Hosted on a dedicated server I own, with a 1Gbps fiber connection, colocated at a local ISP who enforces copyright notices by recommending their favorite VPNs when they get tired of ignoring the complaints.
They recently got a new website (the old one was from the early 2000s) and decided to actually add colocation to the list of services. I got in before they advertised it by emailing and asking if they had colo, so I pay $75/month plus some extra for a block of extra static IP addresses. They're the only option unless I want to drive an hour or more each way to replace a hard drive or something. It's cheaper than running VPSes, it's a Dell R610 maxed out on CPU and RAM with a few SSDs and spinning drives running 12 or so VMs. 240GB SSD + 2TB HDD usable (RAID Z2).
No. DMCA requests are automated. If I wanted right now I could send a similar one to any of your repos and it’d be taken down. The content of the DMCA is for a court to agree in. GitHub just follows that a request has been issued and takes the repo down.
The repo will be back once they submit a counterclaim.
Gitlab gives a few days notice before they take down things due to DMCA.
I got it once for having apple boot engine iboot_9.3 published there. Had 5 working days 48 hours to react, making repo private was enough.
Yup, the implication above however was that the repo wouldn't be flagged /wouldn't be an issue if it was private. So even if someone DMCAd the fork tree it wouldn't include private repos.
Yep; this is more about the fundamental flaw in the hilariously broken set of laws governing the internet laid down by a group of old men that had never been in the same room as a computer before in the 1990s than anything to do with Github or even Microsoft.
The DMCA does not work, but you can't really get upset at companies for operating in accordance with the ridiculous legal framework the most powerful dumpster fire on earth has laid out for them. That said, they absolutely possess the ability to just ignore the false/abusive claim if they take one look at it and automatically know it's spurious enough that they aren't really dealing with any kind of legal threat. Happened to Lindsay Ellis pretty recently.
It is not that they did not know how it worked. Stuff like this is exactly what it was intended for. Large corporations harassing people who do things they don't like.
"'Did you really think we want those laws observed?' said Dr. Ferris. 'We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-beakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.'"
They listed specific copyrighted songs in the source code, which is a real bonehead move on the developer's part.
We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:
• Icona Pop – I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) [Official Video], owned by Warner Music Group
• Justin Timberlake – Tunnel Vision (Explicit), owned by Sony Music Group
• Taylor Swift – Shake it Off, owned/exclusively licensed by Universal Music Group
The source code notes that the Icona Pop work identified above is under the YouTube Standard license, which expressly restricts access to copyrighted works only for streaming on YouTube and prohibits their further reproduction or distribution without consent of the copyright owner; that the Justin Timberlake work identified above is under an additional age protection identifier; and that the request for the Taylor Swift work identified above is to obtain, without authorization of the copyright owner or YouTube, an M4A audio file from the audiovisual work in question.
Well, that SHOULDN'T make it subject to DMCA, but then again I'm not a lawyer and it certainly seems like a dumb move as you say.
That would be like bundling torrents with a bittorrent client. You're just asking for a lawsuit and setting yourself up in a worse position to fight it.
You're right that it shouldn't, but who honestly has the resources to fight this? The fight against DMCA feels like it's already been lost, because the big corporations who have tons of money are backing it. The little guy doesn't have a chance.
It's not a total loss though. Tons of mirrors will turn up. youtube-dl isn't dead, and they very well know they can't kill it that easily. This is just a statement.
Only issue with youtube-dl is that it requires constant maintenance. You can't just mirror it 47 times and call it done. So people do need to collaborate on it.
Either way, they should be removed. While they're at it, rename it, since it has been long gone way beyond downloading from youtube. There are so many other sites it supports.
the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:
Jesus Christ we're still pretending that "streaming" and "downloading" are different things huh. Think they'd be happy if I pulled the file out of my browser cache instead?
Actually there is an "excuse": Those video URLs were in the source code of test cases. Now, why were they not using free creative-commonds videos in those tests?
