YouTube channel with 100s of Apple WWDC videos taken down | Hacker News Reader

YouTube channel with 100s of Apple WWDC videos taken down

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122 pointstosh64 comments

<conspiracy_hat> Some of those videos have comments related to Apple's commitment to respecting privacy and/or something to do with ads being bad ; now they want to "go in a different direction" and are doing a 1984. </conspiracy_hat>

Unfortunately, I don't think this is valid HTML. Sad! https://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-html5-20110525/syntax.html#:~:....

Must be ReactJS!

<marquee>Killjoy</marquee>

<hat type="conspiracy">...</hat> would work better.

Did you know you can omit quotes?

    <hat type=conspiracy>...</hat>

Source: HTML Standard Snapshot per today (November 5th 2022): https://html.spec.whatwg.org/commit-snapshots/53346e4641595a...

(using a snapshot here to avoid link rot)

The only problem is the underscore, I think. A <conspiracy-hat> custom element would be valid HTML.

No, only ASCII alphanumerics are allowed in HTML 5 tag names.

In fact, custom elements apparently must have a dash. From https://usefulangle.com/post/363/custom-element-valid-name:

• Name has to start with a lowercase ASCII character. It cannot have an uppercase ASCII character anywhere. UTF-8 characters, emojis, etc. are allowed as long as they are not the starting character

• Name must contain a dash ("-") character. This dash character helps the browser to distinguish custom elements from regular elements.

Indeed. This is the relevant part of the specification:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#...

Add a hyphen somewhere in the middle and you're good to go:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#valid-custom-element-name

Probably more like a zealous lawyer at Apple heard of it and based on a lawyery scenario/edge case (that would probably encompass all videos on youtube) decided to send the notice for takedown to youtube. Youtube being run by zealous lawyers don't question any takedown by corps because at their scale, any % of false negative would be costly if they all issued lawsuits.

It seems like over the past 6 months there has been a change at Apple. They are consistently seeming more evil with each passing week. Any Apple employees here that can shed more light on org changes that are causing this?

Regardless, it was always stupid to think that $MEGACORP would forever treat us, consumers and power users, the way they did in the beginning.

Care to share some examples? Apple seems the same to me..

Ads.

Apple is making the user experience worse with each place they allow ads - the App Store and hawking other Apple services at each opportunity.

Services.

While I have no problem with most Apple Services, the idea that the 5GB of free iCloud storage hasn’t changed since 2010 is ridiculous. How many photos have been lost because of it?

Growth has to come from somewhere and everyone already has an iPhone. Expecting large public companies to act in anyone’s interests but their own is naive.

That’s the problem with public companies - by definition they cannot do what’s best for their users, as that will eventually conflict with their duty to their real customers: their shareholders.

If you’re American and have a 401(k), you’re a shareholder too.

“Can’t criticize capitalism if you’re holding an iPhone”

I know what you're saying, but I'm not trying to say you can't be critical of a system you benefit form / participate in.

What I am implying is that, as shareholders, either directly or via proxy like a pension fund, we demand high profits. So we're trying to have our cake and eat it too.

Here's what an ex-employee is saying:

> When ads first appeared in the App Store in early iOS betas, many inside were very upset ... We pushed back strongly. After a meeting where management pretended to listen to our concerns, it was evident they had no intention of changing their mind ... To me ads in iOS are particularly offensive because I took pride in making products that served the customer. Ads turn “customers” into “users” to be monetized for the real customers, the ad buyers. They fundamentally compromise the integrity of the product.

Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1585150636781637632.html

>They are consistently seeming more evil with each passing week.

That is simply not true. They are pretty much the same every single week for at least the past 5 years. What has changed is that the media, the public, or anybody reading has finally accepted the fact Apple may not be so righteous.

Or, all the good faith they had, mostly saved up during Steve Jobs's era has finally burned out.

Jason Snell: "Apple historians only do stuff like this because Apple has no sense of its own history."

https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/1588601907928436740

Apple has historians and extensive private archives, so it sure seems like they do.

I'm curious what this person expected would happen when they distributed Apple IP via a Google property.

Private archives are useless, and contrary to the public nature of copyright's actual endgame. This presumes that the company will 100% preserve their history, and many don't. It should not be illegal for individuals to preserve culture under some misguided idea of copyright as rent-seeking.

