your platform will be the aforementioned scammers, fraudsters, and conmen.

I'm sorry for the GP poster's situation, but there's really no way to make everyone happy, here.

Illegal? Probably, but I'm not a lawyer. I imagine the words "unfair competition" might be present somewhere on the legal paperwork. And if it's illegal but not criminal, you have to sue the competitor yourself, which is expensive and time-consuming.

PayPal probably should have some kind of hold on your account saying "don't shut off the account until we've investigated" but that might itself be abusable (see Facebook Xcheck). If this behavior is illegal they might also have standing to sue whoever is sending the reports.

All of that requires you to have at least some amount of evidence tying the false reports to the competitor, too. Or at least enough evidence to survive a motion to dismiss so you can use discovery to get the rest of the story.

What is considered criminal depends on the jurisdiction, but I doubt making false reports to a private company is criminal in very many. At least in the US, you could certainly get sued for continually disrupting someone else's business, but to sue another party, they'd need to also be in the US so they could be served and actually subject to being forced to appear in a US court and a judgment against them could be enforceable. Otherwise, you end up in a situation like some Chinese business owner just building their own McDonald's. Sure, it violates all kinds of US ip laws, but if their home jurisdiction doesn't care about US ip laws, there isn't shit you can do about it.

Yes, but it was done anonymously. The competitor denied all knowledge of it, but the guy he paid to do the reporting would talk to me through chat every day to gloat about it.

I ended up paying 15000EUR bounty to track the guy down. Found him in Germany. 15 year old kid. Had somebody talk his mother about him. Never had a problem again after that.

maybe i missed it but after searching i see this mentioned nowhere public. just ips to whitelist for firewalls and junk like that.

so like i get they could contact support again and ask about avenues but not knowing about this seems unfair?

It must be nice having a brain not corrupted by years of Internet!

But then again, in the US at least, it is perfectly legal to record TV and watch it any time you want. That was a good ruling. Thanks, Mr. Rogers.

In order to watch these videos, your computer downloads the videos. Your radio doesn't have to download a copy of the song to play it.

> I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage.

My usage is usually no less legitimate than youtube's usage. I'm usually downloading things that were uploaded without permission from the copyright holders from a platform that is distributing them without permission from the copyright holders.

>I can listen to music on the radio, but it's a whole different issue when I pick specific songs to pirate for my own personal listening :p But that's not where the caring comes in; it's the tools I can use to pirate songs; hence youtube-dl going down and not the users who used it.

So basically you are not allowed to listen to what your mood wants but rather what their sponsors want, that or pay us! Yeah no thanks.

Btw, you can still record songs from FM/AM radio too, just use any SDR and pass that to your preferred application and record it, I would love to see how they will prevent that.

Now hang one hot minute!

What on earth are you talking about? Recording radio or television for personal use is illegal now? Are we so used to not owning a single thing that these things are alien to us now? I mean, I'm not misremembering the era where people taped shows to watch them later, am I?

Also, pardon my language, but fuck off with your "watching videos on YT's platform". It's my user agent, my hardware, my actions that are causing the video to be shown. I'm already making allowances to youtube by executing their code mostly unencumbered, I'm not bending over backwards and granting them extraterritorial rights.

That is an unjustifiably charitable take on that court. I bet they do have a clue what they are doing and are specifically making industry-friendly rulings because they know it will get them more customers. Letting companies choose the court they want really should not be a thing, it just has too many perverse incentives for one local court to butter up to them. And neither should a regional court be able to continue to rulings that apply country wide if they often get overturned at a higher court when challenged.

Yes it seems obvious to me that "download" here means "store outside the browser in a format that can be viewed in any player and copied indefinitely". of course my browser is downloading a video I watch but not in a form that is useful to me outside of viewing it on that site in that browser.

Agreed. Will be doing a closer look later. “Cash payment through mail” is a gutsy offer.

Weird Al released a parody "charity song" in 2006 called Don't Download This Song that poked fun at them too.

    > Oh you don't want to mess with the RIAA
    > They'll sue you if you burn that CDR
    > It doesn't matter if you're a grandma or a seven year old girl
    > They'll treat you like the evil, hard bitten criminal scum you are

He also ironically hosted links on his website to download the song DRM-free!

I believe the song you are referring to is "Fuck the MPAA" by Futuristic Sex Robotz

Content brokers.

The RIAA is not a thing because of music artists[0], they were created by music labels to represent their interests.

The biggest mistake people make when talking about anything to do with copyright or the creative industry is to assume that, because publishers of creative works represent or hire authors, that we can just collapse authors and publishers down into a single entity and treat any copyright related argument purely as a struggle between artists getting paid and the public wanting free shit.

Of course, publishers do not have interests aligned with those of authors and artists. This is, at minimum[1], a three-sided war between publishers, authors, and customers. Artists want to be paid but need to go through a publisher to sell[2], while customers want to watch/listen/read but need to buy through a publisher. Publishers have massive incentives to screw over artists by reducing or diluting their take in favor of whatever keeps the machine fed.

While both publishers and artists need some kind of limited coercive copyright arrangement in order to have a market for their work, they tend to disagree heavily on who should own those rights and how long they should last. Artists want to sell the thing they made, but publishers want assets: they want a brand that can neatly fit on a marketing schedule or an accounting statement. The former only requires short term copyright owned by individual artists while the latter requires infinity-minus-one-day terms, four companies that own the world's culture, and increasingly expansive interpretations of DMCA 1201 that invent DRM out of things never intended to be DRM.

[0] Let's not call them "content creators"

[1] We can subdivide these groups further still, of course, but three groups is enough to make my point.

[2] As per [1] we are treating distributors and publishers as part of the same group of middlemen. For example, while Amazon Kindle self-publishing does not do some of the same marketing or promotion that a traditional book publisher might, they are still intermediaries between authors and readers.

That content creation needs to be encouraged in the first place still has not been backed up by any kind of studies. But if you were to want to do that, making it a nightmare to build on other people's content is surely not the best way to go about it.

No, people need to stop letting Apple and Google have so much power; such silly victim mentality!

There's plenty of software and means to host your own video platforms.

DMCA takedown notices are for taking down content you own. The music industry doesn't own youtube-dl.

We already had mass censorship of wrongthink on social media coerced by federal agencies. This is petty by comparison and Orwell has been spinning for years now.

To control the future, control the present; to control the present, control the past...

Its basically the VCR recording uSA Supreme Court case all over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....