Recording Industry Forces Important Video Downloading Tool’s Website Offline
from the get-over-it-riaa dept
When will the legacy entertainment industry get it through their thick skulls that recording content is legal. We’ve done this. We’ve done it at the highest level. Tools that have substantial non-infringing uses are legal.
Well, at least in the US.
Which explains why the legacy companies often go overseas to do their dirty work. And that’s the case here.
For a while now, the recording industry has been absolutely furious that it was possible to download YouTube videos, with their ire directed mainly at one tool that enables such downloads, youtube-dl, a command line video downloader, that is also a plugin component for other download tools. It’s a useful tool. Journalists use it all the time. I have used it multiple times myself, most often when I’m trying to generate a transcript of a YouTube video, and the transcript tool I use requires an upload file.
It has, as the Supreme Court notes, substantial non-infringing uses.
That didn’t stop the RIAA from sending a totally bogus DMCA takedown demand to GitHub three years ago. After some public outcry, GitHub reinstated the code.
But, of course, the RIAA never gives up its quixotic efforts to attack the open internet. So, it went to Germany, where copyright law is pretty consistently stupid. Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal Music went after the hosting company, Uberspace, who was hosting the youtube-dl webpage in Germany.
Using the European equivalent of their argument in the US that failed (here it was that the code violated Section 1201 of the DMCA that forbids “circumvention” technologies), a German court sided with the labels back in April, but the site remained online until just recently, when, as TorrentFreak notes, the labels put up a bond that allowed for the enforcement of the original order, even while Uberspace appealed the ruling.
The ruling was published in March but Uberspace wasn’t required to take action right away. The hosting company decided to appeal, which meant that the youtube-dl.org site remained online, unless the music companies posted a €20,000 bond.
Initially, it didn’t appear that the labels would enforce the order, but that changed a few days ago. The plaintiffs informed Uberspace that they had posted the security, leaving the company no other choice than to take the site offline.
Torrentfreak spoke to Uberspace’s owner, Jonas Pasche, who seems (quite understandably) pissed off about this, but noted that his hands were legally tied:
“I received that information from the plaintiff’s side on July 27, with proof that they did the security deposit at a bank. So I no longer have a choice but to follow the judgment. Otherwise, I would face a fine of €250,000 or jail time,” Pasche notes.
The appeals fight continues in the meantime:
Uberspace will continue the legal battle and is prepared to fight the order up to the highest court possible. If the appeal is successful, Pasche will gladly unblock the site.
“We are confident that a higher court will overturn the judgment of the Hamburg Regional Court, so we will be able to unblock the site as soon as this happens,” he says.
All of this is basically just the major record labels being a fucking nuisance. The (again, perfectly useful for non-infringing purposes) youtube-dl code is still on GitHub where it can be downloaded. And, even if the labels somehow managed to kill youtube-dl, people would figure out other ways to download video content. It’s not going to stop piracy. And, really, at a time when the record labels are making record revenue thanks to the internet, maybe they could lighten up a bit on this infatuation with trying to make everything suck just because some tools might be used for infringing uses in some cases.
Get over it. Some people are going to infringe. If the industry and its lawyers spent like 20% of the time and effort they currently spend on “anti-piracy” efforts on just providing better content in more convenient ways to eager music fans, they’d do so much better.
But the whole industry has built up this stupid faith-based belief that “piracy” is the problem, rather than their failure to better serve their customers.
Filed Under: circumvention, copyright, germany, youtube-dl
Companies: riaa, sony music, uberspace, universal music, warner music, youtube
Comments on “Recording Industry Forces Important Video Downloading Tool’s Website Offline”
Firefox users, just search extensions for ‘Easy Youtube Video Downloader Express’, and get a download button next to the subscribe button.
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Whether you’re using FireFox or some other browser, Jdownlaoder (and others of that ilk) can easily download any or all the parts of a YT video.
