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Comment by Espionage724 | Hacker News Reader

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a TOS clause about videos on YT not being your property and that you can't export them off the platform unless you own the rights to the specific video. People that watch videos on YT are using someone else's platform; don't like it, don't use the platform, and tell the content creator to upload somewhere else. Nobody is entitled to bypass intentional blocks by YT and use 3rd-party tools to download other people's videos.

Personally I only used youtube-dl to pirate songs from HQ videos :p I can't imaging there being a large percentage of "legitmate" and fair usage.

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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.

> Your radio doesn't have to download a copy of the song to play it.

Yes, it does. It’s called ‘receiving the signal’.

All a conventional radio does is translate electromagnetic waves that are already surrounding it into sound waves that we can hear. An intellectual-property-maximalist lawyer could cogently argue that a radio that records the signal onto a tape or other storage device is somehow violating the IP rights of the authors, as it is interacting with the work in materially different way than an ordinary radio. Not that I would agree with this lawyer in any way, but the lawyer would at least have a basis to argue that one thing is not like the other.

However, video streams are not a signal floating in the EM spectrum. They are 1:1 connections that must be requested, their content must be actively downloaded onto local memory, and the content must be transcoded and/or decoded into images and sound to be consumed by a human. The point is that this description is as true for a video being watched on the official YouTube app on a Pixel 5 as it is for a video that has been downloaded with youtube-dl/yt-dl on a PC. There is no material difference in the actual events taking place.

Radio has since the mid 1990 moved towards digital signals, and by now almost all conventional radio receivers do not covert electromagnetic waves into sound waves. They covert electromagnetic waves into a digital sound file, which then get copied into local memory and run inside a software program that plays the sound (and generally outputs meta data). It can also buffer sound if it wants to.

As a interesting side-note, Norway has stopped using FM radio in favor of digital radio, and Sweden is on route to do the same. The primary argument here on Sweden in favor of keeping FM radio is that older car models might still not be compatible with digital radio, and the FM radio could in theory be useful case of national emergency.

This may be true for specific countries, but analog radio is far far from dead globally.

It's literally exactly the same. I can listen to a broadcast radio signal with my rtl-sdr usb dongle and save as much as I want of the instantaneous streaming data. I can watch a youtube video with computer and save as much as I want of the instantaneous streaming data.

There is literally no possible way I can experience the sound or video without first receiving it. The only difference with "streaming" is that lawyers think it is somehow not downloading when you delete it afterwards. Magical thinking.

Downloading implies data persists. AM/FM radio and TV antennas take an active signal and play it on-demand, without persisting the data, and without copy-protection.

The detail is with what's in-between the signal and how you're using it.

- It's fine for me to record antenna TV to VHS; there's no copy-protection and it's for personal-use

- It's probably questionable, but largely fine for me to record songs playing with my phone's sound recorder; you can't copy-protect public audible noise in this context

- It's not fine for me to put a dongle/box in-between a Roku or TV streaming box in order to break HDCP to record content. The problem here is breaking the platform's copy-protection.

- It's not fine for me to go to a torrent site and download a song. I think for archive purposes you have to archive from personally-owned media, but it's likely gray-area if you own the media and pirate content of that media from somewhere else (like if you own a PS2 game disc and download an iso online)

youtube-dl was being used to break/bypass YouTube's copy-protection.

Two wrongs don't make a right :p

That's between YT and the video uploaders; people using yt-dl are not using it to rebel against YT.

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.

I wonder how specific that ruling is; nowadays you'd have to break HDCP if you want to record from most devices with something in-between, and it seems like that wouldn't be as-legal with bypassing copy-protection

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.

Not a lawyer, but as I understand it's not legal to break copy protection. It's legal to archive media for your own personal use. Recording VHS and even sound recorder from a phone is more-legal than putting a box/dongle between a FireTV stick and your TV in order to break and bypass HDCP.

Outside of straight-up piracy, it could be argued that youtube-dl was bypassing YouTube restrictions.

Also if someone had that attitude towards a service I was offering, I'd go out of my way to block their access; I choose the restrictions on my platform that I offer to others, and people that actively go against that can go use someone else's platform or host their own since they're so sure they must know better :p

>It's my user agent, my hardware, my actions that are causing the video to be shown

technically, you are asking for a video to be shown and Google chooses to show it to you. We don't really have the power dynamic to say "we allow google to execute their code", because we are the ones seeking their service.

>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.

I can pick specific songs and even download them for offline playback with Spotify. A problem in that case would come if I try to bypass Spotify's copy protection and play the offline songs in a different player.

youtube-dl was bypassing geo-blocks.

>youtube-dl was bypassing geo-blocks.

I don't think it was. I've been told by youtube-dl that content is blocked in my region many times.

The article spells out how they claim youtube-dl is bypassing copy protection.

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