[HN Gopher] Update: YouTube-dl reinstantiated thanks to EFF (2020)
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Update: YouTube-dl reinstantiated thanks to EFF (2020)
Author : ericdanielski
Score : 375 points
Date : 2021-01-20 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (assassinate-you.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (assassinate-you.net)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > There is one thing that has been and is always going to be
| counterproductive, especially in such situations: blind
| actionism. Many people flooded the Internet (read: forums,
| Reddit, bug trackers of projects), inciting panic and suggesting
| to move to some other "free" hosted platform. This is clearly not
| a solution. Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to
| comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you
| end up in court.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| [deleted]
| stretchcat wrote:
| AFAIK NewPipe does not use youtube-dl.
| creatonez wrote:
| > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with
| such a request.
|
| Gitlab so far has a history of not responding to bogus requests
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| In addition, there is huge benefit if you can persuade a large
| company to defend against this. GitHub/Microsoft is one of the
| few entities that actually has the financial and legal
| firepower to take on the recording and music industry.
|
| The smaller hosts may not have the financial and legal cushion
| to do anything but rollover if the music industry lawyers send
| them a notice.
| musicale wrote:
| > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with
| such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in
| court.
|
| Yet it wasn't actually DMCA takedown request, but a strange new
| kind of takedown request, where a a private company claimed
| (falsely) that youtube-dl violated section 1201 and demanded
| that github remove it.
|
| Unfortunately github seems to have codified these new "1201
| takedowns" which didn't seem to exist previously.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Even if DMCA 512 doesn't cover DMCA 1201 violating
| circumvention tools, that wouldn't make GitHub in the clear
| to host them. If anything, it would actually increase their
| liability: the whole point of DMCA 512 is to provide a
| process by which an ISP can disclaim liability for
| contributory copyright infringement.
|
| If they refuse the request on the grounds of "you can't DMCA
| a circumvention tool", then they're still liable regardless
| of if a DMCA 512 takedown can or can't apply to a 1201
| violation, since there's still an underlying tort of
| distributing a 1201 circumvention tool. If they accept the
| request, and get sued anyway, they could at least argue that
| they have a safe harbor (or should have a safe harbor).
| jsight wrote:
| Advocating for even more centralization isn't necessarily more
| productive. I'd love for someone to manage a mirror of all
| github repos in a place that is less likely to face these kinds
| of legal jeopardies.
|
| Why not try to direct people toward that, rather than direct
| them towards crossing their fingers and hoping the lone company
| wins the fight?
| withinboredom wrote:
| Because the only way to "win" a "battle" is to take a stand
| and "fight," running and hiding isn't winning.
|
| By building up sufficient case law, everyone can do things
| better and the next time this comes in front of law makers,
| there will be a better understanding of edge cases and better
| laws can be written.
|
| I'd really love to see a Developer's Guild or Union that
| could collectively take on these sorts of fights and argue
| for all software devs. The EFF can't stand alone.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with
| such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in
| court.
|
| Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter
| your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project
| itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material,
| doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do
| whatever they want until someone challenges them?
|
| While it's good that github eventually returned it, their
| willingness to comply with such a sham should make projects
| consider moving from them.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no
| matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the
| project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright
| material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass
| to do whatever they want until someone challenges them?
|
| The takedown request didn't claim the project was an
| unauthorised post of copyright material. It claimed it was a
| DRM circumvention measure, and US law is sufficiently vague
| on that matter it really can't be said definitively one way
| or another if that's correct unless someone is willing to
| litigate it.
|
| Nobody does, in this case. Certainly, describing the request
| as "completely fraudulent" is wrong. It may or may not have
| been valid, but the legislation is sufficiently vague in most
| of the US and Europe that it's entirely possible this could
| go to court and the RIAA would win.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure
|
| The takedown notices do not apply to DRM circumvention
| measures, only copyright material.
|
| I agree it's completely possible that a court case could
| rule against youtube-dl, but the only method for taking
| down a DRM circumvention tool is to get a court order.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| DRM circumvention measures don't have a takedown
| provision as such, but the hoster becomes jointly liable
| as soon as they are notified, which was the point of the
| letter.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| If this were true, it would make no sense for github to
| have reinstated youtube-dl. I assume such legal liability
| would need the start of a lawsuit to be valid.
| wonder_er wrote:
| Based on how easily the EFF resolved the problem by sending
| that notice to GitHub, it feels like this could be an easy
| problem to solve in the future..
|
| The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of
| lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a
| handful of really interesting blog posts.
|
| I would say this entire story is something to celebrate,
| because it shows how easily a single person could stop this.
