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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

> how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos

The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.

YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.

A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.

I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.

Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.

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> Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.

I see your point, bit it isn't just the ads. I object to being stalked throughout my life online, they don't have the right to do that IMO.

Separate the ads from the stalking and maybe I'll just block or otherwise avoid the stalking and not the ads, but right now that is not remotely possible. I don't use sponsorblock for instance, the main extra stuff that circumvents can't be stalky, though I do manually skip when I've heard the same scripted-by-the-advertiser-to-try-sound-natural part already (wow, so your favourite part of the service is exactly the same as the other two podcasters I've listened to this day? In exactly the same words? That really sounds like a recommendation from you personally as a genuine user… (actually, this can sometimes be a useful signal of how little trust I should put in their other opinions!)).

You don't need to use the service.

But at the same time if you have an understanding that their business model demands you accept their terms of service, so they can fund the product, your basic options are participating or not.

The vast vast majority of the time I watch YouTube it's via an official client, and if you feel so strongly about your privacy I'm sure you're knowledgeable enough to sandbox your browser. You can always spin up a VM just for YouTube and run Chrome inside of that.

I rarely download public domain videos for music projects. But this gets harder every week. Eventually I'll just have to grab my phone with an analog audio jack and manually record back into my computer.

Or just download the public domain videos from another site. Yt-dl makes this phenomenally easier, but I definitely understand YouTube's motivations in blocking it.

re- the sponsor blocks. I find it quite eye opening too. Some creators I follow have created there channel with an image of trustworthiness, and then they have a sponserblock scripted word for word same as other channels... That really lost them most of their credibility in my eyes.

If they're willing to pretend they use something and love it for ads, then I don't know if I can watch there stuff. If they just say, xyz company has paid use to advertise this, we tried it for a few days, we found it helpful, that would be fine, but don't pretend/lie that you've been using it for years.

Us not having the right seems a little extreme. What if I close my eyes and block my ears during evey ad? Do I not have the right to use YouTube then?

I would say yes and no (leaning on the no)...

I think saying you don't have a right is fine... they are providing a service and dictating it's usage and you are using it.

So on the "closing your eyes". On one side, yes, allowing your browser to play the video and YT then being able to treat as a advert view means that youtube gets paid and the creator gets paid.

However... I would personally view this as can a person do this and how it works as a generalisation and I would say "no", because if everyone did this (why does just one person have the right to close their eyes), then (at least I'd imagine) the companies paying for advertising would see a drop in click-throughs and (I don't know what you call it.. but let's just say) more money. They'd then stop paying for adverts. Then no companies would want to pay for adverts and YT is no longer profitable (to YT or the creators).

Even entertaining the idea is extremely disturbing and dystopian. Having control over what we watch and what we listen to should be basic human rights. And those are inalienable, meaning we can't sign away those rights, not in a contract, not in any terms of service.

People who accept that as something a company should be allowed to do are a massive problem. Because of you, they might actually do it. It will start by making sure you cannot mute the sound in any way, designing hardware in a way to enforce that - devices will start overriding the use of external speakers and play ads from internal ones to make absolutely sure you haven't muted it. Next they will force always-on cameras on us which will make sure our eyes are open and looking at the ad. Next we will have brain implants to make sure you're actually paying attention and not thinking about something else.

I find it extremely disturbing that you don't feel disgusted about even thinking of "yes".

This is like saying you have the rights to mute your work meetings. Sure you do, but you just won't be employed anymore. I don't see that as a problem, because being employed and watching YouTube are not essential services nor human rights.

Then the correct solution would be to allow everyone just pay $1 per month for watching Youtube without any ads. Youtube will be funded and users will see no ads. But I suspect that even in that case Youtube will still want to show ads - even though the users would be paying for NOT seeing ads ...

Why is this correct? Youtube is a private company. It's very much allowed to charge $200 per month while playing tons of ads for you. Youtube sets the price and its policy, not the users.

Maybe they'll come up with a solution that requires you to turn on your camera while on youtube so that they can detect if you have your eyes and ears unblocked during ads. Blocked-eyes-blocked-ears detected = popup that pauses the video and asks you to unblock before continuing.

This is an actual black mirror episode

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

"Say McDonalds to end commercial" https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

the advertising industry doesn't have a right to invade people's privacy on an unprecedented level, and create a massive black market for reselling people's personal information. But they do, so adblocking is, at the moment, the ethical and morally correct option.

If you work in a part of the advertising industry with any kind of privacy invasion you deserve to lose your job and have your business be shut down, in some cases even jail time would be completely deserved. So no you don't need to allow ads for ethical reasons.

Can you iterate on that? I would like to understand what you are saying. By jail time, do you mean advertisers on YouTube have done such a malicious thing? YT did not block these efforts?

> YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.

It depends on the jurisdiction actually. In mine (France) and a few others, the right to save material is granted to every citizen no matter the license of the said material as long as the copy is made for private use only (it's called «droit à la copie privée» which translates to “right to private copy”).

Canada also has private copying (and pays a levy on blank media to pay for it, although at this point we're pretty firmly out of the blank media era).

https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/strategic-policy-sector/en/...

(What a classic Canadian government URL that is.)

Does this mandate American companies provide a mechanism for a personal copy ?

In theory YouTube could geo lock these features if made to implement it.

No, unfortunately, and DRMs are still legal. Which is a shame given that we have to pay a tax to the copyright industry whenever we buy a storage media (be it an SD card or an HDD) in exchange for this right…

What I mean is that there's no legal reason for Youtube to prevent downloading their videos (they can't be sued by IP holders for providing a download link for that matter).

So does that mean if you watch Netflix in Canada or France you can send a letter requesting a copy of their media ?

It seems like a good idea, Bojack Horseman is probably going to be taken down at some point, but enforcement remains elusive.

You can send them a letter, and they can comply without infringing any agreement made with the copyright holder, but they don't have to.

> Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.

Am I still allowed to close my eyes and turn down the volume when some ad is shown?

Not if the ad industry gets a say in it.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/

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