> It should not be illegal for individuals to preserve culture…

My understanding is that the illegal bit wasn't the preservation, but the re-distribution (of copyrighted material without a license or permission) and monetization.

So they have to wait till the stuff is out of copyright to distribute it?

You do understand thats 100 years into the future right?

What's the point of preserving something if nobody can see it?

Unauthorized copies outside the protections of fair use are still a violation. The damages are just lesser if you don't distribute and generally not worth litigating.

Archival and distribution for the purposes of education and preserving the historical record can be considered fair use.

YouTube, of course, has no obligation to continue to host noninfringing fair-use content. It costs them money to have lawyers decide if they are at risk by hosting it, so they just quickly and cheaply fail closed on DMCA stuff.

Definitely, I've experienced that myself.

The point is that independent preservation is necessarily at odds with the way copyright is policed in the modern day. Modern copyright is centered around the dogma of "copyright holders should have the right to absolutely control everything regarding a work". The copyright rent-seekers have, at every step, used the available technology and legal framework at the time to exert maximum control and give the individual minimum rights, and push the "final payment" date of public domain further and further away.

If independent preservationists cannot legally archive material (and that includes redistributing it, otherwise the media is still at risk of loss due to the same mechanisms that cause it to be at risk of loss without independent preservation).

Preservation needs to be explicitly codified in copyright law as accepted and legal. My recommendation would be to gate it behind the original length of US copyright law - after 14 years, archiving and distribution (along with incidental monetization for the purposes of maintaining and expanding the archive) should be allowed. After 14 years, infringement should require specific commercial usage of the work (selling individual copies versus merely ads across the board, especially if there is an effort to pass it off as an authentic copy). It could also require transparency in the money involved, to assure that it is entirely going towards maintaining the archive (which could include purchasing digitization equipment, acquiring copies of media, a small amount for time spent processing said media and for any hosting costs one might incur).

Monetization is a red herring. YouTube is running ads on those videos whether or not the channel owner monetizes. Money is made either way. Money does not automatically erase fair use defense, either.

I highly recommend you read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/technology/steve-jobs-arc... (archive: https://archive.ph/I9HFD)

The way Apple runs their closed archives and what they task their historians with is highly "not-unbiased," to say the least.

EDIT: missing an "un" in front of biased to really drive that double-negative home.

Not being biased is great!

Sorry, typo!

Private archives serve little purpose, by their nature they're closed, and never go public. They just sit there collecting dust until they're accidentally trashed or destroyed in a natural disaster (https://www.infodocket.com/2017/10/30/report-hewlett-packard...).

Maybe someone at the company pulls one or two faded photographs from them to make some PR puff piece for the company's 50th or 100th birthday. But that's about it.

Apple is a corp, not a family. Archives are only useful for advertising, employees aren't retained long enough to care.

'Sense of history' doesn't mean you don't not understand a copyright violation.

I think we all understand - very well - exactly what happened here. Apple has a law firm that scours the internet looking for Apple IP being used improperly. Unfortunately, they didn't think to carve out exceptions for fans and historians, so things like this get taken down as collateral damage in a war on actual IP theft.

Ideally Apple would re-release all of this old footage with a permissive license, but the bureaucratic red tape at a large organization is probably immense (not to mention the fact that they'd have to scan it all to make sure they aren't using any 3rd party IP, such as music as Steve Jobs walks on stage, opening Apple up to lawsuits).

Last month I was interested in WebOjects & went back & watched Jobs present on it. That kind of history being lost to society, obliterating how time has moved & passed on, is anti-civilization.

Does Apple have an official channel or website with these videos? If so this is more justified. If not, it's good the dev still has them.

I don't understand why companies would want to erase their history, and I don't think it actually happens often (more like, people just forget history naturally). A company's history doesn't hurt their reputation unless it's particularly bad (like United Fruit). And Apple's history is great: Steve Jobs may have been a dick, but Apple has produced amazing products and ignited trends like the personal computer and touchscreen phone. And despite what some people here say, I don't think they're getting much worse (see: Apple M1, iOS still way better than Android, my experience with macOS and other products is that they honestly work really well).

