Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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It makes it worse lol. Using links to copyrighted materials in the tests meant to verify correct functionality?

It's "prominent" in the source code. They literally wrote out "Test VEVO video with video age protection" then linked to a Justin Timberlake song

https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub...

I clicked on this ready to see some stupidity from the copyright industry but literally downloading from links to copyrighted music in your unit tests?

That's how you give the RIAA a way to take down your project. -

Actually seeing this made the comments made in the worst faith about how "they took it down because you can use it to download bad stuff, what's next?!?!" seem pretty dumb.

If that was the case Bittorrent... which makes youtube-dl look like a guy slinging tapes out of a van next to Naspter HQ...

wouldn't have been able to send them packing with a simple "we don't endorse piracy": https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/07/bittorrent-to-riaa-youre-...

>It makes it worse lol. Using links to copyrighted materials in the tests meant to verify correct functionality?

Using copyrighted materials in test code is fair use and a well established practice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

The creators of youtube-dl are not distributing the material or inducing infringement by using a link to it in a unit test. I am typically on the RIAA's side,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23079092

but they're going to lose this one. If RIAA should be mad at anyone, it is youtube for distributing it without DRM. Youtube really really REALLY should have had their asses taken to the cleaners in viacom vs youtube. I don't know what the settlement was, but it wasn't enough, because youtube still exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Y....

This is a python program doing exactly the same steps a browser takes to download the file. It's just written in python instead of js.

Here, though, Youtube (Google) have contractual agreements to license the use of copyrighted media on their platform, and which is uploaded directly from the record labels themselves.

The RIAA is claiming that YouTube does have DRM on their videos, which if the court agrees, may be the end of youtube support in youtube-dl.

It doesn't have DRM because youtube download only extracts the direct download link and downloads them. There is no DRM on youtube. Example from the alleged offending link,

youtube-dl --skip-download --print-json https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxxajLWwzqY

You can easily copy the links from the formats into your browser and they will play, you can wget them, anything. There is no DRM there, and if anyone convinced you otherwise, they lied.

> Using copyrighted materials in test code is fair use and a well established practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

What kind of nonsense is that? Playboy did fight people for using it, the eventually let it go because it was one image that wasn't particularly important them. It's literally right there in the article you linked...

And I assume you forgot to link to this other program but again, not exactly a real argument.

RIAA went after them on the use of that link, if other projects (of which dozens exist by the way) didn't slip up like that and are still here, it only makes it clearer what the problem was

They can argue that downloading a publically available video for testing purposes is perfectly legal, because it is.

"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." https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

It is enabled by a feature of the Youtube service.

They explicitly disallow downloading, but it is not enforcable (though that word probably doesn't mean what I think it means... the law probably overrules physics)

Severance

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

But in that wording they do allow downloading. Features of the Youtube service accessed thought the Chrome browser don't have to be exactly the same as accessed though other browsers and tools, other tools are not prohibited to provide features they can extract and interpret from the received source code and data, they are not obligated to run the code at all or as is.

Ugh, I don't want to get into this Stallmanist "if the server returns 200 it's ok!" tarpit. If you believe that, it's fine.

You probably won't ever actually need to use that defense outside of internet arguments honestly... for all their noise the most repercussions the average person might ever see from infringing copyrights is a scary letter from an ISP.

Good luck if the legal system decides to test your hypothesis though.

This isn't about YouTube's TOS at this point, you're making a copy of a copyrighted video without the consent of the copyright holder

> downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution

First, it's not actually illegal, at least in my jurisdiction and in a great many, to make a copy of a copyrighted work.

Secondly, the author somehow gave permission to YouTube to make the video publicly available and downloadable, and YouTube is perfectly happy to provide to me the download URL.

It's illegal in the jurisdiction that Github and the RIAA operate in?

Laws don't exist in a vacuum, so it doesn't seem like a stretch for my comment to refer to the laws actually applicable here right?

Your second point is just remixing the same Stallmanist POV I call out above.

YouTube doesn't just provide you with anything. You go to YouTube, and you find a link, and you stick it in your unit tests.

The fact YouTube's server replies is neither here nor there in the eyes of the law (ironically Youtube does actually return 402 "payment required" and 429 "too many requests" of they figure out what you're doing)

You're free to make whatever esoteric argument you want, but after realizing they did something as silly as put copyrighted videos in the unit tests, there's not much of a leg to stand on.

Especially when there are literally dozens of YT downloader type projects of Github still up right now that didn't do that...

The DMCA is not intended for taking down such tools.

The proper procedure to do so would be to sue the authors, and from what I can gather none of the core authors are in the US.

You saying it's not for exactly the thing it is for... doesn't make it so. I don't know why you think it does.

> this Stallmanist "if the server returns 200 it's ok!" tarpit

That would be an Elbakyanist stance, not a Stallmanist one.

I can't tell if this is an attempt at a crappy joke or you actually think a) Stallman is not exactly the kind of person to make the argument and b) the overwhelming majority of people who prescribe to that line of though aren't aligned with Stallman in other thoughts on technology

Elbakyan doesn't hide behind these kinds of tired non-arguments and instead admits SciHub is illegal and pushes people to take action so it's not: https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/why-sci-hub-is-...

I mean supporters of Elbakyan, when I say Elbakyanism, not Elbakyan herself. Indeed, Stallman also asks for people to take action to end copyright entirely, but he uses a legal tool that twists the law to the opposite of intended purpose, instead of, say, creating a cracked software repository (like Sci-Hub does for scientific articles). Two opposite approaches that have the same intended result.

Ah so you've made up a term for supporters for a person, given them a collective philosophy that doesn't align with their "leader's" much less silly ideas.

My apologies for not divining the tea leaves on your made up term that I guess was not meant as a bad joke, but ends up being one anyways.

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