https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=5

> We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:

They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be. This doesn't circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don't understand what leg they have to stand on here.

This feels like DeCSS all over again.

P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it's not listed.

[1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn't in the readme, but in the test cases. See extractor/youtube.py. To me this seems even more tenuous, but IANAL.

The only chance tools like this have legally is when infringement is an "unintended side effect."

We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have done this easily without it. We imported hundreds of thousands of videos like this.

I suspect there are many more legitimate uses of YouTube-dl than you would expect.

Definitely forking it, I need this to continue my research.

We can hope this inspires a) greater suspicion toward proprietary players that are sitting atop open-source work like GitHub (they're not the only one by any stretch); and b) greater adoption of systems that distribute the software's entire history together, including documentation and bug reports, e.g. Fossil.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953

https://pypi.org/project/youtube-dlc/#files

[1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org/

If you can prove me wrong with some link to where are we covered legally to download CC content from YouTube, it would make me very happy.

Maybe you are right. If that is the case it is questionable whether contents produced with tax payers' money should exclusively hosted on Youtube to increase Google's income and restrict tax payers' rights.

It's one thing if a tool designed for legitimate archiving use results in incidental violation of copyright.

It's another thing entirely, legally, if a tool is designed for violating copyright. In such case, it doesn't matter if there are also legitimate fair use uses of the tool.

And that's what the README showed: that youtube-dl was built primarily to violate copyright.

EDIT: based on other comments, it turns out the offending evidence was in the unit testing code not the README file, which legally makes it a bit worse than if it had just been in the README file.

Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.

A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.

The only tenuous leg the RIAA has to stand on is claiming that allowing only streaming of content constitutes some form of digital rights management code, and by reverse engineering it, without imposing the same restrictions as Youtube's website and apps, do, maybe that's some form of circumvention which will be found not entirely legal.

They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.

It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.

Are you a lawyer? Ethically I agree with you: copyright law regulates distributing copies to other people, and YouTube is the only one doing that in this scenario.

But I've been told in other internet discussions that courts don't see it that way. Basically, that the point of the law is to allow big companies to stop people from accessing media without paying, and the interpretation is stretched as far as it needs to be in order to enforce that.

So I don't know what to believe here.

Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally.

It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".

This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court.

In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it.

RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?)

A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they?

So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.

Yes, RIAA has all the savvy of a deranged stalker.

This is a result of money being a proxy for competence.

Infringement does not require distribution. The rights encompassed by copyright include reproduction, derivation, distribution, public performance, public display, and broadcast rights. Infringement of any of those rights is copyright infringement. For US law, see at least 17 USC 106(a) abd 501(a).

The tort of copyright infringement is as you describe it.

When people say copyright infringement requires distribution they mean you can't be tried in a criminal court for merely copying you can still be sued.

At least in the US, criminal copyright infringement may be for any act of infringement. The statute 17 USC 506(a) [0] describes the necessary conditions for a criminal prosecution, which are not limited to reproduction or distribution. Here [1] is a nice article from the department of justice about the crime.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

They might have a very strong case in court. One of the reasons youtube-dl is so active as a project is because they’re in an arms race with Google. Google regularly changes how videos are delivered in an effort to thwart downloading tools. The RIAA could seize on this and even have Google testify that they’re trying to protect against this unauthorized downloading. Given the revelations about the tests in youtube-dl’s own repo, it would be a very difficult legal battle.

In the criminal sense, you're correct.

In the civil law sense, you'd be wrong. Using a camera to record a performance is an act of copying and is subject to copyright law. Generally, if the performers and/or the owner of the copyright don't give you permission to record the show, you don't have the right to do so. (Note that taking pictures or recording short clips is usually but not always regarded as fair use. Recording an entire performance without permission is rarely treated as fair use.)

However, recording the performance is also an act of creation, resulting in a derivative work that has its own copyright, but one which is useless without a copyright license to the underlying performance.

YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).

If the license between the RIAA (or other licensor) and Youtube allowed visitors to make permanent copies of Youtube streams, then downloading a Youtube video would not be a copyright violation. But generally, having entered into streaming and downloading licensing agreements with the RIAA before, I would be extremely surprised if the RIAA would enter into such a license with Youtube, as it would kill sales of digital music downloads if people could just download permanent copies of Youtube videos instead for free.

If you own the copyright and upload a video to Youtube, then it wouldn't be a copyright violation to download that video from Youtube.

Owning the copyright means you don't violate the copyright in making a copy, but that doesn't mean you get to make that copy through any means; you still have to use legal means, and for a website, that means methods that are acceptable under the TOS of that website.

I'm not sure if this is going to be considered similar to taking a full copy but I'm also not sure what substantial purpose there would be for taking that full copy except for the (probably valid fair use) purpose of shifting access to manage time, location, or network conditions. Given that you pay separately for your bandwidth, and there is an incentive to conserve it, I don't see any way this isn't considered fair use without a sharing component.

Taking a copy is incidental to lawfully consuming the content that was provided in an authorized setting, whether that copy is stable or not. Nobody is hosting copies of YouTube content, paying the bandwidth and hosting bills so anonymous co-parties to the infringement can enjoy the content separately from the authorized channel, (it is not even suggested that anyone would want to do this.)

I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.

Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.

> I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.

> Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.

TV broadcasters do not give you a license to copy their content but it's legal to record TV. Why is youtube any different?

Today, there are a multitude of options for consuming TV content, and due to the (recent) creation of time-shifted licenses, the fair use justification for standalone-DVRs has mostly gone out the window (which is why they're not for sale anymore; for example, Tivo no longer offers standalone DVRs; Hulu, cable companies pay for time-shifted viewing).

As Youtube was always on-demand to begin with, the time-shifting justification for recording TV in the Betamax case never applied.

Yes, that is why 17 USC § 117 provides that making a transitory copy necessary to run the program (such as a RAM copy), or an archival copy of the data needed to run the program, are both explicitly not violations of copyright.

I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.

It does not. Youtube does not explicitly, or implicitly, provide the user a license of any type. Youtube has licensed the right to provide a temporary copy of a video to a user.

Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.

It normally wouldn't be...except that some idiot decided to include unit tests to make sure that youtube-dl could be used to download music videos covered by RIAA licenses. That basically makes the RIAA's case, especially since youtube-dl must be regularly updated to handle Google's countermeasures.