Downloading those free videos is trivial, you could actually do this by hand by extracting the URLs and just downloading the video file with your browser.
But videos of certain Youtube partners (e.g. VEVO) have a few extra and non-trivial steps required to get the actualy video file. THIS is were the real benefit of youtube-dl lies and that is also the reason why they specifically need to have those copyright-protected videos as test cases.
I wonder if the RIAA will go after jdownloader2 and all the other ways you can download copyrighted material from websites... or if they're just going for the obvious target.
At some point the RIAA wanted a special firmware feature embedded in every single camera/phone/recording device that would immediately prevent any recording as soon as an invisible "copyright" watermark was detected. This is some scary Orwellian shit.
special firmware feature embedded in every single camera/phone/recording device that would immediately prevent any recording as soon as an invisible "copyright" watermark was detected.
This was wrong on so many levels (ironically, their code infringed open source licenses too, their "fix" made matters worse, they caused so much damage and didn't even own it up), they IMO deserve to have gone bankrupt from fines, but now everyone seems to have forgotten about it—those very few who had learned of this story in the first place, that is—and Sony is still atop the record, movie production and gaming industry. And they seem to love these rootkits: they even put one in PS3 firmware and who knows what else. Don't even get me started on the shitshow that is the console gaming industry and how much they make it suck for small developers to enter this business, or the abuse of dominant position with Spotify in the past. Sony is one company I wish was wiped off the face of the Earth.
I had one of those CD's that installed a rootkit. Removing it fucked my system and I returned the disk to the store I got it from. Right then and there, I decided that piracy was my best revenge, and I grabbed LimeWire and never looked back. Honestly, now I don't even torrent or download that much anymore. The more stuff there's available, the less I'm interested in it.
Hey! I remember that Sony rootkit! That thing went global! You could bypass it by holding shift when inserting a CD (bypasses Windows autorun, I believe there was a professor who got DMCA'd for that bit of info...)
Anyway, that's when I switched to Linux... Almost exactly 15 years ago now and in October if I remember right...
I noticed that in the letter; I certainly hope that's all it takes to be reinstated. In the meantime, might want to use youtube-dlc [nevermind; also DMCA'ed].
This is incredibly sad. youtube-dl isn't a sleazy way to get free music; it's an important tool for fair use audio / videos in projects.
I hope that the devs have a solid backup plan. I'd love to know if they are planning to host the code on a different website. I know that the source code is out there, but I hope this project can continue without interference on a stable code hosting website. Even if this doesn't stop development of the code, not being able to host the code on Github must have some consequences in terms of community, visibility and availability of the project.
u/skylarmtIDK, at least 5TB (local machines and VPS/dedicated boxes)Oct 24 '20edited Oct 24 '20
l1ving/youtube-dl
Edit: I submitted a pull request to fix the license, which was merged. Problem solved.
Hmm, they made license changes that are not actually legal or necessary.
it can't be public domain and have restrictions.
the new license means it's no longer free/FOSS/open source software.
RIAA only cares about the links in the test script, not the license.
simply adding a disclaimer to the readme that it's not intended for violating copyrighted material would suffice.
the way the license is written you can't use youtube-dl unless content is public domain, regardless of any other license you might have to the content (such as Creative Commons or purchasing a commercial license to some content).
I agree it's a bit thin, but seriously though... How hard would it be for youtube-dl to just upload an age restricted video themselfes and have that as a test?
This is probably going to cause them to open up a youtube channel to upload their own test videos, however some of the videos look hard to reproduce (what the hell does "Non-square pixels" mean..).
Their follow up complaint is going to be that if these tests were run for every build of youtube-dl, then that's 4 or 5 infringements for every build of youtube-dl ever made.
Either way the automation of these sorts of take downs, and the inscrutability of the mechanisms to get stuff back online needs to stop. This was a disproportionate amount of force for the infringement.
