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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the public perception is, they did indeed get Napster et al offline, which I think is the thing they cared about.

Not sure that they interpret the Streisand Effect in the conventional way. If anything, temporary increase in usage of targeted tools helps them make the case that they're being harmed by said tools' existence.

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I'm still annoyed at the ruling against mp3.com. They created a hash of the physical CD-ROM, and if it matched one that was already in their cloud they wouldn't actually rip the contents for your own personal copy of the exact same bits. It was tantamount to ZFS deduplication being outlawed.

Reminds me of What color are your bits: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23.

Yes, that's the thing a lot of techies have glossed over. The increased usage of youtube-dl since the takedown letter was sent makes the RIAA's case stronger if the RIAA takes this to court. (It's not as apparent on HN where people have been bringing up their (mostly) fair uses, but on Reddit and other forums, people have been proudly proclaiming how they just downloaded youtube-dl and began downloading music videos from YouTube.)

Ironically, by using youtube-dl en masse to "stick it to the RIAA" they may have inadvertently dug its grave instead.

YouTube makes these videos freely available. Downloading / recording them is in no way illegal.

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