Music industry is suing youtube-dl hosters
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2) Large part of world's population can't afford subscription services
3) There's a lot of music that is not on music streaming services but is on YouTube
4) Sometimes you need the mp3 file (for ringtone, for editing, for remixing etc)
5) There are still some people who rather want everything on their HDD
A lot of Caribbean music (Soca, Dancehall, Parang etc.) is like this.
You just described youtube in general. As the old saying goes, "content is king". Look at VHS (if you're old enough to remember). As bad of a quality as it was, everyone used it. Pros would complain about how bad it looked, but the mass populace was just fine with it. Youtube is the same way. In the beginning, the quality was soooo bad, but users didn't care because it gave them endless content.
Pfft, people bought 5-in-1 DVDs. People bought 10-in-1 DVDs. Average Joe doesn't care about "quality", he wants the content.
But more than the quality for the top 100 pop songs almost all the official music videos they now put in like interludes, breaks, talking over and stuff to cut it up so it's not just the song.
Makes listening harder. for those who come to watch the video too.
In my case this often happens "in addition" to buying+downloading the song's mp3 (usually on Amazon).
Might I direct you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
I suspect that GP didn't pick that example randomly, because youtube-dl is a pretty close analog of a BetaMax.
"You are not allowed to: access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as specifically permitted by the Service; (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders; or (c) as permitted by applicable law;"
This one alone gives you a whole bunch of reasons to download a video, at least in sane jurisdictions.
If something gives us any power at all, they'll sue it into oblivion.
Letting everyone do things in their own self interest, unchecked, is rarely found in stable societies. For example, one persons interest (getting music for free) may not align with another's (the starving artist's).
Computers exist and are networked. Data is trivially and infinitely copyable. The clock will not be rewound back to the dark ages where data was a finite product that people could buy and sell. No matter how much the music industry rages and sues, it won't change the fact that YouTube is just sending me data via HTTP and there's absolutely nothing they can do if I decide to redirect that data to my hard disk instead. It's up to them to adapt to their new reality. If they can't, that's their problem.
Is Widevine problematic?
Do you have an industry/example in mind where this is the case? All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold. I can't think of anything that's sold based purely on promises, without extreme risk being involved. And when this is the case, it seems there's some partial initial payment (and initial debt put on the creator of that something) to mitigate some of that risk, with complete payment after the thing is finished.
An employment would be one way.
Demanding things on behalf of “starving artists” otherwise sounds exactly like the “starving FLOSS maintainer” who burns out because nobody will find their work. Unfortunate but it’s on them to find a sustainable business model if they want it as an income stream. A ban on general computing will not save either the artist nor the programmer.
How so? All employment arrangements I've been involved in paid based on time that was previously worked (like, paid monthly for previous month), with the pay being for the clear, partial, progress that is shown during that time that I worked. I've never been paid, in anywhere near full, for time I will work in the future, or progress I will make. I've never seen as employer that pays, in full, for to-be-completed work. This seems extremely risky. Do you have an example?
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter where people treat creations as an investment. Patronage platforms like Patreon where people can support creators they like on a regular basis.
Maybe that's the answer. Maybe not. I don't really know. I just know copyright is insane.
> All of the "profit from something created" schemes that I can think of require that the something exists before it can be sold.
That works for physical goods which are naturally scarce. Data is infinitely abundant. Supply is infinite. Price might as well be zero.
The value is the labor that creates the data, not the data itself. The artists, the programmers, these people are valuable. There needs to be some way they can get paid for the act of creating rather than sales of the artificially scarce product of their labor. Because that artificial scarcity was dead the second computers were invented.
No record label in existence would give you any money before you prooved to them somehow that you are able to do the music you want them to finance you for.
As a member of a band myself I don't care when people download our music, rather the opposite, I like it when people dig the music. And if they dig it enough, they will also buy a shirt, the vinyl, or something among those lines.
I think the difference between me and some others in this thread is, I think you have the right to make that choice. I think you also have the same right to say, "I put effort into this, and I want to limit its distribution to only those that compensated me for it".
So far corporations has been pretty unchecked, maybe that's got something to do with political instability today.
decimal_digits = ceil(bits * log10(2))
It might take hard work and a ton of money to discover that number, but once it's known it can be trivially copied. Copyright is about creating artificial scarcity for numbers. That's how insane it is.
The key fact here is that numbers are just the means of content delivery in a digital world. To be clear, personally I'm not fond of Copyright status quo, but this particular logic makes zero sense.
In cryptography there should be exactly one copy of a private key in the entire universe. When your keys leak due to a mistake or whatever, you invalidate it and make a new one, you don't sue anyone who might have a copy in order to get them to delete it.
