YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

Probably not. If intent were to be demonstrated in court, a derivative work would almost certainly be tainted in turn unless those authors had a _really_ good justification for their actions. (IANAL though; I'm just guessing based on other copyright cases that came up in the media before.)

For example, imagine forking Napster back in the day, redoing the UI, and rewriting half of the internals. Do you really think a court would let that fly? Judges are hardly idiots.

That being said, why not just mirror the original to a host running as a tor hidden service and continue all development efforts there?

Instead of a unit test which successfully downloads a copyright-protected video, it would have a unit test which attempts to download such videos but returns an error message to the user based on a hardcoded blacklist of videos IDs, stored in a separate config file. (It would also have a unit test for successfully downloading a public domain video from the developers' own channel, of course).

The developers could also make clear that they are happy to receive DMCA requests to add specific video IDs to their blacklist. As for what happens if the user deletes the blacklist config file, maybe that won't have a unit test.

If such a fork was successful in fending off court cases, though, it would start to raise interesting First Amendment questions. The difference between the two pieces of software, in practice, is just the text in the README telling people not to break the law (plus a single "Delete" button press after installation, which the user would have to learn about from another source). This would mean that the difference between developers complying with the law and breaking the law is including that text in the README, which effectively seems like compelled speech.

(Hypothetically of course! Youtube-dl is not only for Youtube.)

Not sure what one of those looks like. I hear people talk about them, but I've not seem an advert on a YouTube video.

That being said, I do use a bunch of anti-ad browser extensions... :)

The content holder licensed the content to Youtube (or Vimeo, etc), but does not necessarily control the monetization of that content by the licensee. (Generally, the license will say something like royalties shall be X% of revenue derived from the content, without limiting itself to specific methods of monetization.)

Youtube doesn't have a license to give to the viewer; the license they have is merely to show you the content.

I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.

This has been the law for several decades already. But the key thing to understand is "fair use" doesn't mean "to avoid paying." If digital content is available for purchase, the courts generally have not found making a permanent copy from a streaming source to be fair use. (Where it gets complicated: multiple copyrights applying to a single work, such as the dancing baby Prince video. The creator of the video was okay with people viewing it and downloading it freely, but Prince was not. In the music arena, this would be a non-issue due to compulsory licenses, but those licensing schemes don't exist for other types of media. Ultimately, the court said that the focus of the video was the toddler dancing, and that the music was incidental, so including it in the video was a legitimate fair use. But it took more than a decade for the case to be resolved.)

>> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge

> when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.

The problem with this idea is that you're quoting a case about recording televised broadcasts. The quote you pulled your quote from begins "when one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work".

Televised works were shown with embedded advertising a lot more intrusive than what can appear on a YouTube video. There is no way for the presence of advertisements to affect how this argument applies to YouTube, when it was originally cast in terms of television.

Yeah I'm gonna need to hear that from the courts, my assertion here is that the DMCA unfairly skirts around this provision of copyright, not that it superceded it outright.

Those fair use rights are not an optional provision of copyright, (although many opinions have stated that copyright provides the author may refuse to allow copies if they technically can, unless you have relevant case law that superseded Sony Betamax, in that case I believe it was the minority opinion), I am not aware of any decisions that say anything other than "copies for fair use may be required for there to be fair use."

But I am not a lawyer, and just because I haven't heard of the case doesn't mean it didn't happen...

Furthermore according to parents logic VCRs shouldn't be allowed to exist because they can record from both categories.

No, that's not at all what I said. VCRs are just tools. Tools are subject to a different analysis post-DMCA: does the tool have a substantial non-infringing use or is it deliberately designed to violate copyright?

In determining whether a tool was deliberately designed to violate copyright, they look beyond just the mere function of the tool and examine why that functionality is present, and how the tool and that potentially-violating functionality is marketed.

On that note: DVRs generally no longer exist today as standalone goods (see, for example Tivo, etc). This is because the copyright owners introduced new time-shifting licenses a few years ago, and your cable company, Hulu, etc. pay the copyright owners for the right to let their viewers view content on a time-shifted basis. A standalone DVR would generally have the primary purpose of violating those (relatively new) rights, and thus wouldn't pass muster today.

What about VCRs? They're still okay. They make degraded, low-quality copies of broadcast transmissions for archival/time-shifted uses by people who have TVs that still connect to VCRs. As those people generally wouldn't be able to access the equivalent digital content on their TV, it's clear that the primary use of VCRs is for fair uses purposes.

Even from your own archive?

Originally many people started out with plain paper terminals rather than the spiffy video terminals that would later become common.