I remember the internet before there were sites like YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, and the like. There was Napster. The recording industry (and Metallica) were furious about all of this digital music cutting into their profits–and, yeah, the livelihoods of the artists or course. Everyone was using this pitiful excuse that if they could pay a reasonable about to legally acquire music online that they would gladly buy it. As if! But I guess that’s what eventually happened, and it actually worked. Not sure how the recording industry is still a thing, since the sales of vinyl, 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs aren’t high enough to put even one record producers kids through college. Maybe this “let the consumer pay for the content where they want to consume it” thing isn’t actually all that bad of a business strategy?
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Not to get into History, which you have about 50% correct, the fact remains that Hollywood in general still charges as if it had enormous production costs, when in fact they no longer have such an excuse. Q.E.D.
Where there is a “legal” option to purchase music or movies, the cost is exorbitant, make no mistake. And 20 or more years ago, we did say, nearly all of us, “Give us a legal and cost-commensurate alternative, and we’re on board!” The implied alternative of course was piracy, increasing by orders of magnitude.
And neither industry listened. Super high prices, DRM, one-sided agreements (as in shrink-wrap style), and finally, ruinous laws purchased from legislators all up and down the scale. That was the answer we got back from them.
Let me go a step further with an example. You’re a budding musician, perhaps 14 to 16 years old. You want to emulate all the shredders you’ve ever heard. Good place to start (although that’s not the route I took). Now, how do you obtain the music you want to learn from? Do you spend more than your parents spent on buying their house? No, probably not. Now what are your options?
Well, you could temper your appetite and buy, legally, one or perhaps two recordings a month. Nice, right? But your allowance is now null and void. So what’s next? You’re dedicated to the exclusion of all else, and you ran through those in two days. Uh oh, your wallet’s not on speaking terms with portraits of dead presidents, so where to you turn?
Need I answer that for you? Now, if my surmisal were correct, and pricing of legally purchased recordings were on the order of a dollar for an album, and perhaps 20 cents per single, then you, my fair-haired guitar player wanna-be, would be able to make your allowance last for nearly all month, eh?
And now the challenge to you: Tell me who got harmed in the lowering of those prices…. It sure as hell wasn’t the recording artist, Samuel Abrams and I can attest to that – we already aren’t getting diddly-squat from the industry!!!
The copyright cartel certainly has the right, legally speaking, to charge what the market will bear. Sadly for them, they still don’t understand that the market has left them behind, and they’re sitting their on their thumbs playing spin around the rosette, wondering what the hell happened since 1996 or so. (That’s the year that the specification for the CD was laid out, what we now know as ISO 9660.)
I don’t outright condone piracy, but I sure as hell understand how it came about, and why it’s still “a thing”.
And that “not selling enough CDs, vinyl, etc. to put a kid through college” thing? Have you looked at the retail price of any, repeat any vinyl recording on the market today? Starting at $30 and skyrocketing upwards towards triple that number for some artists. There’s a production cost there, yes, but it’s to appeal to the snobs who can’t let go of yesteryear and have too much money, or to the snobs who think they have golden ears and are ready to die on the cross of “vinyl sounds so much better”. I’ll not elaborate on that last point any further.
obligatory tl;dr
The copyright cartel has but one purpose – to thwart the Constitution and it’s intent to secure the growth of public art, of any sort.
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Half of nothing is still nothing, after all.
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Exactly my point – Big Entertainment is the problem here, not the original premise of copyright protection for a limited time.
The RIAA is cancer. I buy only indie from Bandcamp (no affiliation). There’s so much good music out there that there’s no need to feed the beast.
Internet-era equivalent to the advent of tape recorders.
“Home taping is killing record industry profits! We’ve left this side blank so you can help.”
Is there an internet-centric version of this that we could apply to advertising this very useful tool?
on the other hand, RIAA is right about youtube-dl. We never had the right to download videos from youtube as a video files. When youtube-dl is opening the floodgates, they’re doing something illegal. RIAA’s contracts with youtube about usage of RIAA’s catalog in google’s youtube service is not surviving 3rd party entities doing illegal operations, so they have no other choice than sue the authors.