When was the last time you ever saw that happen? Some work you grew up with enter the public domain? These companies have already made untold fortunes, several times over. So why doesn't it happen?
They altered the deal. Unilaterally. The money people paid them? They used it to hire lobbyists to change the law and rob people of their public domain rights. These monopolistic protections were meant to be limited, they had an expiration date. The corporations managed to extend copyright duration to the point it might as well be infinite. There exists a public domain but no work ever actually ascends to this mythical place. Fair use? Nobody without an army of lawyers would ever dare try for fear of being sued.
Is this the social contract you want people to respect? The one where they get everything and we get nothing? You say my view is one-sided? These corporations are the most one-sided monopolists there are.
The second people stop pretending artificial scarcity is real, it will be the end of them. Look at how Sci-Hub is shaking up the academic journals. Their end literally can't come soon enough.
But for the most part you are right.
That's a misconception.
To get a data-representation for stuff (like numbers, documents, songs, videos, pictures, text, etc.), we have to encode it. Then if we want to retrieve the thing, we'd have to decode it. It's not a number until decoded as such -- and you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it.
I appreciate that you're mostly just trying to object to laws restricting data, it's just that the bit about data-being-numbers may detract from it by starting with a misstatement.
---
If it helps break the mental-association: even if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian? For example, is "1000" 8 or 1?
Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like [bags](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(abstract_data_type)#Multi... ) (which are actually used in software, e.g. [in C#](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collectio... )). Then, what number would such data be, if the data itself fundamentally lacks a [total-ordering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order )?
Or, if we insist that unsigned binary-integers are the fundamental encoding, then how could non-terminating numbers be stored, e.g. 1/3 or pi? Or even just non-integers or negative-integers, e.g. 1/2 or -1? Or, if we argue that data for those numbers isn't numbers until decoded as such, then why should we say that other data is numbers before decoding?
(Not that each point would need to be addressed, just, different thought-experiments that might help break out of the misconception.)
It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see how it's a misconception. All data is a sequence of bits. All sequences of bits are numbers expressed in base 2. How could I be wrong here?
> you can't skip the need to decode data as a number because there're different ways to do it
> if we assume that all data should be read as unsigned binary-integers, are they big-endian or little-endian?
To me this just means all data could be represented as multiple numbers. Mentally, I visualize binary sequences as big endian. It's totally possible that there is another number that represents the same data but with different endianness.
> Or, say a computer has unordered-storage for stuff like bags
There must be at least one number that represents it, that much is certain. I'm just not particularly sure how complex that number is because when I made this argument what I had in mind was discrete self-contained files.
I don't think I understand these other possibilities well enough to comment at the moment.
> It might be more helpful to see binary-sequences as trivially decode-able as unsigned-binary-integers, rather than actually being unsigned-binary-integers.
I don't see the distinction. If you can decode data as an integer, it must be equivalent to that integer.
It's easy enough to avoid such absurdities by recognizing that data's just data; that, to get stuff like numbers, text, images, etc., we need to decode the data.
The "starving" or small time artist is an excuse that is useful for corporations when they want to manipulate public opinion. No music label cares even the slightest bit about individual artists or their fair payment, they care about megahits and big sellers.
If you want to support your favourite artist that isn't already a millionaire or multi-millionare paying for spotify isn't it.
To actually support "starving artists" visit their shows, buy some merch (however even this isn't the case anymore for some) or look for independent artists on bandcamp (bandcamp takes 15% of a sold album).
If all you do is pay for spotify or something like that you are not supporting a "starving artist" any more than someone downloading the songs, maybe even less because sharing the music on the right filesharing forums might at least lead to some of the sales (merch/concert) above.
For anyone interested have a look at https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
To add to that: Big labels hurt small time artists immensely. If you are an artist on youtube getting hit with a (false) copyright claim by a large label is a constant threat to you. It even happens to people with songs with millions of views [1]. We have reached a point where using certain chords or chord progression can get you stomped by music labels.
Music labels are not in any way friends or allys to "starving artists", only to millionaire artists.
But at same time, merch have higher entry gate. You are unlikely to buy a merch created for someone you don't really know. (Unless it is just good enough that you are willing to just use it like a general T-shirt...etc)
But the musician herself is irreplaceable. If you want to make money by making music, be sure to develop a relationship with your audience rather than police it in order to ensure you're getting paid.
They broadcast free of charge, and when we don't consume that broadcast in the manner they hoped, they use it to justify taking away our right to run software of our choosing. It's obscene.
As in "freedom"?