Yes, that is why streamed content is now generally covered by streaming-specific licenses, as noted above.

Format shifting was at the time not allowed in UK copyright law, and again is not allowed as of a couple of years ago (it was only allowed for about a year).

iTunes was designed for copyright violation. I'm sure the manual will show that.

Just for comparison.

It's my understanding that any media _can_ fall under Fair Use in the USA, meaning that there would have to be specification as to who was using the software and their circumstances within the unit tests in order to make it infringing use. You might fir example be archiving, or preparing educational materials, or compiling a review, or doing subtitling.

It's not sufficient to prove someone downloaded, you have to show it was infringing activity. How do you do that with a unit test? Software to perform legitimate, legal downloads would still have to do that same test.

In short you've found a smoking gun, now prove its principle purpose is murder.

This comment is provided solely for entertainment and in no way relates to my employment.

No, Itunes was designed for organizing music. How you got that music was a separate function,and you could split out the CD ripping functionality and still have the primary function of iTunes. Additionally, making copies of physical media for personal archival purposes is recognized as a legitimate fair use (and was back then), so the the CD ripping functionality would have generally still have been okay. And yes, there is case law on when ripping CDs is considered fair use and when it is not.

It's my understanding that any media _can_ fall under Fair Use in the USA, meaning that there would have to be specification as to who was using the software and their circumstances within the unit tests in order to make it infringing use. You might fir example be archiving, or preparing educational materials, or compiling a review, or doing subtitling.

Yes, any media can be subject to a fair use defense. The second statement is not relevant to the copyright analysis. The last statement are examples of fair use, but note that acquiring the content for the purposes of preparing educational materials is not automatically "fair use". For example, preparing educational materials for a class provided at a for-profit institution, or in educational materials sold commercially, would not support a fair use defense, though otherwise the use of copyright content in educational materials has generally been deemed fair use.

It's not sufficient to prove someone downloaded, you have to show it was infringing activity. How do you do that with a unit test? Software to perform legitimate, legal downloads would still have to do that same test.

The unit-test is a part of a different analysis from a basic copyright infringement claim; That question is whether the tool is intended for violating copyright and for that, they don't need to show any infringing activity actually took place, only that the tool was intended for infringing activity. The DMCA does not require a creator to suffer harm before they sue, since it recognizes that in the computer age, once such harm occurs it may not be possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

Well, being able to rip music off your CDs was literally advertised as an iTunes feature; Apple promoted iTunes after its introduction in 2001 with the slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn." And Apple did get accused by various industry players of promoting copyright violation. I wouldn't say that iTunes was "designed for copyright violation" any more than I'd say youtube-dl was "designed" for it, but Apple definitely understood that iTunes had value to people who wanted to make digital copies of media in ways that did not strictly fall under fair use guidelines. :)

Ripping CDs for personal archival copies had already been characterized as fair use by the courts by the time iTunes was first released. If it hadn't been, the industry players wouldn't have just "accused" Apple of promoting copyright violation, they would have done something about it. The music industry has always been very aggressive about protecting their IP rights.

It would have been very different if iTunes had the slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn, Share."

If you have a tool which skirts (bad, overreaching, probably constitutionally invalid) laws, be smart about how you present them!

Making a copy on its own is not fair use. What matters is the reason for making the copy. If you are making an connectivity-shifted copy (aka, for viewing away from internet access) there could be a fair use argument to download content from a streaming site that is not otherwise available for offline consumption.

But the flipside of that: if there is a way to access the content in a way that fair use is not implicated (i.e., because the copyright owner makes the content available for that use case such as offline viewing, even if payment is required), then generally fair use does not apply.

Remember: fair use is a defense to violating copyright, and it must be reasonable under the circumstances. Not wanting to pay for a license for your intended use case is generally never considered reasonable.

If you can show it to me, then I am allowed to take a copy.

That has never been the law, at any point in the history of copyright, dating back to before copying works was trivial.

> [There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses.

Is there a subsequent opinion that reversed that? (How is youtube-dl substantially different from a VCR recording, if youtube is substantially similar to a broadcast medium?)

> [W]hen one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work ... and that time-shifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge, the fact ... that the entire work is reproduced ... does not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use.

> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge

when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.

I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.

>> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge

> when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.

The problem with this idea is that you're quoting a case about recording televised broadcasts. The quote you pulled your quote from begins "when one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work".

Televised works were shown with embedded advertising a lot more intrusive than what can appear on a YouTube video. There is no way for the presence of advertisements to affect how this argument applies to YouTube, when it was originally cast in terms of television.

The content holder licensed the content to Youtube (or Vimeo, etc), but does not necessarily control the monetization of that content by the licensee. (Generally, the license will say something like royalties shall be X% of revenue derived from the content, without limiting itself to specific methods of monetization.)

Youtube doesn't have a license to give to the viewer; the license they have is merely to show you the content.

I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.

This has been the law for several decades already. But the key thing to understand is "fair use" doesn't mean "to avoid paying." If digital content is available for purchase, the courts generally have not found making a permanent copy from a streaming source to be fair use. (Where it gets complicated: multiple copyrights applying to a single work, such as the dancing baby Prince video. The creator of the video was okay with people viewing it and downloading it freely, but Prince was not. In the music arena, this would be a non-issue due to compulsory licenses, but those licensing schemes don't exist for other types of media. Ultimately, the court said that the focus of the video was the toddler dancing, and that the music was incidental, so including it in the video was a legitimate fair use. But it took more than a decade for the case to be resolved.)

(Hypothetically of course! Youtube-dl is not only for Youtube.)

If you purchased a movie, presumably this included the rights to watch it offline (and most of the movie lockers like Vudu, etc, generally include such rights), then the selling website generally makes available copies for offline viewing (and many Blurays include codes to activate on movie locker service to get a license for a digital copy). In such case, you would need to use that service for downloading the offline copy, because the Youtube copy isn't part of that license to you.

