But youtube-dl is not a "pirate method", it's a neutral tool for downloading video contents. Presumably, you have the right to download those contents.
Could we not call it "watch" instead? It's a neutral tool to watch youtube videos.
How exactly the video file gets downloaded into the viewing device is an implementation detail. Whether it's a MythTV plugin, that free Android app, Firefox, or this Python tool isn't important. If one of them is declared illegal in some jurisdiction, they all are.
It's important if a court cares, which would probably be the case. Watching a YouTube video on Firefox is unlikely to be construed as circumventing DRM while downloading the same video with youtube-dl conceivably could be construed as such.
Courts aren't always concerned with technical differences, more often intent.
No court has found any of the mentioned software to be illegal so far, anywhere.
They are all interchangeable. Should one implementation be found problematic, in theory it can be swapped with another.
It's not comparable to DRM, where a particular software can be licensed for a particular digital protection mechanism. In this case either they all are, or none are.
You're still just focused on technical implementation and not the intent behind actions, which is also important and will likely be considered by the courts.
While there is no technical difference, there is quite a difference of intent between watching a streaming video and downloading it to circumvent copy-protection.
Unsure if that can be configured or not, but if your video content distribution network can’t rate limit or handle bursts you probably have more pressing issues.
Agreed, just mentioning a "technical difference" that could be used to determine if people are watching in real time vs downloading-with-a-tool-that-grabs-everything-as-fast-as-possible. Since this is Google, it's fair to assume they might be interested in anything that causes them to lose Ad revenue.
youtube-dl is used for reasons other than just watching videos. For example, journalists use it to download videos from YouTube to edit them into their news stories. Data scientists are using it to download videos for automated analysis in quantities larger than any of the involved scientists could ever watch. Both are not "watching" in the narrow sense implied by the word, but not copyright violations either because they probably qualify as fair use.
The point is that youtube-dl does exactly the same thing as every other method of watching the video. You can't watch the video -- by any means -- without downloading it first. The uses you list may not be "watching" in a particular sense of the word, but they are "watching" in the same sense of the word that is relevant to using a web browser -- the only sense that would apply to YouTube.
It doesn't matter. YouTube's Standard License authorizes certain videos to be viewed only by streaming through YouTube's web player or an authorized client. This is enforced by obfuscating code in the player. By circumventing that code, youtube-dl veers into "illegal piracy tool" territory.
Note that it wouldn't matter if youtube-dl contained no deobfuscating code at all, but merely downloaded and evaluated the JavaScript Google's web client uses to deobfuscate. The result is the same: youtube-dl circumvents copyright access controls and is therefore illegal.
That would make little sense because the tool itself doesn't have anything to do with watching videos. It only downloads them, or pieces of them, and does some format and metadata conversion. The name describes precisely what it does: it downloads data.
The new narrative is that obviously you’re not permitted expect in very rare circumstances, so any tool used to aid actual fair use gets slammed with DMCA take-downs.
I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s how they’ve been trying to frame the discussion for a long time now.
Yes, and I'm very surprised at the number of people that are apparently falling for this narrative. It would've been unthinkable just a decade ago, it seems.
It's good to see others recognise it for what it is. It needs to be strongly pushed back.
That's because even a decade ago (well, a decade and a half, factoring in recent memory), the internet was a fundamentally different, much more open place. Now probably 90% of traffic exists in increasingly siloed walled gardens, which all take measures to ensure their content (and more importantly, you) stay there. (Hell, a good portion of that traffic isn't even from some general-purpose browser, it's from an app.) And circumventing that is pretty much the letter of the (poorly worded) law when it comes to the DMCA. It's not really the people that have changed, it's the internet that has.
(Sure, many parts of the internet are still open, but youtube isn't one of them.)
Does anyone technically have the right to download from youtube in this way? Even if so, it's clearly in the category of software predominantly used for piracy, all of which can also have legitimate uses.