>is rarely found in stable societies
As in most of the developed world?
I'm sorry, but you don't have complete "freedom" to achieve your own self interests. I once knew someone who was very interested in a car stereo. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for others who happened to own car stereos, that car stereo was in a car that belong to the police, and he definitely saw an even larger reduction in "freedom" after that.
Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.
Corporate "speech" is still just human rights to free expression. Corporations have nothing to say without humans.
This constitutes a separate person, legally, with liability that is not on the individual because they cannot individually control the agenda and actions of the larger corporation.
I'm really interested in this view. I suspect that at a large enough size, organisations can absolutely have an emergent... "nature", which is not only characteristic of that organisation, but largely independent of its constituents (the humans). I introduce into evidence the Roman Catholic Church. It is so large, so entrenched in its ways, that it is extremely highly unlikely that an individual within it (including the pope) can substantially change the character of the organisation.
I have a personal belief that humans are to very large organisations (incl. nation states) as cells are to higher-order creatures. Once a large enough organisation has "matured", humans entering the organisation adapt themselves to it (probably subconsciously), and the organisation's unique culture survives.
If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
But anyway, I just googled it:
- the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
- the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society
- all the ways of life including arts, beliefs and institutions of a population that are passed down from generation to generation
- an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups
It has little in common with what I described, namely written (managed, on purpose, situational) processes and KPIs, which force people to act as they do, and are not inherent to them.
It's great that you have questions, but you actually have to follow it up with research and learning if you care. From the comments you posted, I get the impression you haven't spent 1 hour googling answers to your questions. That sends me the impression, you don't really care, you just like hearing yourself think.
My reluctance against your suggestion is based not on my interest or lack thereof^. I've had this sort of discussions many times before, and usually people split into two categories: those who correct or argue directly, in short and precise argument, and those who refer to unnamed sources throughout the thread. From the first group you learn quickly, and consistently, and they leave no aftertaste, even if you feel "defeated", because their argument sends a strong educational message. The second is a potential time spoil. I've read "some works" before, and in most cases (or it's perceived as such) it turned out that that guy meant just a slightly different meaning, or an interpretation of that author, which is different from a common sense around a specific term, or simply they missed a big chunk of a message and pressed on a non- point, or were primarily just a narcissist troll. I can remember the last time I constructively "just went" and read a book on some Buddhism downstream, after an argument with one guy who claimed that it's very rational and isn't just a cool story (the topic was that one of their prophets arrived in my country). I downloaded it, read a preface and 20 minutes later it already narrated magic forest experiences and spirits who messaged truth to the prophet. Same story with Islam followers, sometimes they are talking nonsense and refer to Qur'an, which I've already read in seven translations, including interpreting one, with cancelled ayat remarks, and often I know surah and ayat range they're talking about right away. (Edit: I just noticed that both cases are about religion, which is known to be "hot", but it doesn't end with religion, it just happens to bring brightest examples.)
I'm not saying that you're not right, but it's statistically nonsensical to follow your vague suggestions to go read on a field. That is why it will never work, and you will think that these lazy careless STEM guys portray some trend. It's a trust issue, not an issue with my desire (or lack of it, which is the case) to learn something regardless of who my opponent is. I simply can't trust few hours of my life to every other guy on the internet, if they don't provide a good enough argument to do that.
^ which I already claimed non-existent, it feels like you don't like to read comments at all
0: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
Humans have no nucleus, no mitochondria, no golgi apparatus. They cannot transcribe RNA or respirate or activate neurons. Every action undertaken by a human was performed by a cell (or an agglomeration of cells) within it.
Human "action" is just the emergent properties of cells. Humans can do nothing without cells.
There is a fundamental difference in the concept of an entity that exists as a whole, and a legal construct that is purely an economic allocation abstraction.
Nations aren't real either.
There is a fundamental difference between the basic building blocks of life and a convenient term for an ambulatory hallucinating collection of them.
This can go on. Do you not see the flaw in your argument?
This is the social science equivalent of reasoning about human behavior and focusing on the behavior of individual neuron connections, or the behavior of an OS by focusing entirely on the I/O drivers - wrong scope of analysis.
That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process.
> With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser.
They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.
If you download the videos, they can’t inject ads into them, they don’t get ad revenue, earnings decline, shareholders sell their stock, value of the stock decreases, shareholders get even more upset, stock price decreases further, execs can’t take out loans against their stock because it’s not worth enough … the cycle continues.
I don’t really think it’s about control—it’s about increasing the value of the corps stock so employees and shareholders with stock can sell it or use it as collateral for loans to buy nice things.
Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.