You can assert all of that, but unless you have some landmark precedent to cite that agrees with what you're arguing, I'd like to hear a court decide on that. Sony Betamax says what I'm arguing, and archival can be for fair use, too. There is 36 Cinema, which maintains copies of classic kung-fu movies that aren't available for purchase anymore, and invites Rza from Wu-Tang Clan on periodically for broadcast viewing with a value-add, Rza's commentary. Since the movies are no longer available for sale, there is no impact to marketability. Since commentary is added, transformative. That's all fair use, format-shifting. I say youtube-dl is a tool for format shifting, with substantial non-infringing uses that present a compelling value and don't impact marketability, exactly in line with the Betamax case. If format-shifting and copy for archival was strictly prohibited as you suggest, those movies could be lost forever whenever a format becomes obsolete. When was the last time you saw a VCR? (CD or DVD player?)

That's just one of the things that the fair-use rules and exemptions in copyright were written to help resolve positively.

You can record anything on TV with a VCR, even if it's available separately for purchase on video. There is no technical way I can see in which this scenario differs. You are not obligated to pay for content again and again in every medium, format-shifting is also an allowable kind of fair use. Everything you're saying makes sense, but I don't think it's as clearcut as you say, until it has been decided by a court (and appealed, and decided again by a higher court.)

The 36 Cinema stuff resulted in a new copyrighted derivative work: the commentary. And they can distribute that commentary all they want...but to distribute the underlying films as part of a commercial offering they need copyright licenses to those films. It's irrelevant that the underlying films are not for sale at retail, since they can still acquire a copyright from the copyright owner.

Format-shifting isn't fair use. It's literally an act of copying that is subject to copyright protections. Format-shifting might be fair use, but you have to do the full analysis, and format-shifting to avoid paying for a copy in the destination format is not fair use.

That's just one of the things that the fair-use rules and exemptions in copyright were written to help resolve positively.

Now you're just making stuff up. 17 USC 107 sets forth the basic rules for fair use, and they're quite limited.

When was the last time you saw a VCR?

Last week. Best Buy and Walmart still sell VCRs...Millions of people in this country still have old TVs with purely analog connections.

You are not obligated to pay for content again and again in every medium, format-shifting is also an allowable kind of fair use.

Actually, yes, you are, since each offering of the content in a different medium is a different copyrightable work subject to its own copyright. A VHS copy of a film is very different from the Bluray copy of the same film.

They sell tickets to these events. It's still fair use, (and it would not be possible to have these events without someone first acquiring a digital copy for archival.) You're arguing that they could broadcast the video with commentary but they can't make (or take) a copy? This is prerequisite to the activity! And many of these publishers may no longer exist, as not everyone agrees these movies are classics.

Also section 117 of Copyright Act explicitly calls out the making of a copy for archival as an allowable exception.

Not sure what one of those looks like. I hear people talk about them, but I've not seem an advert on a YouTube video.

That being said, I do use a bunch of anti-ad browser extensions... :)

Yeah I'm gonna need to hear that from the courts, my assertion here is that the DMCA unfairly skirts around this provision of copyright, not that it superceded it outright.

Those fair use rights are not an optional provision of copyright, (although many opinions have stated that copyright provides the author may refuse to allow copies if they technically can, unless you have relevant case law that superseded Sony Betamax, in that case I believe it was the minority opinion), I am not aware of any decisions that say anything other than "copies for fair use may be required for there to be fair use."

But I am not a lawyer, and just because I haven't heard of the case doesn't mean it didn't happen...

The Constitution gave Congress the power to right the laws on copyrights, not the courts. The courts don't write copyright law, they just interpret it.

Fair use, for example, is explicitly written into the copyright statutes by Congress (17 USC § 107), but with sufficient breadth and ambiguity in the language that the courts have added in uses that were not explicitly written into the law but could be reasonably read as being within the scope of the text of the law. That is indeed why the court in the Betamax case was able to characterize "time shifting" as fair use in the first place.

Yeah I'm gonna need to hear that from the courts, my assertion here is that the DMCA unfairly skirts around this provision of copyright, not that it superceded it outright.

Again, Congress gets to write copyright law... They get to change it how they want, so long as it does not violate the Constitution. (Note that the DMCA is an "act" of Congress, which is the method by which Congress actually writes and changes the laws of the US. When we refer to the DMCA, we are referring to the changes to US copyright law embodied by the DMCA.) Courts have upheld the constitutionality of the DMCA.

Those fair use rights are not an optional provision of copyright,

Yes, they are. The Constitution makes no provision for "fair use." In fact, by its bare text, it would appear that the Constitution would not support fair use because it provides for "exclusive rights" to go to creators and inventors (for the periods covered by copyright and patent). "Fair use" is entirely a legislative creation of Congress, and theoretically Congress could take it away.

unless you have relevant case law that superseded Sony Betamax

I don't know why you're hung up on Betamax. That case was based on the copyright law at the time of the case, i.e., the 1980s. Congress changed the copyright laws after that case (in the DMCA and other legislative acts), so Betamax is no longer relevant except as persuasive authority, and the underlying facts supporting the time-shifting as fair use ruling generally do not apply to digital content available on-demand.

If you have a court decision that shows a court interpreted Congress' actions as revoking fair use by the enactment of DMCA, then I'll concede the point, (but you won't have one as the DMCA does not explicitly revoke fair use.) DMCA laid out protections for copyright owners who sought to protect their copyright with eg. DRM schemes.

That doesn't revoke fair use. It just makes it practically difficult to utilize, since you might have to (illegally) circumvent a copyright protection device in order to access those fair use rights. They are still there, copyright owners just have a few more tools in their toolbox to prevent you from accessing them lawfully.

Is Youtube's "rolling cipher" such a mechanism? Debatable. Is the proper remedy a DMCA takedown of the entire youtube-dl source, or something else? That's all something for a court to decide. Only certain uses of youtube-dl are potentially foiling anti-circumvention devices like "rolling cipher", it's a utility that works on many video streaming sites, (and substantially many of the works on those sites are not protected by "rolling cipher" or similar, possibly any, DRM.)

> I don't know why you're hung up on Betamax.

Has there been a landmark ruling since, that reversed Betamax? It was decided by the Supreme Court, so unless you have one, I don't think I can agree that it is no longer relevant.

Can you cite a source for this? I do not believe that is generally the case. You are allowed to rip CDs even if the same music is sold digitally and you are allowed to DVR a TV show even if they sell DVDs of the same show.

