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Comment by Kranar | Hacker News Reader

You are referencing section 512 of the DMCA, but that's not what the RIAA issued to Github. The RIAA issued a notice in reference to section 1201 of the DMCA and Github has a specific complaint process for violations of that section, and I quote "Complaints about Anti-Circumvention Technology" [1]. That was the form that was used to make the complaint to Github. A link to the details of that complaint along with instructions on how to submit a notice for such violations can be found below. So what exactly is Microsoft or Github suing the RIAA for given that it is Github which provides a complaint process for technologies that circumvent section 1201 of the DMCA.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

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YouTube doesn't have copy protection for downloads; there is nothing to circumvent. These tools just add a user interface for downloading. If you subscribe to Youtube Premium, Youtube itself gives you downloading.

This is not like breaking encryption on DVDs.

Your device has to download the data in order for the video to be viewed. Streaming is a form of downloading; a copy of the data passes through your equipment, and is retained for some duration of time.

Yes Youtube does have copy protection for downloads and in fact the reason why certain specific music videos were chosen to be part of youtube-dl's test suite is to test the circumvention of Youtube's copy protections! It's literally in the documentation of youtube-dl's test suite what Youtube's mechanisms are along with how to circumvent them.

It doesn’t matter. Chrome and youtube-dl are both downloading a video and letting the user play it. Youtube-dl is nothing more than a specialized browser.

If Chrome does something, any other piece of software is allowed to do it.

Chrome doesn't create a copy of the video on the users HD by default. That's what matters, if Chrome did start doing that (by itself without an extention) I'm sure the RIAA would be suing Google over that.

The media player can save the video in such a way that the Youtube site doesn't know that this happened. That makes a convincing argument that there is in fact nothing in Youtube that can be called copy protection.

> I'm sure the RIAA would be suing Google over that.

Probably, but it could not reasonably sue on the basis that Google's web browser is circumventing copy protection in Google's video site. They could still sue that way unreasonably of course.

> Chrome doesn't create a copy of the video on the users HD by default.

Sure it does. That's how it buffers and caches things.

Even if it doesn't leave a copy on the HDD, a copy in RAM is still a copy.

But all of these things are happening inside of my own computer. YouTube already sent the bits and bytes to my computer and I am allowed to do whatever I want with those bits and bytes.

There's nothing illegal about keeping a copy of something that was in memory and anybody arguing otherwise should be viewed as an enemy of humanity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24893533

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