I’m not debating wether it’s moral or ethical, but if you were in their shoes trying to juice revenue to increase the value of your equity, you’d either charge a monthly fee for users to remove ads or fight like hell against people who are trying to download videos without ads.
That’s exactly what YouTube is doing.
FWIW, I can’t stand ads and I think it’s complete bullshit that they’re suing to take down youtube-dl, but they’re acting complete rational for the incentives they’re optimizing for. The problem is that optimization is at odds with users like ourselves.
I think copyright, advertising and surveillance capitalism are completely unacceptable practices that ought to be banned straight up. They are directly and indirectly responsible for everything that's ruining computer and internet freedom today. If we can't ban them, we should all be aiming to minimize their revenue so that they cease and desist on their own. I'd rather have the entire copyright and advertising industries implode than cede control of my computer to them.
That's what's at stake here. Computing freedom. They need to own our computers in order to stop us from doing basic things like copying and deleting data. If we don't stop them, we will lose something I think is far more valuable than a bunch of industries. We will lose computing freedom.
Maybe this is just me getting old, maybe this is just I finally realizing the obvious that is that currency was always proof of stake and never were value representations of goods. But kind of interesting and worrying.
They totally can, just not at a moments notice. Putting a car ad into a car video-> works. Shoutout to sponsor -> works. Putting the scam ad of the day -> doesn't work (or needs some effort).
If SponsorBlock is integrated into youtube-dl, then it no longer does.
* They do directly pay the people making the content
* That income can't be taken off them by the medium (youtube usually) deciding to demonetize the content
* YT isn't even taking a cut, in fact
* Those ad placements aren't trying to stalk me around the Internet and storing every tiny bit of information about me they can glean
* Sponsorship bit are usually there because they have at least some tentative relevance to the content and the people consuming it, without the need to stalk us as we travel around the Internet
At least until such time as the video carries like youtube start inserting ads directly into video streams, then I'll reconsider. I don't block ads to block ads: I block adds as a side effect of blocking stalking behaviours, wasted bandwidth from auto-playing video, 3rd party code on otherwise half-reputable sites trying to access my camera & mic, slowing my devices via poorly optimised animations, pop-ups that may interrupt other app use away from the browser, pop-unders too, battery drain from CPU use when mobile, being forced to interact because I can't just look around or scroll past as the ad is over the content, ... If the stalky inserts start to happen then I'll react by using sponsorblock or similar.
The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."
Take a look at China’s use of AI tech.
But if you build your own Blu-Ray player and distribute the plans for others to do so as well, they'll be legally on top of you in a jiffy.
YouTube-dl is like that homemade Blu-Ray player -- it's something that's working on your behalf, not theirs.
Every corporation is exactly that. Humans are just the substrate it runs on.
Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default.
This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients.
If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons.
Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.
And yet... it is entirely consistent with the way the music industry has been acting for over 20 years, since the popularity of Napster.
10 PROFITS = MAX(PROFITS)
20 GOTO 10Yeah. It's like a global mass gaslighting. One day there's a video, the other day it's just gone, no mention is ever made of it again and you're expected to just accept it.
Even though videos are the main content, Youtube is also the #1 website in the world for streaming music:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-did-youtu...
https://musically.com/2021/03/22/surprise-youtube-is-the-mos...
This seems to me to be akin to bullying a mouse because bullying the elephant in the room isn't going to pan out.
e.g. https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=YQfkm4Vp-1o&list=PLZGh95p3...
Granted, since then, a bunch of older DnB songs from this label resurfaced on YouTube, uploaded by various users. But it was a pretty dry couple of years for me. I was only able to find a couple of songs for sale on Discogs at the time, and many more lost because once deleted not even the artist/song name showed up in my playlist so I didn't know what to look for.
This is the worst part of all. It’s a memory hole, and feels like gaslighting to the end user.
First thing I did was download it and upload it somewhere else.
I don't care about the longevity of the record industry. Music is alive and well, with liberal distribution on the Internet making discovery and independent distribution so much easier. There's more music than ever, and much of it goes straight to YouTube (or Nico Nico).
How many copies of youtube-dl and DeCSS and PlayStation 5 private keys and such need to get put onto the blockchain before the Music Industry tries to sue it out of existence?
Also, there's enough money in blockchain to buy out the music industry.
I mean obviously I am not the last person to make this decision, but I have a feeling that the population yet to do so are vanishingly small.
For those who don't know, youtube-dl can do this oob if ffmpeg is installed:
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format <best|mp3|ogg|*> <url> [youtube-dl | yt-dlp] -f 140 <url>
RIP my most recent favorite Zelda background music vid.