Well, sprocket-feed terminals more precisely, where you sit at a floor-standing wide-carriage _printer_ having a full QWERTY/ASCII keyboard, connected to the mainframe using a RS-232 serial COM port cable.

Or remotely dial-up over regular phone lines using external modems compatible with the kind first used for internet dial-up. Modems later found internally as standard equipment on PC's, made to accept a common RJ-11 telephone connector, eliminating the need for the RS-232 cable.

Not unlike a space-age teletype.

Either way, you type to the computer and it types back to you.

When available, as we all know it's been a while and computers still can never be expected to have 100 percent uptime, so time shifting has always been the norm in some way or another. At this point with a dumb terminal you just come back later when the mainframe is not too busy for input, or for output just wait for the printout until it's good and ready.

More effective session management would have to be accomodated by storage of some kind not unlike the punched paper tapes for sending and receciving on some teletypes.

Underneath the terminal you have a big box of the fan-feed computer paper so you fundamentally get an endless record of the communication in its entirety. Otherwise there is nothing. This is the default. Out-of-paper meant no communication and no data.

Pallets and pallets of boxes and boxes of printouts, excessive amounts of trees giving their lives and paper mill pollution up the wazoo (you ever smell that stuff?). But it's worth it, these are not copies, this is the original data, as you received it coming in live over the wire.

Depending on the institution or individual, and the risk of losing this unique output, archival handling procedures may apply.

Upgrading to a VT-102 type video terminal is actually analogous to a desktop PC when it comes to form factor, but the command line is still not from a local processor, and no local disk storage.

Naturally you still get your continuous printout as the screen display scrolls it on by, now possible from a plain serial printer (or from the same old paper terminal) connected to the second COM port on the VT-102 for pass-through printing.

You still use the terminal to operate the command line & display the output from a remote CPU, and with scrolling ability, can roll back to redisplay some recent earlier content. This was not a copy either, it was the same original live data as printed, just redisplayed. Not every terminal had that kind of memory though, and if present, not much.

Then you get _intelligent_ terminals with lots more memory plus local floppy storage, having more than two COM ports, and a simple local OS in ROM to handle these peripherals.

It finally became posible to judiciously save paper like never before, from that point on there has always been a local SAVE command of some kind. That's one of the only main purposes of any mainstream desktop workstation ever since.

You end up with a stack of floppies instead of paper containing the original data from that hardware session.

Interestingly, even today it is sometimes still faster to look something up in your paper records than find it on a disk though.

Anyway the disks simply have digital representation specifically crafted for the storage medium, often in appropriately treated text files.

From that point you could always play back data from a disk to your console screen, and/or one or more of the COM ports which may be connected to other terminals, computers, storage, or printing hardware. When the time is right.

The purpose of putting data into a computer file format to begin with is precisely so this type of communication can be achieved electronically.

And also, so the file or disk can be archived using one of the only non-communication commands in such a pre-DOS desktop environment, the ominous-sounding COPY command.

Well, it's electronic and you need to keep the original completely intact, so no telling how many times you need to run the COPY command to get a reliable archive.

But when one of the things that came across your wires is something like the text of The Godfather, that's an author's original work and it would be most questionable to manufacture copies for people as if it were your own creation, perhaps unfair even if proper attribution is given.

Each user has always been responsible for appropriately respecting the rights owners of any material in their archive, and questioning their own operation enough to avoid things like selling duplicates to just anyone. It's part of the responsibility of having such powerful equipment at their disposal.

Not just for those with dual floppy drives. Takes lots of floppy disks to boot sometimes too. Twenty years ago most PC's already came equipped with two CD drives in addition to a floppy drive, one CD drive was writable for archiving since floppies were not too popular any more.

MP3 sites earlier than Napster arose without question as experimenters compressed and shared their archives using the emerging codec. This was nothing like selling pirated copies of CD's, and was not made available to the general public by any means, just the few technology enthusiasts who had PC's with internet capability.

With progress in hardware and internet performance, there should be more advantage for archival use as time goes by.

Now exponentially more good material is at risk of being lost due to electronic or legislative failures, beyond the pre-existing threats from ordinary disasters like floods or acts of war. There's also the limitations of things like MP3 compression.

There should continuously be improving apps so users can work more effectively than ever with the desired portions out of their own complete digital history.

Meanwhile there is some consensus that operators without your permission are clandestinely eavesdropping to make truly illegal copies of your original complete digital history (along with many others') and extract portions that they my find desirable, sometimes against your own best interest.

You surely need to be entitled to better than this, and in favor of your own preferences instead.