|
| Mitchell L. Stoltz, Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF signed
| this letter, which probably took no more than handful of man
| hours to compile.
|
| Pretty great roi.
| stretchcat wrote:
| Not every project will have a sufficiently high profile for
| the EFF to notice. Relying on the EFF like this doesn't
| scale, isn't future proof, and doesn't address the long
| tail of the problem.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it'll most likely come down to a question of cost
| per incident - while a couple of lawyer hours is
| certainly relatively cheap if that same cost is required
| for every similar RIAA take down request then you'd need
| to look at how many hours it takes for RIAA to identify a
| good target and produce a take down notice. The
| effortlessness of this particular incident gives me hope
| that if the volume of take downs increased then maybe the
| EFF or someone else could essentially put together a form
| reply.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of
| lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from
| a handful of really interesting blog posts.
|
| It's not clear that the RIAA needed to spend any real
| lawyer man hours making the request, I don't think a
| designated agent needs to be a lawyer but even if they do
| they just send a form letter.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Any hosting platform in the US.
| aryehbeitz wrote:
| now sosumi is taken off snap store, probably due to pressure from
| apple
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| reinstantiated? or reinstated? this is not news (2020)
| nicky0 wrote:
| It's of interest.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Further bulk of discussion from November:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726
| musicale wrote:
| It should probably be "reinstated" as you suggest.
|
| And the title has been labeled (2020) as you suggest.
|
| HN isn't up-to-the-minute "news" necessarily; the best date
| I've seen recently on HN was (516). ;-)
| lmilcin wrote:
| Just a reminder, that for every reinstated project there is bunch
| of other that are going to die without public support.
|
| So no, the problem did not get resolved.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think the hope is that getting a few high profile counters
| out there will have a chilling effect on the RIAA being so
| cavalier with their notices - but I do agree that if the
| counters would, in perpetuity, take hours of lawyers' time then
| I'm uncertain if RIAA or the counter notices will scale better.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Except that it keeps happening constantly and platform-owning
| companies just quietly "correct" the error and everything is
| fine.
|
| It is not a fair process if it requires you to get public
| outrage.
|
| Whenever I see a story of a kid which family succeeded to
| collect money for an expensive treatment thanks to public
| outcry, I always think about all those other kids who were
| not so fortunate to get public interested in them.
|
| Should we be happy that we got one of a thousand saved or
| should we be thinking there is something fundamentally wrong?
| wonder_er wrote:
| It sounds like the _real_ "Lesson to be Learned" is:
|
| "When a large organization makes asinine threats with spurious
| reasoning, take a lawyer friend to lunch and help them draft a
| sternly-worded email about the offending organization."
|
| "Mail said letter to threatened party. No further action needed.
| Go back to solving meaningful problems."
| rurban wrote:
| > more importantly, all the metadata (for example, issues and
| pull requests) that was posted on the platform by users,
| developers and maintainers. Such information is invaluable to a
| project, and a takedown of the entire repository with all this
| data can hurt a project very badly.
|
| That's why you regularly need to update your issues with `git bug
| bridge pull`. Then you have all the issues locally, and are not
| bound to slick but the unfree website UI. You can edit and add
| issues locally and push it eventually. Only problem is:
| corabolation on issues with such a temp. took down GH project
| relies on everybody interacting with it via git bug. But all the
| bug refs are pushed upstream, wherever that is.
|
| About lost pull requests: Regular remote branches are the
| standard workflow, and an issue can carry the description, if the
| commits are not descriptive enough.
|
| Problems: issues are not numbered, only have hashes. They can be
| merged out of order, there's no central truth. So references in
| docs or commits need to use the hash, like bug #4e327af, not just
| GH #403.
| jhauris wrote:
| For those down voting, can someone comment on why this would
| not be a good idea? I hadn't heard of git-bug, are there other
| caveats one should be aware of, or is there a reason this isn't
| a problem worth solving?
| bergstromm466 wrote:
| Do they maybe want to be able to trust Github for the service
| they claim to provide? And do they maybe agree with the
| initial takedown?
| inetknght wrote:
| > _update your issues with `git bug bridge pull`_
| $ man git-bug No manual entry for git-bug $ git
| bug git: 'bug' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
| The most similar commands are log
| tag $ git --version git version 2.17.1
|
| What is `git bug`?
| michaelmure wrote:
| See https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
| antman wrote:
| Seems to be this one: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-
| bug#bridges
| [deleted]
| louloulou wrote:
| Information doesn't want to be free - Cory Doctorow - Tech Forum
| 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA
| Matheus28 wrote:
| Remember to donate to EFF if you support their work.
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