Meanwhile, independent music is thriving thanks to the Internet. Let it burn.
Because to find a counterexample you would only need a single artist who has the opportunity to spend more of their time working creatively (rather than their previous civilian job) because they get a royalty cheque every now and then. I personally know four of five such people.
Someone's told them that "X million songs per year" are downloaded via youtube-dl. They get $Y in royalties per thousand views, and they have some number Z which is the average number of times an individual will listen to a song. There's been a boardroom meeting where these numbers have been presented as "X million songs per year are being pirated, costing us X * $Y * Z / 1000 per year, THIS must STOP!"
Music is culture and important. Yes, it is important to be paid for your music, but it is more important for music to be heard. Piracy should live. Fuck the labels, fuck the whole music industry creating plastic „art“ that has no meaning whatsoever. Let‘s make art, not money.
If artists aren't paid for making art, much less art is created. So if music is important to you, you can't just ignore the question of how to pay for it.
It's nice to say "let's make art, not money", great soundbite, but artists are people just like everyone else, who deserve to be compensated for their work. And who can't live without having money to buy food.
Let‘s talk about this differently. The impact of real art is way more important than a few plastic pseudo-art creating „i am special“ people not making money to live a life as an „artist“ / influencer on instagram… Buuut: anyway.
Honestly, they're probably targeting it because it's easy to find with the Google searches they're trying.
It works very well with many non-YouTube sites, especially ones hosting “adult” videos.
I assume porn is the most common case, but archiving Stanford lectures might well be second.
I do. And I pirate it myself. Though many people around me did get Spotify when it launched here recently.
My choice is usually to just reboot to Windows, fire up iTunes, buy the songs I want and listen to them DRM free. The only Apple product that I use xD
I've got a playlist called music into which I add music. ^^
On my mobile phone I've got Termux with an add-on that allows you to add widgets that run custom code.
I've written a simple script ( yt-dlp -P ~/storage/shared/Music -i -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --no-restrict-filenames --download-archive ~/music_archive.txt -x --audio-quality 0 <link to the playlist> ). Which is ran whenever I press on the widget. I could use crontab, but since I don't add music that often, I prefer to do it manually. ( The -o is for file name, normally the file would have the same name as the source, but for unknown reason so of my files' names for restricted to ~40 chars, doing it the way you see above solves the issue).
Before this system I used to have a similar script on my PC and crontab running it. The script downloaded music into Google Drive and on the mobile phone I had a program that would sync that folder with music to the phones music folder.
But the current system is far superior, for one it doesn't fill up my Google Drive and secondly it doesn't require multiple devices to work.
Being able to use a terminal on my phone makes me really happy! ^^
So when you press the widget it runs yt-dlp on your phone, or is it sending a command to a remote PC?
When I press on the widget it runs yt-dlp on my phone. There are no other devices involved in the process, just my phone.
From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy:
>17 U.S.C. § 1008 bars copyright infringement action and 17 U.S.C. § 1003 provides for a royalty of 2% of the initial transfer price for devices and 3% for media.[20] The royalty rate in 17 U.S.C. § 1004 was established by the Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998. This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. The royalty also applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers. Most recently, portable satellite radio recording devices contribute to this royalty fund.
>Thanks to a precedent established in a 1998 lawsuit involving the Rio PMP300 player, most MP3 players are deemed "computer peripherals" and are not subject to a royalty of this type in the U.S.
>Currently, private copy royalties are generated in the US by the sale of "blank CDs and personal audio devices, media centers, satellite radio devices, and car audio systems that have recording capabilities."[21]
The opposite of "quite a few" would be "quite few".
EDIT: on reading some of the linked sources I realise I was wrong about this.
I take it you don't speak English yourself? You can apply "quite" to any adjective, including "few".
I think the idiom "quite a few" is arguably worse to use in a diverse audience since it means the opposite of "a few" and is one of the only times "quite a" is used to negate the meaning of what follows.
It's not like either phrase is wanting for totally unambiguous synonyms.
Thanks!
(EDIT: TIL from the sibling comments that it always means "super many, lol" which surprised me) (I'm not a native English speaker)
Not saying that I agree with them, but "I use it for a legit purpose" doesn't mean they are going to act sensibly.
The Streisand Effect didn't save Napster or Popcorn Time. It could only save these people from the RIAA if they actually made enough money to fight the lawsuits and win.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/21/arts/issue-and-debate-roy...
Of course everybody knows that it's practically covering missed royalties from illegally copied content, but according to the letter of the law it isn't.
Maybe they do charge the Microsoft fee anyway, but I'd be a bit surprised if they didn't fix that issue.
