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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I remember having countless depressing conversations about this all the way back in the very early 2000s when potential clients wanted us to program a video "streaming" system that did not allow downloading, and fruitlessly trying to convince them that streaming was downloading--there's no meaningful technical difference. People were convinced that "streaming" was some weird distinct mode that the Internet could be converted into, and that you just need to program harder to do it.

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It is not a hard distinction to explain.

Streaming does not by default save to device. There are ways around it; these are pointless to invest too much in fighting. Making streaming good and reasonably priced makes legit customers out of pirates.

You will never defeat piracy through technology, only through economics.

I remember going into local browser cache folders and pulling out YouTube videos in full. Am I remembering wrong or did in fact the #1 video streaming platform simply just download the videos to your hard drive, same as you would have with right click save? Only difference is the default folder it goes to.

absolutely. you would just go to the browser cache folder and look for the file that was increasing in size as the seconds passed. This is why I disagree with the comment above that you can't defeat piracy through technology. I think there are plenty of people like me who routinely kept music/video through tricks like that who are now thwarted by whatever the heck html5 thing browsers started doing in the 2010s.

If you could find a file in the cache folder you are fully capable of typing `yt-dlp URLHERE` in a terminal. I taught my dad how to do that around 2010 or so so he could save his religious music to his computer.

well yt-dlp didnt exist in 2010, so no you didn't. At some point he had to move from youtube-dl or whatever it was called to get the new fork. and looking at yt-dlp's github I see how often its tricks get shut down by google, and old releases don't work. Every few months. That inconvenience alone will discourage many pirates and save a lot of money for content providers. Just as there are many users users will at the margin economically there are many at the margin of competence or drive.

I've been running a YT-DLP build for a year now, no issues. Even I am surprised.

People who use tricks like this will always be in the minority. This is harder than going to TPB.

I do not recall this specifically with YouTube - but I recall pulling wmv's out of the IE cache in the same way.

>Streaming does not by default save to device

But that's not accurate. It does download the content to the device but only stores it in the browser cache as chunks or otherwise you could not buffer or replay.

In gaming Denuvo (a technology) has essentially defeated piracy. Also the last two xboxes

Denuvo is crackable, but there's low demand for it outside of a few big budget singleplayer games. Not to mention gamers are spoiled for choice. There are literally thousands of free or cheap games to play instead of new releases... why muck with piracy when you can grab a grey market month of gamepass for less than a sandwich?

You might defeat piracy through draconian laws though.

They are already and nobody cares because there are enough technical ways to dodge them.

There are plenty of less-technical ways to dodge them as well.

Older stuff doesn't see much enforcement. Unless it's Nintendo or Game of Thrones, basically.

Just lie to those people.

On one hand, that will get you plenty of jobs working for those people.

On the other hand, that will get you plenty of job working for those people.

Capitalism: Trickling down agency to the intelligent since Year X

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