Eventually every technology, product and content item will survive only if the process how it was created follows the established laws. Thus tools like youtube-dl are dangerous to any author willing to produce content that lasts long time. Popular works have significantly stricter copyright following requirements than ordinary works of art. The strictness of copyright comes as a suprise to many people who suddenly finds the technology or product popular, and its necessary that authors prepare for the most onerous reading of the copyright law.
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This isn’y true. Youtube cannot pass along rights to users that youtube itself doesn’t have. Since they never specify licenses for each video separately, they cannot customize the rights that youtube obtains based on original author’s license. Even if original author used creative commons license to distribute the video, youtube did not obtain full CC license rights from the author, and thus users of youtube are not able to excersize their rights on the downloading files from youtube. The different platforms work as license filters and are removing users rights the more the authors use someone elses platforms to distribute their products.
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What is YouTube-DL enabling that is less legal than what anyone can do with a cassette tape recorder and radio, or a video cassette recorder and television footage?
The claim that different creators have different permissions for what they upload to YouTube is a cute attempt to distract from the real issue, namely the fact that this is no different from the recording function of a VCR.
Meanwhile the RIAA can piss and moan on one tool. Users will either migrate to another tool, or just move onto another hobby altogether in a boycott.
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its the unlimited copying of the material without sending web request to youtube.
VCR recorders are only legal because the quality sucks so much that multiple copies of the material makes it unwatchable.
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In order to even view the video to rip it, YouTube has to be requested. But I suspect that’s not what you’re asking for and what you mean is some convoluted hellspawn definition unique to “stricter copyright law”.
You’d be wrong there.
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Nope, that’s in the original VHS vs BETAMAX decision. The technology at the time was analog and was explicitly designed lose quality of the material once copies are being made. And courts concluded that that’s good enough copy protection and the company has thought about rights of the content owners and that made the VHS technology legal.
Current technology is digital and it doesn’t suffer from similar over-time degration of the material. But the tech vendors are thus unable to use VHS vs BETAMAX decision to declare their technology legal, unless they accurately replicate the technology features, including the analog’s quality decrease.
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Copies having reduced quality was never, ever a justification for whether something is legal or not.
If “explicitly designed lose quality of the material” held any kind of legal weight, counterfeit products like handbags should be legal by that definition, because they’re usually of a worse quality than the original they’re ripping off. But that’s not the case.
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YouTube is not passing on any any license, it can only exercise its non-exclusive license to display videos, and that does not control any permissions or licenses the creator may grant to others.
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Then users of youtube has no rights to display those videos. => we need to all stop using youtube
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As a piece of code, youtube-dl doesn’t do anything illegal. Not even the use of the code is inherently illegal. The example given in the article is a great one that falls under the broad umbrella of fair use. I could have a poor internet connection, and use a script that downloads the video small bits at a time until I had enough of it to watch, watch it once, and delete it. That’s a perfectly legitimate use. Yes, there are plenty of uses that violate the YouTube TOS and are also clearly not fair use, but the tool doesn’t and shouldn’t need to understand the subtleties of how it is being used and make that determination. Making a broad statement that the only use is illegal is guaranteed to be wrong.
Consider the analogy of a chefs knife. Most people would agree that a chefs knife is a tool that is almost exclusively used for constructive purposes. We all need to eat, and many foods benefit from being sliced. A chefs knife does that job well, but it can also be used as a weapon. A chefs knife can be extremely dangerous, used either in a careless way, or even in an intentionally harmful way. If you focus only on the negative uses of a chefs knife, then you can get on your high horse and fight for laws that render the distribution or use of chefs knives illegal, and try to shut down any kitchen supply store that fights to supply them. That would be pretty silly, though.
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Obligatory car analogy (to go along with the above post):
Yes, I drive a car, just like everyone else. And we’re all legitimate drivers. Oh, wait… you say that someone robbed a bank and drove a getaway car? And now you want to outlaw all cars, so that banks can’t be robbed? Are you sure you want to go down that road there, bunky?
GTFOH!