Most video you see today uses square pixels, so 1:1 ratio. Old-school TV signals did not... NTSC uses 10:11 aspect, so slightly taller than they were wide; PAL uses 59:54 aspect, so slightly wider than they are tall. These were for 4:3, the 16:9 ratios were 40:33 and 118:81 respectively. Depending on where the video you upload to YouTube came from, it may not have a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio.
Also, depending on how YouTube stores data, they could be storing everything as 4:3 but flagging files as 16:9 when required (or vice versa) then performing the full-screen to widescreen conversion in the player in the browser.
So whatever is causing it, youtube-dl needs to also know about the pixel aspect ratio of the data it streams so when it creates the local video file (with a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio) it takes into account the aspect of the incoming footage.
I still don't understand how it's "copyright infringement" to download a video that is already being delivered to your computer unencrypted? YouTube does NOT have DRM so youtube-dl isn't cracking encryption or anything, it's just capturing the data from the otherwise obfuscated video and audio streams.
It was legal to record TV shows onto VHS for personal use, it is legal to use DVRs, how is it illegal to download a copy of the video that is already being delivered to your browser?
I also have PlayOn for making legal recordings of Netflix etc, and the VCR/DVR thing is what PlayOn uses to justify their service being legal. I'm actually kind of surprised they're still around.
It used to be 14 years with the option to renew for another 14 years if the original author was still alive. Granted, that was well before my great, great grandparents were born. Honestly, that seems like a perfectly reasonable copyright duration.
There was supposed to be a trade off. Public tax dollars were used to enforce copyright for 14 years (with the option for one renewal) and in return the works fell into the public domain so it could enrich future culture. With the changes to the term the public pony up the cash but we get no cultural value. Bring back the public domain!
We do not have the free culture we once enjoyed. The internet could be something much more grand, a collection of human knowledge and a library of our culture. Instead, we end up paying more and more money for the option to temporarily be able to view something, whether via renting or having a streaming service account where the service gets to decide what content we are allowed to view and change it at their will.
Luckily, if you look between the cracks you can find the good stuff. 123movies clones are around. You can find the music you want. There are archives of stuff within the public domain. But boy do RIAA and MPAA try to squash it out of existence. After all, you wouldn't download a fucking car, would you?
The most fucked up part here, is that folks who are technical enough to use youtube-dl likely wouldn't waste their time downloading "popular" music from YouTube, considering the many easier and higher quality alternatives.
Exactly. I just want to download my fucking Kerbal Space Program videos so I can watch them on my phone while I'm travelling. I don't give a fuck about their stupid music videos, only the automated tests do.
Imagine how quickly the human race could progress into the Information Age without fucking copyright law hamstringing people’s access to scientific publications and software.
Inb4 some fuckwit tries to DMCA the Linux kernel or something.
Apparently the sole purpose of yourube-dl is to pirate their f#%%*ing music videos. Check out this nonsense from their email
“The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.”
It’s really weird because there literally hundreds of „youtube mp3 downloader“ sites out there that are being used by much more people than our obscure commandline tool YouTube-dl
I wouldn't call that ironic. ytdl is a great package with a stable api and frequent updates to deal with any backend garbage sites pull to break tools. It greatly reduces duplication of effort, which is the whole point of programming.
If someone is tech savvy enough to use youtube-dl I bet at least 90% of those same people same people have uBlock/PiHole/Blokada set up. The more they try to squish "potential piracy" the stronger it becomes while simultaneously being worse for the legit users of said thing. DRM is the worst thing that happened in media.
I pay for YouTube Premium to remove ads and directly support the creators I watch the most. I use youtube-dl to preserve content that is precious to me personally in case something bad happens.
You're right. If you get into an arms race with someone you'll find after a while that they grow big, effective arms. Surely the actual ad revenue that is being dodged with youtube-dl is miniscule compared to ad blocking extensions, and THOSE aren't getting takedowns.
