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Comment by adkadskhj | Hacker News Reader

Curiously, what do scrapers (aka "readers") have to worry about with this topic?

Eg, i'm making an archiver and reader combination that, for personal use, archives stuff in a Git-like store. Yet, Git (and Git-likes) can also be used to distribute.. so hypothetically i could use this software to scrape and distribute content.

My intention is primarily to make news articles/etc searchable, archived, etc. Yet i'm sure NYT would have something to say about my test cases scraping their site.

.. the world is interesting.

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I think the recent LinkedIn case established that it is legal to scrape anything which is publicly available (ie no login required). Redistribution would be a copyright violation, but the scraping itself is legal.

I'm not sure what that means for youtube-dl though.

The same argument can be made for video that's also publicly available.

Not to mention, youtube has it's own Download function in the mobile apps, even for copyrighted content. So there's that.

> youtube has it's own Download function in the mobile apps, even for copyrighted content

Wait, seriously? I had no idea. I would think the presence of such a feature would severely undermine the RIAA's case.

It does, but it's only available for those who have a subscription to youtube premium.

As such, I assume the RIAA will try to argue that it doesn't fall into the same bucket that youtube-dl does, since the method of accessing the site is different (scraping the site, vs a sanctioned API)

I assume that YouTube's licenses with the RIAA covers the Youtube Premium features on their videos. If they didn't, they'd be in violation of RIAA's copyright (streaming licenses are not the same as downloading ones).

You know... I read the Youtube license and I see this:

Licence to Other Users

You also grant each other user of the Service a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to access your Content through the Service, and to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, modify, display, and perform it) only as enabled by a feature of the Service.

I am a user of the Youtube service. I read and agreed with the terms, I have watched videos. Thu I am allowed to reproduce its content. The RIAA explicitly agreed I can distribute it.

only as enabled by a feature of the Service seems like the operative clause.

1) the Service makes downloads available (Youtube on Android)

2) the Service makes downloads available on any browser, it is up to the browser to show it.

3) "If it turns out that a particular term of this Agreement is not enforceable for any reason, this will not affect any other terms."

Physics clearly make this unenforcable.

"Spitting out an mp4 file that you can copy to another device" is not a service that YouTube provides. That's why youtube-dl exists. If it was a service that YouTube already provided then there would not be as much reason for youtube-dl to exist.

"Unenforceable" doesn't mean practically unenforceable, it means legally unenforceable. The laws of physics permit most cars to exceed most speed limits. Those laws are still enforceable.

Unenforceable clauses in contracts are things that are either contrary to law or otherwise don't fall under contract law. So a clause that says "if you sign this you must give up your firstborn son" is unenforceable. That sentence just says that "if we screwed up drafting this contract, just because you were able to challenge one clause due to being unenforceable doesn't mean the whole contract is void." It's a severability clause.

Yeah, the last one was tongue-in-cheek.

However, Safari (not Firefox) is not affiliated with Google. Google has no say on how the content provided by the Service is presented. The Service provides a HTTPS connection. Its influences ends there.

I'm not a youtube user, and I didn't agree to their terms of service. I can however plug their URL's into a terminal without actually accessing their web site

> it's only available for those who have a subscription to youtube premium.

No. It's available for free users as well AFAIK.

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