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This use case fails for 2 reasons:
1) hidden in the steps is “circumvention of technological protection measure”
2) also hidden is the fact that to download it in pieces, you need to take away control from youtube and let end users freely copy the file to every pirate on the planet.
both (1) and (2) are illegal operations, and thus if you cannot remove those steps from your use case necessary steps, i.e. remove youtube-dl from the operation, it simply isn’t legal to do so.
Re: Why does the RIAA pox on humankind still exist?
As the simplistic counterpoint to your bs, youtube-dl type tools would be illegal if your points contained validity, which they do not. You might want to inform your contacts at RIAA that no one uses youtube-dl anymore. It has been broken for years. Most people use forks such as yt-dlp – which RIAA attempted to strong arm, but RIAA was found to be on the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of tech understanding – much like yourself.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases
Which can be used for legitimate, legal purposes to download videos from all of these sites (required disclaimer: download but just don’t infringe people :)=
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/master/supportedsites.md
Now back to you. All of your false claims are easily debunked. See the github.blog post below, which contrary to what you would have us believe, illustrates why RIAA is dead wrong about youtube-dl type tools in the U.S. And btw, the “win” in Germany is an empty-instant voided win, considering youtube-dl is only used by a few people on the few sites it still works on; one of them not being youtube.
https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/
“Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways. We also understood that this project’s code has many legitimate purposes, including changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos. When we see it is possible to modify a project to remove allegedly infringing content, we give the owners a chance to fix problems before we take content down. If not, they can always respond to the notification disabling the repository and offer to make changes, or file a counter notice.
That’s what happened in this case. First, we were able to reinstate a fork of youtube-dl after one of the fork owners applied a patch with changes in response to the notice.
Then, after we received new information that showed the youtube-dl project does not in fact violate the DMCA‘s anticircumvention prohibitions, we concluded that the allegations did not establish a violation of the law. In addition, the maintainer submitted a patch to the project addressing the allegations of infringement based on unit tests referencing copyrighted videos. Based on all of this, we reinstated the youtube-dl project and will be providing options for reinstatement to all of its forks.”
PS: I don’t understand how all of your comments haven’t been downvoted into oblivion on this article. Most of them are RIAA propaganda, nonsense, and contain legal/historic/tech ignorance. For instance, VHS was not specifically designed to reproduce bad copies; that is the nature of the analogue beast and has zero to do with the VHS design spec. JC.
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Your misunderstanding is mostly because of the above. You haven’t heard of my position on the matter. The position is that software developers who are creating new technologies, will need to listen to all relevant stakeholders, including RIAA. If RIAA spouts propaganda and goes to onerous positions recarding copyright, then software developers need to allow that position on their software product. Doing otherwise would be illegal customer filtering/developing your product to work only with certain limited demographic. Basically it isn’t any better than what Nazis did in world war II.
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lol, Tero, you don’t get to argue about Nazis. You literally supported Putin invading Ukraine claiming that it’s about copyright law.
There’s a streaming software out there that will do the same thing I don’t see YT stopping them.
They already know, they just don’t care. They also know that this is little more than a nuisance. But as long as they can still get away with it, they’re gonna keep doing it. They’re going to keep trying to squeeze the last penny that they can out of this.
And even though they might have hit the law of diminishing returns on this a while ago, they still think there is a buck to be made. And, by God, they’re going to make it!
Quora still says this is illegal to use
Liars. Damn Liars.
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Quora, the place of Tankies, wumaos, and other jackbooted propaganda thugs, spewing copyright maximalist propaganda?
I am shocked, shocked to know of this!
When it becomes a punishable offense to make false assertions, false accusations and file false claims, that’s when. As of current law, the words “false” and “punishable” in the same sentence are nothing but a joke, easily dismissed with a “But my beliefs! My beliefs are true, I tell you!”
You first.
Take your Meshpage advertisement off of YouTube, then we’ll talk.
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Lol. This is exactly why I need to take the position that end users lose their rights to creative commons flexibility when they use youtube as a middleman. When my position is that youtube is actually middleman that filters out flexibility from content owner’s chosen licenses like creative commons, I don’t need to take my ad away from youtube. The removal requirement came from your idea that youtube is not a party in the licensing of the content videos.