Its difficult to describe all the behaviors they were engaged in.
"...The Complaint alleges that Microsoft has used its monopoly power to induce PC manufacturers to enter into anticompetitive, long-term licenses under which they must pay Microsoft not only when they sell PCs containing Microsoft's operating systems, but also when they sell PCs containing non-Microsoft operating systems..." https://www.justice.gov/atr/competitive-impact-statement-us-...
As a reminder...They lost their case "United States v. Microsoft Corp." and June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft. They would have to be broken into two separate units, one to produce the operating system, and one to produce other software components. This was overturned on appeal on what can be only described as technicalities...
The Judge said: "...Microsoft proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. ... Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing."
Politics changes in the US and the power of lobbying made everything to end up in a settlement that for most Microsoft has been ignoring or forgetting about.That is how much it took to make them open "some" API's
This one from the EU is one of the best overviews:
"Microsoft: A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm" http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
I heard their ex-CEO is into vaccines now ;-)
How much more absurd can this become?
The article makes a critical point: We already PAID for the right to download this material, and have been paying for decades.
Also, I've known several friends in bands. So far I've never heard of any of them receiving a check for blank-media taxes collected "on their behalf."
Anyway, if they didn't want people to be able to copy their stuff, then they shouldn't have put it on YouTube. The music industry is being as dumb as they ever where, it's fascinating that they've learned NOTHING in the past twenty years. How much money can they possibly lose on youtube-dl vs. how much money they continue the scam out of artists.
At this point who doesn't have a subscription to a streaming service? Those who don't where never going to pay anyway. They aren't losing money.
The obvious and dominant form of music copying was with double-cassette boom boxes in dorm rooms and bedrooms around the world.
And in the end, the media publishers' lies about "perfect digital copies" were proven to be just that, as profoundly IMperfect MP3s became the real threat.
If their claims were valid they should have all collapsed in ruin 20 years ago.
/s
[1]: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/urheberrecht-musikindustrie-ver...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
English is the Lingua Franca of the tech world.
If course they are, in a legal sense. Copyright had no sense of bits, data or access. It just cares about licenses.
I'm also not sure that it is a great idea to try to ignore this law. Otherwise they just double down on DRM to ensure that they are the true owners of any devices those bits cross.
Laws that protect physical property and condemn violence are universally accepted and thus thoroughly enforced. If you see someone breaking into someone's house, you'd probably call the cops on them. If you see someone torrent a movie, you'd probably accept that as a perfectly normal thing to do, maybe a bit immoral, but definitely not worthy of real punishment.
And a law that isn't enforced is just a bunch of letters.
> Otherwise they just double down on DRM to ensure that they are the true owners of any devices those bits cross.
Any DRM system is by definition vulnerable to data extraction because the data has to eventually be presented in a form that can be perceived by a human. Even if you presume that the system is absolutely tight and you can't extract the raw stream without millions of dollars worth of equipment, there's always the "analog hole". And it only takes one recovered HDCP key to break the entire system.
Except that the copyright of the contents is with the creators, not YouTube. And also something being in the terms of use does not make it legal, and they cannot make fair use illegal.
Did you ever work in IT support? Because that's exactly what way too many people think.
We're losing the battle for general computing, or may have lost already.
That said, they don't know if youtube-dl users are planning to share their files in torrents, upload them to random websites, etc. I think their goal is just to prevent anyone listening to music in DRM-free environments, regardless of how harmful of a crusade they have to go on.
For more than 12 years now I host my web projects (nearly) exclusively with them. I really enjoy the way they are setup and structured.
You pay what 10GB of hosting is worth to you (min 1 Euro). Shared hosting without sudo. Great user support. Really helpful and real knowledgeable people actually trying to help.
I can't recommend them enough.
When I started I couldn't afford to pay more than a few bucks a month. Now using them professionally and hosting client projects there I can support them by paying more per month.
Sadly having to fight in the Hamburg doesn't help. In Germany the Hamburg court is known for their pro music industry stance.
The experience of consuming media via an offline software is just infinitely better for my focus.
I would rather see Youtube die than Youtube-DL. Youtube-DL has a lot of use cases.
Seriously, we're talking of a tool whose purpose is to download publicly available videos. What's the big deal? It's not even used for music piracy, for God's sake. I've never seen anyone download their favourite album from YouTube videos and use ffmpeg to extract the mp3s. Most of the folks just use Spotify.