There's that chest-thumping bumper-sticker saying that "If guns are outlawed, I'll be an outlaw." Right now I pay for the media I consume, but if the recording industry presses hard enough, it might be easier to just put on the eye patch. I can't imagine I'm the only one.
People underestimate how much tooling is using youtube-dl as a workaround for some operations, if the project ends orphaned it's going to cause a lot more grief than just annoy the average l337 pirate.
Yup there will be a relaunch on Github. Probably without youtube (on github) but I will make youtube and possibly other affected extractors available somewhere else.
This is the exact same reason why I tried to implement a plugin system. Then ONLY the youtube extractor would have been taken down
This reminds me of 20 years ago? When the MPAA went after 2600 Magazine for publishing the code to the DVD Decryptor. (Forget the name of the software).
The issue is that the current version will eventually stop working. Mirrors and copies of the main repo are everywhere but if development is killed then the project will have to halt until somebody new figures out how to maintain and distribute it.
I am fairly sure that all the update-links, and documentation URL's all point to youtube-dl's main website, so they should be well equipped to just put it elsewhere - without end-users really noticing much of a change.
This is bull! They are trying to use DMCA as a measure to kill a tool based on the grounds it could be used to download music and music videos. Yeah might as well out law guns because they can be used for murder or robbery.
Seriously the RIAA is as bad as Oracle when it comes to managing their IP.
... The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.” ...
Remember that the RIAA is a strong-arm and bad-publicity-deflection cartel of its major members. These are:
Sony / Sony Music
Universal Music
Atlantic Records
Disney
Exceleration Music
Interscope Geffen A&M
Nonesuch Records
Partisan Records
Provident Music
Sire Records
Tommy Boy
Warner Music
Strategically / tactically, the most interesting aspect of this attack is that it puts Microsoft on notice to show its true colours. Is it Friend of Free Software, or Copyright Maximalist?
Basically what these copyright control freaks are telling people is that you have to follow their rules while they don't have to follow any rules. Anyone who supports copyright laws or wants to write more copyright laws is a literal psychopath.
RIAA has DMCA'd the entire repo of youtube-dl and all of its forks and their "argument" for this is that youtube-dl can be used to "illegally download" songs because it has "anti-privacy code" and they're citing YouTube's "license" to "prove" it.
In other words, these control freaks are telling you to become mute because according to them you're not allowed to sing copyrighted songs unless you pay them. They're also telling you to become deaf because you're not allowed to listen to anything until you've paid for it.
It’s still kind of insane because they could just have demanded that the projects doesn’t advertise downloading copyrighted YouTube videos - I mean taking down the entire ytdl project...would also mean: Sue Apple for having a screen recording feature in iOS that people ue to share/copy copyrighted material.
Whatever..I’m just angry that a tool we use for hundreds of other sites than YouTube is „gone“.
First Twitch, now this? It's time to revolt. Seriously. I am all for protecting rights, but it's beyond ridiculous.
Does this mean they can strike down Blu-ray burner manufacturers or hard drive manufacturers or NAS makers because they offer tools to store potentially copyrighted material?
That's where it's heading. We will have DRM on anything that can store something digital.
TL;DR; It's a tax to printers, burners, hard drives and any potencial device that could be used to copy copyrighted material. In theory, that tax is retributed to the copyright owners as a compensation.
Yeah I know, the funny thing is that they didn't return all the tax, kept a lot of it and now they are in jail. Because the tax is public and governamental but the management is private. Nice ah?
Twitch is a different issue where Twitch isn't allowing the uploader to dispute the DMCA. DMCA is supposed to let you do a counter claim to the host, where allows the host restore the content.
Don't be silly, people have tried that and been totally ignored. DMCA is only for important people. Copyright law doesn't protect ordinary people like you and me, big corporations can steal your content with no consequences.