Fair use is a balancing act based on analysis of various factors. In the case of ripping CDs for personal archival purposes, the courts treated that as fair use because at the time there was otherwise no way to make archival copies. It's very possible that today a court could rule that making archival copies of CDs for personal use is no longer fair use, because the digital version of the music now exists, as a separate article from the CD, and can be legally acquired. (Note that libraries and other archives still have a statutory archival use exception. Also note that because a CD is a physical good, there are certain rights associated with it that would not apply to content acquired digitally.)

For TV shows, it's not the same thing, since a DVD of an entire season is not the same thing as being able to view just a single episode. That being said, with the rise of digital, on demand availability of individual episodes, the original fair use justification for VCRs and DVRs has basically gone out the window.

The original Tivo could not exist today, and indeed...it does not: Tivo no longer offers standalone DVRs. Hulu, Youtube TV, your cable DVR, all of those services license time-shifted viewing rights from the copyright owners. (Yes, the studios created a new type of right just for this...)

Even from your own archive?

Originally many people started out with plain paper terminals rather than the spiffy video terminals that would later become common.

Well, sprocket-feed terminals more precisely, where you sit at a floor-standing wide-carriage _printer_ having a full QWERTY/ASCII keyboard, connected to the mainframe using a RS-232 serial COM port cable.

Or remotely dial-up over regular phone lines using external modems compatible with the kind first used for internet dial-up. Modems later found internally as standard equipment on PC's, made to accept a common RJ-11 telephone connector, eliminating the need for the RS-232 cable.

Not unlike a space-age teletype.

Either way, you type to the computer and it types back to you.

When available, as we all know it's been a while and computers still can never be expected to have 100 percent uptime, so time shifting has always been the norm in some way or another. At this point with a dumb terminal you just come back later when the mainframe is not too busy for input, or for output just wait for the printout until it's good and ready.

More effective session management would have to be accomodated by storage of some kind not unlike the punched paper tapes for sending and receciving on some teletypes.

Underneath the terminal you have a big box of the fan-feed computer paper so you fundamentally get an endless record of the communication in its entirety. Otherwise there is nothing. This is the default. Out-of-paper meant no communication and no data.

Pallets and pallets of boxes and boxes of printouts, excessive amounts of trees giving their lives and paper mill pollution up the wazoo (you ever smell that stuff?). But it's worth it, these are not copies, this is the original data, as you received it coming in live over the wire.

Depending on the institution or individual, and the risk of losing this unique output, archival handling procedures may apply.

Upgrading to a VT-102 type video terminal is actually analogous to a desktop PC when it comes to form factor, but the command line is still not from a local processor, and no local disk storage.

Naturally you still get your continuous printout as the screen display scrolls it on by, now possible from a plain serial printer (or from the same old paper terminal) connected to the second COM port on the VT-102 for pass-through printing.

You still use the terminal to operate the command line & display the output from a remote CPU, and with scrolling ability, can roll back to redisplay some recent earlier content. This was not a copy either, it was the same original live data as printed, just redisplayed. Not every terminal had that kind of memory though, and if present, not much.

Then you get _intelligent_ terminals with lots more memory plus local floppy storage, having more than two COM ports, and a simple local OS in ROM to handle these peripherals.

It finally became posible to judiciously save paper like never before, from that point on there has always been a local SAVE command of some kind. That's one of the only main purposes of any mainstream desktop workstation ever since.

You end up with a stack of floppies instead of paper containing the original data from that hardware session.

Interestingly, even today it is sometimes still faster to look something up in your paper records than find it on a disk though.

Anyway the disks simply have digital representation specifically crafted for the storage medium, often in appropriately treated text files.

From that point you could always play back data from a disk to your console screen, and/or one or more of the COM ports which may be connected to other terminals, computers, storage, or printing hardware. When the time is right.

The purpose of putting data into a computer file format to begin with is precisely so this type of communication can be achieved electronically.

And also, so the file or disk can be archived using one of the only non-communication commands in such a pre-DOS desktop environment, the ominous-sounding COPY command.

Well, it's electronic and you need to keep the original completely intact, so no telling how many times you need to run the COPY command to get a reliable archive.

But when one of the things that came across your wires is something like the text of The Godfather, that's an author's original work and it would be most questionable to manufacture copies for people as if it were your own creation, perhaps unfair even if proper attribution is given.

Each user has always been responsible for appropriately respecting the rights owners of any material in their archive, and questioning their own operation enough to avoid things like selling duplicates to just anyone. It's part of the responsibility of having such powerful equipment at their disposal.

Not just for those with dual floppy drives. Takes lots of floppy disks to boot sometimes too. Twenty years ago most PC's already came equipped with two CD drives in addition to a floppy drive, one CD drive was writable for archiving since floppies were not too popular any more.

MP3 sites earlier than Napster arose without question as experimenters compressed and shared their archives using the emerging codec. This was nothing like selling pirated copies of CD's, and was not made available to the general public by any means, just the few technology enthusiasts who had PC's with internet capability.

With progress in hardware and internet performance, there should be more advantage for archival use as time goes by.

Now exponentially more good material is at risk of being lost due to electronic or legislative failures, beyond the pre-existing threats from ordinary disasters like floods or acts of war. There's also the limitations of things like MP3 compression.

There should continuously be improving apps so users can work more effectively than ever with the desired portions out of their own complete digital history.

Meanwhile there is some consensus that operators without your permission are clandestinely eavesdropping to make truly illegal copies of your original complete digital history (along with many others') and extract portions that they my find desirable, sometimes against your own best interest.

You surely need to be entitled to better than this, and in favor of your own preferences instead.

In the USA according to copyright law archiving is not supposed to be impossible.

Nobody has a continuous paper record to fall back on any more.

Any threat to the usefulness of your digital equivalent would seem to be a form of cyberattack now that we have a better idea of how a cyberattack can do damage.

It's always been the same tool with possible uses for good or evil, the desktop workstation.

What you primarily do with it can only be determined by examination of its complete digital history.

From an entertainment law perspective it would seem like the only sensible violation could be if illegal entertainment had actually ocurred, not whether the file was being stored locally or remotely.

If most of the files just sit there almost all the time, with almost no dancing to the computer or anything like that, that's an archival device not an entertainment device.

Even more so when the primary user handling of the files is to maintain them intact against all odds, without ever intentionally using the file contents to achieve the files' own particular underlying purpose, whether entertainment files or not.

Furthermore according to parents logic VCRs shouldn't be allowed to exist because they can record from both categories.

