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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

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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