In the USA according to copyright law archiving is not supposed to be impossible.

Nobody has a continuous paper record to fall back on any more.

Any threat to the usefulness of your digital equivalent would seem to be a form of cyberattack now that we have a better idea of how a cyberattack can do damage.

It's always been the same tool with possible uses for good or evil, the desktop workstation.

What you primarily do with it can only be determined by examination of its complete digital history.

From an entertainment law perspective it would seem like the only sensible violation could be if illegal entertainment had actually ocurred, not whether the file was being stored locally or remotely.

If most of the files just sit there almost all the time, with almost no dancing to the computer or anything like that, that's an archival device not an entertainment device.

Even more so when the primary user handling of the files is to maintain them intact against all odds, without ever intentionally using the file contents to achieve the files' own particular underlying purpose, whether entertainment files or not.

The letter makes two claims, "copyright infringement" which might be substantiated by the readme, (but not against youtube-dl authors, perhaps against their users) and "anticircumvention [sic]" which is the meat of their real issue.

The making of a copy is not outside of fair use unless it fails the balance test, aka "four factors."

Sony Betamax disagrees with you, if we can agree that youtube is similar to a broadcast medium and that youtube-dl is similar to a "VTR" from that case, aka VCR, unless there are other substantial differences that I'm missing.

Making a copy is only infringing if it isn't for fair use, and Betamax ruled that time shifting could be fair use.

One of the four factors is market impact, so how is the market for this content impacted by this taking a permanent copy? It would be impacted if the purpose and character of the copy was inconsistent with fair use, but remember youtube-dl hasn't taken or shared any permanent copies.

So unless you think that youtube-dl has made a copyright violation (which I think we've established they haven't) then youtube-dl is Sony Betamax, permitted to sell VTRs as long as there are substantial non-infringing uses, and the copyright claim will have to be brought against the infringing users.

That does not mean the courts won't find this is an "anticircumvention device" or will find that the takedown is improperly executed. They may very well rule it is an illegal anticircumvention device, Betamax happened before DMCA, and didn't decide anticircumvention.

But to my knowledge, in Sony one of the opinions spoke about "jamming" with hypothetical language, stating that it could be possible for Sony to build a box that jams unauthorized copying and I'm not aware of landmark cases that would have solidified those concepts.

If RIAA has accurately characterized the key rotation mechanism in YouTube then youtube-dl may well be ruled a circumvention device and that could be the end of it, fair use or no.

Today, there are a multitude of options for consuming TV content, and due to the (recent) creation of time-shifted licenses, the fair use justification for standalone-DVRs has mostly gone out the window (which is why they're not for sale anymore; for example, Tivo no longer offers standalone DVRs; Hulu, cable companies pay for time-shifted viewing).

As Youtube was always on-demand to begin with, the time-shifting justification for recording TV in the Betamax case never applied.

Infringement does not require distribution. The rights encompassed by copyright include reproduction, derivation, distribution, public performance, public display, and broadcast rights. Infringement of any of those rights is copyright infringement. For US law, see at least 17 USC 106(a) abd 501(a).

[1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org/

Not parts, but the entire thing. Colour propagates through causality. The article I refer to explains pretty clearly about what it means. It's the intent and provenance, not the bits, that are important. If youtube-dl gets classified as illegal, then any trivial modification to it will get the same treatment. Even if you end up slowly replacing every bit of code, if you forked off youtube-dl and didn't change the functionality, that's still essentially youtube-dl.

(You can argue that after enough work done, the ship of Theseus isn't the same ship that sailed into the dock. But the important part is that it's still the ship of Theseus, no matter how many parts you iteratively replace.)

Consider cases like going after someone who took GPL code and republished it as proprietary, or plagiarism, or copyright infringement itself. For the law, it doesn't matter whether or not the bits you have are identical to those of the protected work; what matters is how did you get them. It's the same principle at work here.

> In this case the "meant for copyright infringement" part seems to be some of the unit tests.

In this case, unit tests are evidence that the whole project is meant for copyright infringement. The offending entries serve to establish intent.

As I said it is as encrypted (no less, no more) as all other https traffic. Please note that normal https does no verification of the client, the client verifies the server not the other way around (client verification is of course possible but almost no public sites use it). So the encryption in this case verifies that the content comes from youtube or other sites that it supports but youtube itself does no attempt at verification of the client. This is in contrast to real DRM where the content is encrypted in such a way that it is hard to decode it without running the Content Decryption Module, which are proprietary plugins and that can check HDCP and similar ways to only allow playback on "trusted" devices.