Also what mixes the analysis a little, is that when I post my adverticements to youtube, I’m the content owner, and I’m not (in that analysis) the user of youtube which needs license before watching the content. Copyright owner of course can display his own content.
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Nobody uses YouTube as a “middleman” for rights or flexibility or anything. Your attempt to saddle legal terms on what’s basically free-to-air television is a cute, but farcical grasp for power you never had to begin with.
If you won’t take your ad off YouTube, nobody else has the moral obligation to take anything off YouTube.
This will not save you from stricter copyright law. Someone else can claim ad revenue off your ad even without actually being the content owner of Meshpage.
The reason why this even happens is because of the copyright laws you support. Composers on YouTube have found that other LLC entities have laid copyright claims on the content they created, because these entities claimed to own snippets like “the sound of someone throwing up”, and YouTube is obliged to prevent these composers from getting their money.
Under stricter copyright law, someone can make a copyright claim for Meshpage and you would have to pay them, or take Meshpage offline completely. Ariana Grande, one of the most famous musical artistes today, has encountered takedowns for her own music.
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so, your solution when you’re losing an argument is to jump to completely separate/different argument. Basically you have abadoned your previous argument and you hope this next one will be better…
But yes, its possible that someone claims ownership of my videos. Its also possible for me to sue those bastards. And so the wheel turns.
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Well, you would be able to if Meshpages was making money, otherwise how are you going to pay the lawyers?
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I just pass the cost of litigation to the criminals? Courts will give me lawyers fee award the moment I tell them that I created the copyrighted work myself over 10 year time slot.
See, this pattern of doing the work yourself and gathering enough copyrighted works to fill a hard disk is more powerful than you think.
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And how’s that plan worked out so far?
Oh, it hasn’t worked at all? You still haven’t found any criminals to sue? If you had criminals to pass your costs of litigation onto you’d have sued them already!
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That’s not a separate argument.
The bottom line is that stricter copyright laws that you expect other people to follow will not help you from all the problems of copyright law abuse.
Even people who already follow copyright law as is still get harassed by greedy grifters like yourself. And you use vague claims of YouTube being bad, based on your unclear definitions of what that badness even is, to justify your demands.
If YouTube is genuinely that bad you’d have long since stopped using them as a platform. But you don’t, and you won’t, because you’re a desperate hypocrite.
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Speakign of adrev…
Has Scott Cawthorn tried to claim adrev off Meshpage yet?
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no, havent heard from scott yet
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Give him time.
If Scott Cawthon was the copyright holder that you want everyone to emulate, he’d have sued you and your parents for all the money you were worth.
But luckily for you, you don’t live in a universe of stricter copyright law.
Here’s theory how to decide this issue:
1) youtube-dl’s uses are not non-infringing because all use cases involve circumvention of rolling cipher and enabling usage of video files outside of youtube’s control. The operation that removes youtube from control is fundamentally infringing.
2) even if you could somehow get past (1), you still cannot decide the overall activity to be legal. It requires analysis of the overall activity, not just rely on supreme court quotes disconnected from their context.
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You appear o be missing a significant point, it is Not YouTube taking the cation but rather the RIAA, and there members only own copyrights to a very small portion of YouTube videos. This is yet another case of legacy publishers deciding that they can determine what others do when there is a bit of their content involved.
Also note, that except for YouTube created content, YouTube does not have standing to take copyright enforcement action for the videos that it allows users to view.
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Youtube and RIAA are linked in this case, because they have entered into contract where youtube promises to protect RIAA’s content from unrestricted copying.
But its notable that youtube’s technology implements the same protection to all videos, not just RIAA’s videos. They don’t even try to increase the protection level when its RIAA’s content in question. Probably reason is that end users can post videos containing RIAA’s content, so all 3rd party videos must be equally protected.
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If those videos were equally protected, you wouldn’t be constantly asking for them to be removed.