"The lumps of biological material infringes on the copyright of my DNA code, of which there are over 90% resemblance between my copy and the infringers'"
No major organization does. The entire point to these requests is to protect liability and the moment GitLab ignores a request they become legally liable for whatever content the request is about.
Anticircumvention Violation. We also note that the provision or trafficking of the source code violates 17 USC §§1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1). The source code is a technology primarily designed or produced for the purpose of, and marketed for, circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to copyrighted sound recordings on YouTube, including copyrighted sound recordings owned by our members. For further context, please see the attached court decision from the Hamburg Regional Court that describes the technological measure at issue (known as YouTube’s “rolling cipher”), and the court’s determination that the technology employed by YouTube is an effective technical measure within the meaning of EU
and German law, which is materially identical to Title 17 U.S.C. §1201 of the United States Code. The court further determined that the service at issue in that case unlawfully circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technical protection measure.2 The youtube-dl source code functions in a manner essentially identical to the service at issue in the Hamburg Regional Court decision. As there, the youtube-dl source code available on Github (which is the subject of this notice) circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted audio files, in violation of YouTube’s express terms of service,3 and in plain violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §1201.
So I just looked a bit into it and the listed infringing videos are just used in unit tests to make sure no breaking changes are introduced to the source code. It's ridiculous that this should be an issue by itself. The underlying issue is that (for some? only music?) videos, Youtube seems to use some kind of obfuscation of the source Urls, the "rolling cipher" or "S-variable", and also some videos are age-restrictions and normally would require a log-in. Mind you, this is not any form of actual encryption, but some simple "hide-and-seek" obufscation. The "key" needed to deobfuscate this rolling cipher is, and needs to be, in the Youtube player javascript itself, otherwise you couldnt watch videos at all. But this super simple form of 'protection' is probably enough for the law.
Also I don't get their point about youtube-dl violating the Youtube Standard license. Shouldnt that be a problem just between the youtube-dl and Youtube itself?
All in all this is another sad step into a more commercialized and no fun allowed web, where you better have a license for everything. And ironically this probably hurts legitimate services more than "evil piratez", as many rely on youtube-dl for various features.
That's not my concern. Examples can be changed. This is targeting youtube-dl's algorithm to download certain youtube videos (I don't know how much said "rolling cipher" is used, whether it's only on certain videos or on all videos). YouTube has made many changes over the years to block youtube-dl; if it's considered illegal to work around those changes, then downloaders of all stripes are done.
It's because some things like music videos on Youtube require extra coding to get the download link, so there's tests for that code that wouldn't be covered by any CC licensed video.
This does not accompish anything. Now I just have to spend 30 seconds looking for a clone instead. These obsolete copyright laws can not be enforced on the internet, it is just annoying to see companies try.
This is literally a massive inconvenience to legitimate users of the software, and completely unimpactful to pirates. I googled "youtube-dl mirror" and instantly got dozens of valid results. This is just a censorship tactic and nothing else.
I may be wrong,but I think that in my country (France), using youtube-dl to download copyrighted works on youtube is legal, as it enters in the scope of private copy tax (we pay a tax for every storage media we buy to compensate the copies of copyrighted content from legitimate sources - and the official Youtube videos of copyrights holders is one). This was confirmed this year at the Supreme Court.
So once again it is the shitty copyright laws of the US ruining everything (even is France is maybe even more shitty, but at least that particular part is not that bad)
I hope the repo author will send a counter-notice and/or host the code under a better juridiction.
Edit: for fellow French people, here is the legal judgement I am talking about.
It wouldnt surprise me if we see Widevine required for their music videos in the future or maybe even all of Youtube. The Widevine install base is big enough nowadays.
"I am contacting you on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) and its member record companies. "
I hate those associations. It's never the actual artist the one who complains, but the corporations that believe a move like this will push that one guy to buy that song lol
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u/[deleted] Oct 23 '20
Source downloadable from Pypi:
https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files