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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

You mean doing what users want is bad?

DMCA says so (and several such projects have been removed via DMCA takedown). youtube-dl also walked into that one.

In general, software engineers even on HN tend to agree with that - that using their paid service without paying is bad, yeah.

> using their paid service without paying is bad

Software engineers on HN or anywhere else certainly do not tend to agree that stripping ads from freely-available content is equivalent to using a paid service without paying.

(not defending Google here) I believe that YT costs money to operate. So when I use it without watching ads (which is exactly what I do), I kinda cheat a few cents from them per day/month/year.

Also, having built IOS apps in the past: I love the idea that people use them I hate the idea that people use them without paying for them

> I kinda cheat a few cents from them per day/month/year

You certainly do not. There is a very simple and legally-recognised way to recuperate costs associated with providing a service and that is to charge money for the service. Youtube is very happy to give you content for free; you're cheating nobody. Or do you think you're cheating if you watch the ads but don't buy any of the products too?

> I hate the idea that people use [my apps] without paying for them

Do you charge money for them?

> freely-available

It’s not freely available. It has very real costs associated with it, which is why YouTube was a money burn pit for the majority of its existence.

> It’s not freely available

It is made available to the general public without cost. It is freely available.

It's "free", but not without compensation, and why FreeTube exists: the user is compensated with a free video only after being forced [1] to watch ads, or they can pay [2]. I don't believe compensation, behind a required act, is involved with "free", which is why I would describe it to someone as "ad supported" or even "free, with ads" (which most marketing uses, probably through the advice of legal).

[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/youtube-crackdown-on-adblock-user...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/premium

I don't think the US has ruled over whether third party YouTube apps are DMCA violations yet.

The DMCA takedown of youtube-dl was complete nonsense, even if youtube-dl is violating the DMCA it is not copyright material subject to a takedown. And Germany has ruled that YouTube's rolling cipher is DRM, but that case may be being appealed and has nothing to do with the US DMCA.

That's probably not relevant to Github hosting - Github would very much like to continue to operate in the EU.

And yet it was taken down, never to return.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

As a user I also want to walk into a grocery store and walk out with everything and not paying. But is that bad, let's think about it?

Is stealing physical goods the same as removing parts of a video stream?

Yes, when the service asks for money to see that video stream without those parts. Especially when that money finances the video creator and infrastructure costs for said service.

Your point really isn't such a "gotcha" as you think it is.

Use this smartarsery to support Nebula or PeerTube instead.

so you never walk away or change station when there is advertising on tv/radio/billboards?

And? Some food places charge money for delivering the food to your home, it's not a crime to move the food yourself.

You've said nothing.

So if I close my eyes during the ad, walk away and make myself a coffee, or switch my focus to another window while it's playing - is that illegal?

When I visit a web site for the first time, I don't remember agreeing to looking at/watching or reading the ads.

You wouldn't copy groceries

You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again! Copying groceries is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences

I would have no moral qualms with doing that if I could make an identical copy of the products and leave with the copy.

That's the comparison that is most apt in this case.

That's what we do with fruits and veggies so go for it!

You can't copy an apple from an apple, they're not true breeding.

Even if that weren't the case, you couldn't copy an apple in a grocery store anyway.

In that case the grocery store is providing a service of aggregating and organizing all the products you want, and keeping them fresh. That’s not free. Even if the act of making a copy is free, there are a lot of expenses involved on the store side.

My example is a bit of a contrived stretch, but laws are hard to reason about as they're not binary:

Someone that designed a robot that goes to the movie theater, sits in your seat, and streams the movie to your computer so you can go to the movies from home.

And then it also ends up not showing or "removing" the ads that get shown in the beginning of the movie before it starts.

Just like not reading every advertisement in the regular paper was always considered a crime?

But no one said not watching youtube ads is a crime.

The more accurate analogy would be reprinting a newspaper without the ads.

No, it's more like cutting out the text of the articles with scissors. I did that all the time when I was a kid. Just like I used to record TV on a VCR and then fast forward through the commercials. Time shifting and content skipping has never been immoral.

You don't need an ad blocker to "not read the advertisement" genius.

As a human, I want to get healthcare from a hospital and then walk out without paying, but that would be evil.

Depends on the circumstances. Remember, moral reasoning isn't based on facts about the world, so anything goes if we elevate the right principles.

Just because you're thinking about morality doesn't mean it doesn't start in the world. The world always comes first. There's no void in which you float and do your thinking and then encounter reality.

Everything starts in public. That's where we learn language, how to live and how to reason, including about morality.

Try somewhere with socialised healthcare. I've done that a couple of times.

Selling tools to commit crimes can be bad depending on the crime. Removing Youtube's ability to monetise probably doesn't do that much harm on a micro scale, but is problematic on a macro scale. This isn't like most piracy where the sales baseline remains the same and those who wouldn't buy will pirate, this is mostly just directly revenue negative to Youtube.

Where is it a crime to block advertisements?

I mean, we’re heading there.

You made me remember the scene from A Clockwork Orange where the main character is forced to watch television screens.

> commit crimes

Is this really a crime? The tool does not redistribute copyrighted material for example. It only reshapes video sent to your device, allowing you to decide which parts to view.

YouTube makes money by spying on you and serving you ads

So yeah it's theft

I'm not sure that's how the law works.

The fact that someone makes money spying on me doesn't make it illegal for me to take countermeasures.

If your business is taking pictures of people on the street and I decide to wear a baseball cap and sunglasses, you're just out of luck.

This is a weak argument because YouTube isn't a public street it's a private business

You aren't forced to use it, it is a choice

And this application (FreeTube) is for the sole purpose of circumventing their (YouTube) monetization for the sake of convenience

I don't have a dog in the fight and I'm certainly not a fan of YouTube or Google, but you can't argue it's somehow ok just because you dislike ads or lack of privacy on a "free" video streaming website

And YouTube as a private business can refuse to serve people using ad blockers or alternative clients. But that doesn't make it illegal to use an ad blocker as the parent post was implying.

I'm confused as to whether you're for it against the behaviour.

I'd say both of those things makes it ok to do whatever you can to avoid them - given that YouTube appears happy enough to serve ads for various obvious scams that wouldn't make it past television advertising standards bodies.

And if advertising doesn't influence you at all, would it still be stealing? I'm just saving them the bandwidth.

Is not playing the ads before the video a crime?

Is this a crime?

I'm free to pick and configure my user agent, YouTube is free to decide whether or not to serve me content.

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