Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panny | 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?

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

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