Can you explain what makes you think that even makes sense? Most of the relevant YouTube videos are already available for free to the public, so there is no real incentive to download them from YouTube and upload them to The Pirate Bay. Downloading a copy for personal use would often fall under fair use. Uses with third party video players like mpv aren't even making a permanent copy. Many of the videos are in the public domain (e.g. from NASA) or are permissively licensed (e.g. many university course lecture videos or conference talks).
Who is even using this for some kind of meaningful copyright infringement?
> Downloading a copy for personal use would often fall under fair use.
Downloading a copy for personal use isn't even copyright infringement - for copyright infringement to happen, you'd have to then share that copy you made. For instance, you are allowed to do VHS copies of TV shows, and that was confirmed by Supreme Court[0].
The Betamax case predates the DMCA, which created the “anti-circumvention” laws the RIAA is relying on here. It was also a 5:4 decision that depended on “a significant likelihood that substantial numbers of copyright holders who license their works for broadcast on free television would not object to having their broadcasts time-shifted,” and the copyright holders’ failure “to demonstrate that time-shifting would cause any likelihood of non-minimal harm to the potential market for, or the value of, their copyrighted works.” The opinion explicitly did not cover pay TV, and the court also noted that the cost of Betamax tapes made it difficult to build your own library of tapes for repeated viewing, in concluding that there was no likelihood of harm. I think it’s an interesting and open question whether the typical use of youtube-dl falls under fair use.
What a bizarre revisionist point of view. Radio players quite naturally learned to record to cassettes once the technology was available and no one ever came to raid player manufacturers, nor did anyone brand the kid sitting at home recording the radio some piracy overlord.
If you publish a youtube video publicly, there is an expectation that the public is allowed to view it.
Is the idea that the author didn't have the rights to publish the video in the first place, due to things like unlicensed background music?
Thus far, Youtube is under the safe harbor principle of the DMCA, and as long as they honor those takedown notices, the end user is not likely to be held accountable. The software they use is even less likely to be.
Fair - what word should i have used in place of illegal to describe DMCA?
Youtube DL was taken down because it was DMCA'd, to which we all (mostly?) agree was an abuse of DMCA, but nevertheless the premise seems to be that it was effectively a form of piracy - no? Isn't Piracy (and supporting Piracy/etc) "illegal"? Or is there a better word to use here?
Getting DMCA'd doesn't mean anything more than somebody submitted a letter saying "I believe this content infringes my copyright, please take it down.". It does not establish guilt.
Just because the RIAA cries foul doesn't mean there is actually anything wrong here. Piracy is illegal, but youtube-dl is not a piracy tool, just like VHS recorders were not piracy tools. Making personal copies of videos is absolutely legal, and seems to be the prominent way to use youtube-dl (Why else would you use it? The content is already available for free on youtube itself!).
So what you should call youtube-dl is "Something the RIAA doesn't like", basically.
Right, but there is an implication that if it was piracy it is illegal, no? Lets not play coy.
My comment of illegal isn't a court of law, my intent was clearly discussing the idea that if the RIAA is accusing youtube-dl of piracy (effectively), and then they themselves increase popularity of youtube-dl, they would effectively be promoting piracy, aka something illegal.
Ya'll are getting hung up on the details. It was a joke.
Well not a joke i guess, no punchline hah. But still - humor /cheeky comment about if it's considered piracy ("illegal"), and the RIAA end up promoting it, aren't they themselves promoting piracy. That's all :)
The RIAA falsely claims youtube-dl is a tool for piracy. This is not reality. Accepting the RIAA's premise is problematic.
The right words here are not "piracy" or "illegal," but it is not clear what statement you are trying to make. I can't recommend any better words without additional context.
Maybe “arguably illegal”? The RIAA’s argument is that youtube-dl is a tool for circumventing copyright protection, which is related to the concept of piracy or copyright infringement, but prohibited by different laws. Marketing a circumvention tool can be illegal even if there are ways to use it that don’t infringe copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