No, that's not at all what I said. VCRs are just tools. Tools are subject to a different analysis post-DMCA: does the tool have a substantial non-infringing use or is it deliberately designed to violate copyright?

In determining whether a tool was deliberately designed to violate copyright, they look beyond just the mere function of the tool and examine why that functionality is present, and how the tool and that potentially-violating functionality is marketed.

On that note: DVRs generally no longer exist today as standalone goods (see, for example Tivo, etc). This is because the copyright owners introduced new time-shifting licenses a few years ago, and your cable company, Hulu, etc. pay the copyright owners for the right to let their viewers view content on a time-shifted basis. A standalone DVR would generally have the primary purpose of violating those (relatively new) rights, and thus wouldn't pass muster today.

What about VCRs? They're still okay. They make degraded, low-quality copies of broadcast transmissions for archival/time-shifted uses by people who have TVs that still connect to VCRs. As those people generally wouldn't be able to access the equivalent digital content on their TV, it's clear that the primary use of VCRs is for fair uses purposes.

You absolutely do not have to buy the MP3s rather than rip the CD that you own to MP3, just because they also sell MP3s and you want your archival copy to be in MP3 format. You can make them as a backup copy. (If there's no anti-circumvention device like the famous CSS encryption in your way, that is.) The publisher cannot pay once for CDs and also sell MP3s, they need a separate license for that (if that is how the author's licensing is written, granted, that's a fact.) The consumer is not bound in this way, they "paid" for their copy (presumably, if payment was needed to receive it) and they can format shift if their use passes the 4 factors balance test for fair use, (and if it is technically possible to do so, eg. without bypassing an anti-circumvention device, (thanks DMCA.))

Moreover, we are talking about youtube-dl, which is not owned by the RIAA and they have no right to take it down in this way. They can seek relief in the form of an injunction, the scope of the injunction to be determined by the courts, who would have to consider the substantial non-infringing uses of the tool; they would be unlikely to decide that vaporizing youtube-dl from orbit is the appropriate remedy.

I don't know where tranformation would land as they are just streaming data and not actually viewing it.

It's (potentially) the whole content, but a case that was literally just uploading an entire video as-is with a different title was ruled fair use not too long ago, so this isn't itself damning.

The nature of the work seems irrelevant here as it's not viewed. It could easily be replaced with any other video -- even one owned by the repo creators.

Likewise, since they are unit testing rather than viewing the content, I doubt there is any commercial harm and the market overlap between video viewers and unit testers is zero.

It's (potentially) the whole content, but a case that was literally just uploading an entire video as-is with a different title was ruled fair use not too long ago, so this isn't itself damning.

I'd like to see a cite for that. Generally, uploading whole content owned by someone else is not fair use absent something like the content being newsworthy in itself (such as video of a police beating). Otherwise, fair use would generally require some transformative effort.

Likewise, since they are unit testing rather than viewing the content, I doubt there is any commercial harm and the market overlap between video viewers and unit testers is zero.

Copyright violations don't require the copyright holder to prove commercial harm. That's the entire point of statutory damages.

Here's the Carl Benjamin case covered in bloomberg (you can look up the specific case if you'd like) https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/youtuber-wins-attorneys...

> Copyright violations don't require the copyright holder to prove commercial harm. That's the entire point of statutory damages.

This is explicitly one of the four points of fair use as stated by the US government, so it's very important.

https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html

That's not what "primarily" means.

What are you basing your legal theory on?

Once the infringing use has been established, it doesn't matter that there is also the potential for legitimate fair use. If it did, then Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire would still be around because they all had the potential for legitimate fair use.

The problem YouTube-dl ran into is they literally named themselves after a prominent streaming site that is copyright holder friendly and also literally tested, in their codebase, the ability to do a thing that arguably violates the DMCA.

What other facilities could I use to exercise my fair use rights in this case, besides tools like youtube-dl? If the video is already available freely for viewing (with advertising), are there any greater damages that aggrieved parties could calculate than the loss of advertising revenue from my repeated viewing of that file?

What incentive is there for me to share this file in violation of copyright if anyone can download a fair use copy for themselves, with the tools provided by youtube-dl?

By putting the infringing act into the code of the tool itself, they lose the ability to make that argument, and moreover show that the tool was built to infringe copyrights, because clearly they thought it was important enough to be able to infringe copyrights that they created multiple unit tests for it.

are there any greater damages that aggrieved parties could calculate than the loss of advertising revenue from my repeated viewing of that file?

The loss of advertising revenue is largely irrelevant unless the RIAA chooses to demonstrate the amount. Copyright law provides statutory damages starting at $750, and for that they just need to show a single infringing act (and for each additional act they prove, they get another $750).

What incentive is there for me to share this file in violation of copyright if anyone can download a fair use copy for themselves, with the tools provided by youtube-dl?

You're assuming a fair use case for using youtube-dl to download a copy of a licensed music video. But fair use is defense to a claim of violating copyright, so you need to show why your use is a fair use, you can't just say "fair use" as if it were a magic spell that makes your legal problems go away. And generally, it would be difficult to prove fair use for any of the content covered by an RIAA license because they make that content available for use offline, time-shifted, etc...they simply require that you pay for that.

The person who took a copy has no substantial reason to share it with anyone, as it is freely available through the content providers. Anyone with a copy of youtube-dl can get it, (does youtube-dl enable the download of any paywalled content? If so, that might be a fact that changes the game. But if so, does the RIAA claimant have standing to make that argument?)

Right, but you're looking at the wrong thing. The use of youtube-dl by you to download Taylor Swift is not what the courts are looking at (and note, that would generally not be fair use if your intent was just to watch it later as the time-shifting defense from the Betamax case is generally not applicable to content available on-demand, though using the video in a derivative work like non-profit educational content would probably still be fine).

It's the fact that youtube-dl holds itself out as being the tool to use so that you can download Taylor Swift that is at issue.

The person who took a copy has no substantial reason to share it with anyone, as it is freely available through the content providers. Anyone with a copy of youtube-dl can get it, (does youtube-dl enable the download of any paywalled content? If so, that might be a fact that changes the game. But if so, does the RIAA claimant have standing to make that argument?)

It doesn't matter if they intend to share the video further. The copyright violation act is the downloading of a permanent copy of video content provided on a streaming/on-demand basis. The downloader sharing the video with others would be a separate copyright violation.