I don’t have a source, but I remember someone talking about how it’s policy at Apple to scrub as much old ads and marketing materials from the internet as soon as they become outdated. Good luck finding that old iPhone 5s ad that makes that phone look really attractive - the point is for us to only want for the newest one. I’m not so sure that I agree - history is written, memory is subjective etc.

Meanwhile I can still download Windows 3.11 from Microsoft's MSDN Subscription Downloads site.

It's still useful too: https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/slack-now-on-windows-3-1/

---------

...though Windows 95, 98, ME, NT4, and 2000, and the original release of Visual Studio 6, are all absent because of the Sun lawsuit, which prohibited all distribution of Microsoft software that contained Microsoft's opinionated Java VM - and all "J++" tooling. This even extends internally: when I was working at Microsoft I had to get special-clearance to have an admin-asssistant get me Windows 2000 burned to a CD-R so I could run Windows 2000 just so I could take screenshots of an obscure Office 2000 product for a presentation for a meeting that got cancelled. It would have been quicker just to RDP in to my home VM server and booted off my own pirated Windows 2000 ISOs lol.

Microsoft is also pretty bad about removing their own videos, though. You can get a sense of that by looking at their YouTube playlists:

Keynotes: (5 videos removed) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQXpv_NQsPICGmKjFQ_Bx...

Commercials: (21 videos removed) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFPUGjQjckXET1TSWuDoP...

Microsoft's Unboxed series: (15 videos removed) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFPUGjQjckXGj5o5DMcf_...

I do applaud them for keeping their old software available, though. And at least they don't seem to go after others' channels. At least as far as I'm aware.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

No, these videos were only available on CDs or DVDs sold through Apple's developer programs in the 90s/2000s.

Apple has a Podcast with the keynotes, but it only goes back to 2007:

RSS: https://applehosted.podcasts.apple.com/apple_keynotes/apple_...

It's a fairly big step from "remove copyright material from a competitors site uploaded by an unauthorized source" to "erasing history".

One problem of having old WWDC content available is that it is confusing for a developer searching for how to do something to be shown deprecated approaches. It's hard enough finding the right way to do something in Swift with all the old versions of the language around.

It’s hard enough finding a way of doing something. Apple doesn’t document anything. Instead they point you at WWDC videos which they take down after 5 years (or even less) that hold critical information needed to develop for their platform. If they want people to do things “the right way”, then they should document it properly instead of just pulling things arbitrarily or putting all their documentation in the form of videos.

This. For the $100/year privilege to write software for their platforms, the documentation is atrocious.

Old WWDC content has a lot of value. They cover a lot of core technologies that Apple has no interest in covering and documenting again (because they deprecated and are removing old documentation instead of improving them...). The channel in question helped me a lot while trying to understand aspects of early-Cocoa.

The argument you've presented is more related to the way Apple handles the evolution of its software than about having old content laying around. Their current approach is far from good unfortunately. During OS X Lion days, Xcode documentation was so rich that even core concepts of the OS were covered.

Having a structured way to keep those informations readily available is very important to help us preserve software history. And Apple is not helping...

Typical Apple move, they hate documentation.

Somewhat unrelated, but as part of a recent fascination with how the company runs under Tim Cook I was looking for YouTube interviews with other executives. Essentially, no one speaks on behalf of the company except for the Top 4-5 people, and even then what's available is like once every two years. And they give no forward looking answers or meaningful answers, just refer back to 'our customers'. Definitely feels like you sign something that says 'Do not talk publicly' to be a leader at Apple and I imagine their lawyers feel similarly about stuff like this.

>Wouldn’t want anyone learning about Mac OS X, Darwin, Aqua, or WebObjects

I think Apple would rather have you learn about Mac OS X, Darwin, Aqua and WebObjects from their own development documentation. That's why a lot of the available developer documentation is from that era.

https://developer.apple.com/search/?q=webobjects

The person should just give a copy to the internet archive. They will preserve the information.

They said they are going to

Everyone should move to Twitch and make it a proper alternative to Youtube. I trust Amazon way more than an ad company like Google.

Sounds like you arent a twitch streamer. DMCA is alive and well.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/06/after-massive-dmca-takedow...

Mass DMCA strikes have happened before, and it lead to lots of streamers deleting everything out of fear that they would be permanently banned. Streambeats is a pretty successful company that exists entirely because of this.

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