So what's the big deal? That if we use youtube-dl then we don't see ads and we don't get tracked? Oohh, actually that's the whole fcking point, you know? youtube-dl pisses lots of people in the majors not because it's used to illegally download musical content (I'm pretty sure that's only an insignificant fraction of its usage), but because it hurts their "new" way of doing revenue: ads, tracking, and more ads.
And you know what? I'm more than happy to hurt such a shtty way of doing revenue!
--extract-audio --audio-format mp3However cutting the full albums apart and tagging the resulting songs is serious work that I don't think a lot of people would do realistically in times of spotify.
-f251
I'm afraid of naming them here because not sure of the repercussions
Might not be the best place to ask this, but its something I wonder about a lot.
The only time it's allowed is when they have the appropriate licenses. (sync license under DMCA for music synchronized to live streams)
Streamers were doing this without repercussion 5 years ago because the streaming industry wasn't large enough for the music industry to care about. That changed about two years ago.
The same holds for cam models, it's just that they're not getting claims for whatever reason. Maybe the music industry just isn't that focused on live pornography?
Like, for example, how at the beginning of January 2022, Sony Music Entertainment had got ALL the legitimate Youtube videos of the Vienna New Year's Concert forbidden to stream in Japan...
This is yet another example of abuse of the fact that Youtube, confronted with a copyright infringement report, will first just block the reported video, and only after that will consider appeals...
So now all these videos are allowed again. (took several weeks)
I could argue that the software is a web browser, admittedly one tailored around a specific use case.
I feel the music industry has to do a better job explaining how downloading a youtude video via the youtube-dl user agent is different than downloading the same video via the firefox user agent.
MPA tried to get the source code repository for Nyaa.si removed from GitHub by saying "the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows)."
It was completely bullshit since they forgot to mention that the project provides everything necessary to engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows EXCEPT the actual copyrighted motion pictures and television shows. The repo is back up after a reversal: https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/
I think we can agree at least that countries which ban communication tools have worse human rights records than countries which don't restrict them as much.
Also, I don't dispute the media industry's premise that a government which had complete control over all software installed on people's computers could decide to reduce the amount of copyright infringement.
Only once regular people can no longer write dangerous code will the music industry finally be safe.
It's both a good short story, and a chilling reminder - especially to anyone who's dealt with textbook companies recently.
RMS was right. Not about everything, but about a lot.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Originally published in 1996, I believe.
youtube-dl -f bestaudio [url]
then convert to 12kbps Opus with
ffmpeg -i [file] -b:a 12K [file].opus
I could even do this from my phone over SSH but eventually made a simple web frontend for it. I haven't opened it to the public though, because of, well, news stories like this one.
Plus, I haven't studied this but I don't think they reencode all old content. New videos seems consistent but older videos can have varying things available. Using bestaudio & ffmpeg will definitely get you a consistent result. I can't promise hard-coded -f options for specific formats will be reliable.
So youtube is already Opus, but it's not already SILK.
And as long as DRM software is in browsers it's a somewhat understandable confusion.
While I like youtube-dl, it's clearly not an intended way to interact with YouTube.
I'm curious how you reached that conclusion. The maintainers of YouTube-DL would certainly disagree!
They're not like us, they don't know or care what user agents are. The only thing that matters to them is control. To them, the idea that someone might do something they didn't approve of is an atrocity that must be combated at all costs. They actually think that browsers are glorified passive content consumption platforms where they get to set the rules and it's take it or leave it. Even something as basic as user scripts is an affront to them because it means the user is not a passive consumer anymore.
What's the music industry's fear? People making their own remixes and becoming too powerful, rhythmically? No. They don't like people not paying. People don't like paying. Therefore they avoid it. It's not courageous nor morally repugnant, but the motivation is entirely self-interested and the result is mildly negative for the actual people working in creative industries.
Yes, actually. It's not uncommon for remixes to be taken down.
This "drivel" means exactly what I wrote: there is no acceptable explanation for anything they do. Nothing they say will ever change the fact that copyright is fundamentally incompatible with the 21st century, the age of free flowing information.
> It's a shallow attempt to recast people not paying for their music as some sort active citizenry?
Shallow?
These corporations have robbed the whole world of our public domain rights. They lobbied the US government multiple times until they made copyright duration functionally infinite. They use the US government to impose their copyright on the rest of the world. They work on DRM which means they are completely opposed to the computing freedom we all enjoy today and are atively working to undermine it. And on and on.
Of course copyright infringement is active citizenry. It's civil disobedience and at this point it's a moral imperative. To pay them even one cent is to empower them to do even worse.
The other major defense is that it’s a tool with significant lawful use.
Many digital tools can be used to infringe. It’s only a problem for the tool maker if the tool’s primary purpose is circumventing copyright.