The letter makes two claims, "copyright infringement" which might be substantiated by the readme, (but not against youtube-dl authors, perhaps against their users) and "anticircumvention [sic]" which is the meat of their real issue.

The making of a copy is not outside of fair use unless it fails the balance test, aka "four factors."

Sony Betamax disagrees with you, if we can agree that youtube is similar to a broadcast medium and that youtube-dl is similar to a "VTR" from that case, aka VCR, unless there are other substantial differences that I'm missing.

Making a copy is only infringing if it isn't for fair use, and Betamax ruled that time shifting could be fair use.

One of the four factors is market impact, so how is the market for this content impacted by this taking a permanent copy? It would be impacted if the purpose and character of the copy was inconsistent with fair use, but remember youtube-dl hasn't taken or shared any permanent copies.

So unless you think that youtube-dl has made a copyright violation (which I think we've established they haven't) then youtube-dl is Sony Betamax, permitted to sell VTRs as long as there are substantial non-infringing uses, and the copyright claim will have to be brought against the infringing users.

That does not mean the courts won't find this is an "anticircumvention device" or will find that the takedown is improperly executed. They may very well rule it is an illegal anticircumvention device, Betamax happened before DMCA, and didn't decide anticircumvention.

But to my knowledge, in Sony one of the opinions spoke about "jamming" with hypothetical language, stating that it could be possible for Sony to build a box that jams unauthorized copying and I'm not aware of landmark cases that would have solidified those concepts.

If RIAA has accurately characterized the key rotation mechanism in YouTube then youtube-dl may well be ruled a circumvention device and that could be the end of it, fair use or no.

Here's why I am not sure whether I agree:

The text in question is described as being part of a test. It is highly suggestive that at least one developer wanted to consider cases where the rights holder may be more assertive (e.g. with potential protection mechanisms), which implies intent. Granted, I don't know what the actual intent was. Only the people who added that text and accepted the commit can know that.

Intent is important when laws are broken. In the minor instances, it may determine whether the law is even enforced. In more significant violations, it may be considered when evaluating legal recourse or damages awarded. While I am uncomfortable with the law being fuzzy, I am also uncomfortable with it being absolute. The latter is especially true when you consider that it is far too common to create laws that protect singular interests.

Not sure why that's relevant?

I often use(d) Youtube-dl to grab 1080p videos to watch once, not to keep them. eg as an alternative to Firefox

That's because YouTube itself recently seemed to change something about their streaming, such that some 1080p video's now stutter and don't work correctly.

So, I download them to a temp directory then watch with VLC instead. Then batch clean up the temp directory when it's getting full.

eg Youtube-dl is just another Youtube client, no different from a browser. If you're saying that watching media via Youtube-dl is different than watching it via Firefox... to me that sounds incredibly bizarre.

A video streaming service is literally a host for video content + UI's for accessing it.

Whether YouTube internally stores those video's as single files, as multiple versions of a file, as chunked pieces, or whatever... who cares? They'll obviously optimise their backend storage for their particular needs.

Whether you start viewing in the middle of a video, or from the start... are you're trying to say it makes a difference?

Because VLC can seek around a video too.

With YouTube-dl, I download the video, and watch it. At some point, it gets deleted.

With Firefox, I download the video and watch it. At some point, it gets deleted.

Are you saying it makes a difference whether or not it gets assembled into "a file" on the receiving side in order to watch it in an appropriate player?

It's unlikely transcoding a video added anything creative to the process.

In fact, if transcoding a video added anything creative to the process, you would have two copyrights: one for the original creative work, and a second for the derivative (transcoded) work.

The OP's comment was different. He was using youtube-dl to download videos uploaded by his own clients, which was fine because they're the copyright owners. Transcoding doesn't generally create a separate copyrighted work because at least for these types of media, the underlying representation of the bits doesn't matter.

Note: this isn't fair use. Fair use is a defense to violating copyright, and a copyright owner can't violate their own copyright ...but if they licensed one or more copyrights to a third party, they could violate the third party's copyrights depending on the terms of that license.

It could still be in Youtube's interest to prevent this from happening.

I'm asking why you would expect a competitor to make your own product more compelling for your customers.

This is a further example that Youtube-dl is there to circumvent the intended functionality of Youtube.

And in fact it is illegal for YouTube to lock your data within their service in that manner in the EU. You have a right to export your data and they have the responsibility to make it make possible to move that data to a competitor where technically feasible. And it clearly is technically feasible.

There’s a lot of talking past each other going on in this thread. Nobody is defending the RIAA or DMCA. But they exist and this outcome seems painfully obvious.

RIAA being mean, DMCA being bad and copyright being outdated doesn’t matter here. What matters in that the law exists and YouTube-dl made it really easy for the RIAA to make a compelling case against them.

Google isn't making that case because Youtube is YOUtube. The whole point is that it's a platform for family videos, amateurs, and all sorts of other things.

If the RIAA didn't want their content Youtube-dl'able, they should have used one of their locked-down platforms. They went to Youtube because the locked-down corporate platforms don't have the eyeballs. Now, they're trying to convert Youtube into one of those platforms.

My expectation is the RIAA will prevail, but because of deeper pockets and the potential for a multi-million dollar legal battle, not because they're on solid legal ground.

Youtube has legitimate reasons to try and prevent people from downloading content from their site. Youtube-dl is clearly there to enable people to do that. Rightsholders can use this as another argument that Youtube-dl violates (or is designed to violate) the DMCA.

I'm not defending the RIAA or DMCA here but I can understand their argument and why they are making it.

It’s a pretty easy case to make. Any other use of the tool is again, completely and totally irrelevant.

To be even more clear I’m sure YouTube-dl is a useful tool and I think such things should exist. However, this is an important lesson when making and owning these tools. Don’t do the RIAAs work for them.

Some people use YouTube as their repository. Or if they lost the original files it would be a way to recover something. I once had to download mp3's of my own music from MySpace because I had an HD crash and lost them.

I wondered when this would happen. I'm. not referring yotube-dl specifically but the third-party repository problem such as Github and YouTube where material exists principally on one site.

The fact that the RIAA is involved makes it high profiled case and should warn people that distributed systems/repositories are a much better (safer) idea.

That's primarily what's got the RIAA's panties in a twist, is that youtube-dl is 'bypassing' youtube's protection measures to prevent their site from being effectively scraped.

