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Comment by pwdisswordfishc | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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