And actually, it is what an expert courts should and do commission in such cases would explain.
If you make content available via HTTP, then obviously any HTTP client will be able to access it. It doesn't matter that they "meant" for the content to be accessed through browsers.
If they had a proprietary client that wasn't a browser, they wouldn't be complaining at all. So why does it matter? It's about control. It's the fact that user agents act in our behalf in order to do what we want and protect our interests. They want to force us to use something that acts on their behalf, does what they want and protects their interests.
This isn't about "human judges". Those are all paid for. Industry lobbyists literally create the laws that they blindly enforce.
No, this is about a stealthy war that's being fought for the control of our computers. There will never be peace between us. Either the entire copyright industry will be destroyed or we will lose the computing freedom we all currently enjoy and the entire concept of "hacking" will be a footnote of history.
Most people, including the court, would easily see through this as trivial sophistry. It's not much of a legal strategy.
They'd probably have the same issue if youtube added a "download as audio" button to every video without paying studios.
I understood that reference.
Yes, it means no more Disney movies or AAA games. I'm personally quite ok with that.
[0] This is largely for the sake of argument, although I do definitely lean this direction.
Anyways, less extreme would be that we could go back to reasonable copyright terms as existed a hundred years ago. It seems likely at this point that our current 'experiment' with extreme copyright enforcement is going to produce an entire 100+ year range where the only works that will survive will be those owned by massive corporations who hold perpetual ownership of the work instead of their actual creators.
The fact is society is doing them a huge favor by pretending their works are scarce. In return they abuse our good will and erode our public domain rights. All we have to do is stop pretending. Start treating everything as public domain. That ought to be enough of a reality check to an industry that thinks it can monopolize numbers for hundreds of years.
Nobody cares how much money they spent to make stuff either. They don't get to deny reality just because they spent money.
There's nothing wrong with protecting trade secrets, etc. but that is the onus of the secret holder to employ proper security measures. If someone assaults those measures, you prosecute them for those specific assaults (physical, cyber, etc).
But you don't prosecute people merely for being in possession or distributing "intellectual property" i.e. ideas and symbols. Only a backwards society would allow that.
If people don't have to sell their creative work for profit to live, you don't need copyright.
This is the system in other places (eg. Germany) and greatly prevents legal bullying
Companies can still calculate the costs of losing the case and come to the conclusion that the benefit of the intimidation alone is worth it.
I think we sorta want more proactive and aggressive state attorneys that will prosecute seen injustices for the public good. I've pondered this a lot and I can't really see any obvious other path that doesn't have even worse potential consequences.
Could this be solved if we moved towards more % based monetary penalties?
More fundamentally, the purpose of such measures is explicitly to discourage the bringing of suits - anything big enough to be a viable deterrent to bad faith actors will inevitably also be big enough to deter good faith actors.
The law of the law be a complicated and harsh mistress.
Make both parties start in non-binding arbitration, where the plaintiff pays.
If either party chooses to escalate, they'll be on the hook for all the fees, including the original arbitration, if they loose.
Plaintiffs could purchase insurance or some other vehicle to de-risk their claims if they believe, but aren't certain, that they'll win. This will help smaller parties that get infringed upon.
A tool is not piracy.This is not even an argument, let alone a stupid one ,alongside the idiocy of one who believes it.The web already becomes cancerous enough with DRM [Ex: Try installing a FOSS-only system, let's say fedora + librewolf and try playing anything w/o installing flash or drm plugins].
I would sincerely have thought that youtube-dl would be hosted on some random non-cooperative country, instead of Germany. That it wasn't, came out as a surprise to me.
If these interfaces go away, the future of music won’t be nearly as much fun as it is now.
It can be confirmed that someone at samsung is using youtube-dl.
All this to say this is all about retaining control for the rich execs and companies and not for the artists.
But please do think of the artist and support bandcamp and other such stores. Not these thieves because of whom even taylor had to re-record her songs
Many of us had to start doing that - some, particularly as DRM made purchases unfeasible (you buy a container and it only works on a section of Pioneelips models, or it works on the PC but not in the car stereo etc).
The problems are the music industry, the Majors (Sony, Warner, Universal), and ultimately, copyright.
Those are what we'll have to change or extirpate.
[0] https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/72/encrypted-traffic...
https://twitter.com/freezeframebot
YouTube themselves have blocked my IP too many times so it sadly remains inoperative.
If you have money and an army of good attorneys, you usually get what you want.
On a similar premise, there is a novel where aliens have been pirating music from Earth and are contemplating their options with respect to their legal liabilities.
(Thanks, Douglas...)