But Napster was a service run by an organization.

youtube-dl is neither a service nor an organization. It's just some source code floating around the internet, to which volunteers contribute to.

A very different situation.

If anything, it's Youtube itself that's like Napster, and it's telling that the RIAA has gone after youtube-dl rather than Google.

Unlike Napster, Google just complies and hence doesn't have much of a case against it like Napster did.

You used the words "unintended side effect" in quotes but I am unaware of where that comes from while I am familiar with the term "substantial non-infringing use" and "contributory copyright infringement"

Youtube-dl neither assists nor profits from copyright infringement and it possesses arguably non infringing uses.

- You can download non infringing videos. Youtube-dl works on a variety of sites beyond youtube

- If you feed mpv a url it will transparently use youtube-dl to handle fetching the media for playback. Unless you specifically tell it to this does not permanently save the video and is not materially different from watching the video on firefox.

Mpv incidentally uses far less resources for decoding video even with newly added hardware decoding in linux.

- You can consume the same video you are allowed to access on a different device or in a situation wherein you lack network access. For example one could watch and then delete a youtube video one wanted to watch on the train where you lacked internet access. This is analogous to format or time shifting which have been deemed fair use.

The RIAA would of course argue that examples of infringement in the test cases or readme demonstrate intent. A reasonable response to that might (or might not, depending on the context) be that infringement in those specific cases was never intentional but instead purely by accident.

If the infringement in this case ends up appearing to be intentional, it would probably make for a very uphill battle to argue that the tool itself was only intended for legitimate use cases.

Edit: Of course, it's reasonable to ask - if it's legal for YouTube to distribute the content, does using youtube-dl suddenly make it illegal? Is it a violation of copyright to record a pay per view stream? What about a publicly available stream paid for by ad revenue?

Well that's the question, isn't it? Is downloading those particular URLs infringement if the content is legally allowed to be hosted on YouTube in the first place? If so, was the use of those URLs specifically intended to demonstrate or verify the ability of the tool to infringe copyright? Alternatively, can the tool be said to circumvent a protection device under DMCA section 1201?

(For the record, my answer to all of the above is an emphatic "no".)

Instead of a unit test which successfully downloads a copyright-protected video, it would have a unit test which attempts to download such videos but returns an error message to the user based on a hardcoded blacklist of videos IDs, stored in a separate config file. (It would also have a unit test for successfully downloading a public domain video from the developers' own channel, of course).

The developers could also make clear that they are happy to receive DMCA requests to add specific video IDs to their blacklist. As for what happens if the user deletes the blacklist config file, maybe that won't have a unit test.

If such a fork was successful in fending off court cases, though, it would start to raise interesting First Amendment questions. The difference between the two pieces of software, in practice, is just the text in the README telling people not to break the law (plus a single "Delete" button press after installation, which the user would have to learn about from another source). This would mean that the difference between developers complying with the law and breaking the law is including that text in the README, which effectively seems like compelled speech.

Probably not. If intent were to be demonstrated in court, a derivative work would almost certainly be tainted in turn unless those authors had a _really_ good justification for their actions. (IANAL though; I'm just guessing based on other copyright cases that came up in the media before.)

For example, imagine forking Napster back in the day, redoing the UI, and rewriting half of the internals. Do you really think a court would let that fly? Judges are hardly idiots.

That being said, why not just mirror the original to a host running as a tor hidden service and continue all development efforts there?

(And as someone who has dealt with the music licensing agencies, you always just pay for the license. Paying the big 3 licensing agencies annually for millions of streams cost less than the statutory damages for a single violation.)

Youtube has the right to stream those videos, because they pay the RIAA for a streaming license, which is a thing that music licensing agencies have provided for many years now. In many cases, the videos were uploaded by the recording studio itself, and in those cases presumably Youtube isn't paying a licensing fee because the license is implicit in the upload (but note that many videos uploaded by the artists themselves are not technically theirs to upload because the actual rights were held by the recording company, hence the reason Youtube needs the agreement with the RIAA).

The DMCA take-down exemption you are thinking of is a separate protection, that applies to Youtube taking down videos that aren't licensed by them containing music that isn't licensed by the creator of the music.

The statutory damages would apply in the former case, such as if an artist uploaded their own music video and Youtube didn't have the broad RIAA license. This happens a lot more frequently than you would think.

If that happens, the difference is that these are public domain non-copyrghted materials -- not the copyrighted videos, thus stopping access to the files will be more problematic.

It sounds like you're saying the problem is with the original authors, not the code itself, so taking down the code seems like the wrong approach for the RIAA.

What does it matter if I play the beatles on youtube by watching in a web browser or watching an .mp4 file that I just downloaded? It's functionally the same.

This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime. Either way you're carrying the same lockpicks, but if the court decides that you were carrying them with bad intentions, you're in trouble.

I can't say for YouTube specifically (I haven't tried, I suspect they have the talent to make it actually difficult), but browsers do make it remarkably easy to extract most forms of media from a website. Even websites that attempt to hide it have to embed it somewhere. Whether you feel like it's easier to install Firefox and figure out how to extract the media, or figure out how to install Python and pip and then run youtube-dl is up to you.

There are likely even tutorials up by Mozilla somewhere about how to use the dev tools to pull an image (though I assume they're not stupid enough to do it on material they don't have rights to).

There are many reasons one might want to use youtube-dl. Furthermore, there are many creators that either don't care or are happy that you're downloading their stuff.

If we want to make analogies, every gun shop in America sells guns and human shaped targets. Do they have the intent to encourage people to murder other people? It is a tool that can be used for illegal purposes. They might even have examples of how you can do such a thing (as do gun manufacturers, lockpick manufacturers, security exploit announcements, etc, etc). Why would that make the tool illegal? The argument might hold if the only possible use of it is illegal; that puts it among the ranks of things we deem illegal to merely possess, like fully automatic weapons. I'm not buying the RIAA's argument that youtube-dl is so dangerous to society that we can't trust anyone to use it legally.

> This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

No one has demonstrated intent. The publishers have demonstrated that it could potentially be used in an illegal manner (depending on your jurisdiction). They aren't going after someone who downloaded youtube-dl and is trying to use it to pirate things. They're going after the lockpick manufacturer because they have a tutorial on using their lockpicks on their site, and people could use that to commit crimes.

Furthermore, the video and audio are served separately so that codecs can be mixed and matched on the client side, and the same audio can be used for different quality video streams, etc. One of the things youtube-dl deals with is grabbing both and muxing into a single container.

So yes, extracting things from YouTube is not trivial at all.

This is pretty far from lock picking tools. The crime commits with lock picking tools involves physically breaking into someone private property to either steal physical items or do physical harm to people. Breaking and entering and copyright law are not comparable. A closer analogy is smuggling a camera into a concert to break copyright law by recording a concert. Canon or Nikon are not responsible for what I did, just because they made the technology that allows users to record any content, which may or may not include copyrighted material. Even if Canon included how well their camera performed at recording concerts, that doesn’t suddenly make them responsible. Youtube-dl is much closer to a digital version of a camera than to lock picking tools.

  Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 
  U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the “Betamax case”, is a 
  decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which 
  ruled that the making of individual copies of complete 
  television shows for purposes of time shifting does not 
  constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.[1][2] 
  The Court also ruled that the manufacturers of home video 
  recording devices, such as Betamax or other VCRs (referred 
  to as VTRs in the case), cannot be liable for infringement.

YouTube is an on demand stream. It would be comparable to recording a pay per view movie that you purchased. Is that legal? (The question isn't rhetorical, but I seriously doubt it.)

That's a kind of tech adaption of the streaming/playback mode (and I've done it a ton on previous laptops)

Right, this is the precise problem, and it has to be solved - not by a free-for-all but with proper equitabl copywrite laws.

As matters stand, it's only going to get worse. Say we assume that if somehow both YouTube downloads are made much more difficult to crack AND no downloaders are available, then viewers and downloaders will then use newer tech that's even easier to use to record the videos. With new hi-resonution 4k cameras becoming commonly available, they'll be able to record stuff with still-excellent resolution by just photographing the monitor.

Of course, that still won't deter the RIAA, I can see them trying to ban cardboard covers and jigs that hold cameras and monitors accurately in alignment.

One could argue that YouTube success is mostly about unlimited access to illegal copyrighted material uploaded by some unknown person in some unknown part of the world

After all the thing it's already on YouTube and on my HD after I watched it

If the videos were uploaded to Youtube with authorization, then accessing them through youtube-dl is not an example of the program being used for infringement.

Either way, the purpose of the software is to download anything publically available from YouTube. Its purpose is not copyright infringement unless the purpose of YouTube is copyright infringement.

The content is already available

The monetisation of the content depends on a lot of different factors, many have monetized unauthorized content over the years, many received money from the same unauthorized content by faking clicks and views and many avoid paying YouTube in the form of ads by using ad blockers

I believe youtube-dl users amount to a maximum of a single digit percent of the above (with the digit being between 1 and 2 with 2 excluded)

Good point. I quite like that argument.

Not that my opinion actually matters in this case.

They have these things called "streaming licenses" these days, that are very different from "download licenses" because streamed data is not the same thing as a downloaded file even if they both use the same codec and are derived from the same source.

It is irrelevant, legally, that one implementation of a streaming software may choose to download the streamed data to a temporary disc file, or that some content downloaders can structure the assembly of a partially downloaded file so that (some) content can be accessed before the download is fully completed. What matters is that a streamed file is intended to be consumed contemporaneously with the acquisition of the downloaded data however it is stored on the computer, and that caching for efficiency aside, each separate act of consumption involves a separate act of acquiring the content, whereas a downloaded file is intended to be downloaded once and consumed multiple times.

Also how is the betamax case not applicable. The user of a VCR isn't "licensed" to record whats on their tv

No, they are not licensed to record what's on TV. But the point of the Betamax case was that "time-shifted viewing" by a private viewer was deemed to be fair use because at the time broadcast TV content was transmitted on a fixed schedule and absent the private recording, was not otherwise consumable because many of these shows were not rerun or sold on cassette tape. Thus the court found that the Betamax had substantial non-infringing use (and indeed, that it's primary intended use was thus non-infringing).

However, digital content is provided on demand so there is no need for "time-shifted" viewing, and so the reasoning from Betamax no longer applies. Moreover, many content owners now make the content available for "connectivity-shifted" viewing (aka, away from internet connectivity) via a downloaded content license. Thus, downloading that content from a streaming source is generally no longer protected by fair use.

Consequently, using youtube-dl to download your favorite streamer to watch on a plane trip would probably be fair use because they probably don't make the content available for access-shifted viewing otherwise. But using it to download a music video would not, because the music and video owners make those available for download with a purchasable license. And the problem with youtube-dl is that they demonstrated that the primary intent of the tool was to download music videos, the evidence being that the README and parts of the code explicitly refer to downloading music videos subject to RIAA licensing. Under the Betamax ruling, this would be fine, because there are substantial legitimate uses...but the DMCA changed that and so it doesn't matter if there are substantial legitimate uses if the primary intended use was to violate copyright.

It beggars belief that people can be this stupid. Why the hell would one mention it here? Are they truly that stupid to believe that the RIAA wouldn't see it? Then they made matters even worste by putting it on Github instead of some obscure website in Eastern Europe?

Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!

The courts remedy (at least at the preliminary injunction phase) was not to shut down Napster but to force it to comply with search blacklists provided by the record companies.

youtube-dl obviously is not a service so had no ability to monitor ongoing use. IMO it would have a much stronger case for legitimate use.

IANAL

How could that be true? if the YouTube link in the test case was a video of farmer on his truck would that show it is intended for that use? No. YouTube dl is made to download any YouTube videos it has not been made to download specifically Taylor Swift music videos, it just has just been picked as a test case as any other YouTube videos could have been

A silly home video, preferably uploaded by the maintainers themselves would've just given RIAA's claim no teeth.

These days, just about anyone can copy anything that the DMCA covers despite any attempts to protect it. The answer is elsewhere, that is copyright laws have to be updated to be equitable to everyone. Unfortunately, it's dinosaurs like the RIAA who are standing in the way stopping it.

If the media provided by YouTube were DRM'ed and youtube-dl would be e.g. extracting the decryption key, this would make sense. Is that what youtube-dl is doing though?

  What if someone sold a car and included instructions on how to run over pedestrians?  Should the car no longer be sold, or should the instructions be removed?