[HN Gopher] Google has killed Discord's best music bot
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Google has killed Discord's best music bot
Author : ajdude
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-08-26 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Thought experiment: let's say I'm in a Zoom call (or Jitsi or
| whatever) with some strangers, and in turn each of us plays some
| music in the call (could be from Spotify, could be from the local
| music library, whatever can be piped into an audio sink), assume
| the room is open for anyone to join, would this (which is
| basically plug.dj over webrtc) be illegal? If so why?
| foepys wrote:
| In some jurisdictions is even illegal to sing a song to
| yourself in public.
|
| Copyright around music and film is insane and absolutely
| detached from reality. Having a copyright for 70 years after
| the last involved person's death? Because shoveling money into
| a grave is useful? Why isn't it like patents, 25 years and
| done?
| nightcracker wrote:
| Mickey Mouse.
| prepend wrote:
| I liked groovy bot and it replaced what people would do manually
| by just streaming their machine watching YouTube.
|
| It seems stupid that Google didn't work something out as the main
| problem was that it didn't play ads. So just play ads.
|
| I dislike the trend of shutting down APIs as groovy should be
| able to use any user's license to YouTube to play music into a
| channel (or Spotify or Apple Music or whatever).
|
| This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to my
| friends and should cost me any extra money.
|
| I've never used groovy in a channel with more than 5 people
| anyway.
| camtarn wrote:
| > This is the equivalent of playing a record over the phones to
| my friends
|
| Yeah, that's against copyright law too. It's just that if you
| were doing that yourself, it would be on too small a scale for
| the record industry to fight against.
| mlazos wrote:
| By this logic I can't invite my friends over to listen to it
| either though right? That seems like it should be legal. I
| thought there was some legal threshold where it is no longer
| personal use but I could be wrong
| meepmorp wrote:
| You aren't sitting at home, privately listening to music
| with friends, though. You're streaming the music to a
| people in other places so they can listen to it.
|
| Those don't sound the same to me.
| [deleted]
| t-writescode wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer.
|
| I believe the difference is the 'broadcasting' part. Same
| with streaming movies over a Zoom call.
| prepend wrote:
| That's not against the law. What are you talking about?
|
| I can't deliver public performances. But I can certainly play
| songs for private settings. Usually explicitly, and if not,
| under fair use.
| camtarn wrote:
| I was curious, so I looked up the actual law in the US.
|
| It doesn't fall under fair use, as that only covers the use
| of small portions of a work for a very limited set of uses.
|
| But you might be right. It really depends on whether
| playing something over the phone is considered a
| retransmission of a broadcast, whether it's considered the
| creation of a broadcast, or whether it's considered a
| single performance.
|
| Section 110 subsection 4:
|
| _(4)performance of a nondramatic literary or musical work
| otherwise than in a transmission to the public, without any
| purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage and
| without payment of any fee or other compensation for the
| performance to any of its performers, promoters, or
| organizers, if--
|
| (A)there is no direct or indirect admission charge; or..._
|
| And under section 101, 'Definitions':
|
| _To perform or display a work "publicly" means--
|
| (1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public
| or at any place where a substantial number of persons
| outside of a normal circle of a family and its social
| acquaintances is gathered; or
|
| (2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or
| display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or
| to the public, by means of any device or process, whether
| the members of the public capable of receiving the
| performance or display receive it in the same place or in
| separate places and at the same time or at different
| times._
|
| So - you're all good if you're just playing music for your
| friends at home.
|
| But I can't find anything at all regarding taking a work
| and turning it into a limited transmission embodying that
| work, other than the code generally saying that broadcasts
| to the public must be licensed.
|
| Anyway, while this was a fascinating exercise, I haven't
| actually come up with a solid answer. I take back my
| initial statement of "yeah that's against the law" and
| replace it with "...that might be against the law?" :)
| me_me_me wrote:
| Don't forget that google wants you to watch the videos and ads.
| Most preferably logged into your account.
|
| They want to learn what you watch and listen to.
|
| Bot usage anonymises your preferences and skips ads.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So then Googs should embrace the bots and attach the bot to a
| user so that anything the bot does is associated with the
| user. win-win
| prepend wrote:
| Google could provide an api that shows ads or plays ads. They
| could also even register the users to know who was listening.
|
| They don't want APIs and only want listeners through their
| apps. Kind of lame they aren't building technical solutions
| for actual user problems (like I'd like to listen to YouTube
| in my channel), they would be able to charge advertisers more
| if there are 5 people listening to an ad vs just one.
| enlyth wrote:
| It comes as no surprise to me, they were monetizing streaming
| music from YouTube to millions of people, once you get to that
| scale you can't pretend it's just a hobby project, it's a
| business that's freeloading on YT content.
|
| If you want a music bot that won't succumb to the same fate, you
| are better off self hosting something on a small VPS.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Discord should just use AI generated music trained on those
| unlimited 8 hour tracks. Then the music could be generated by the
| user's cpu with low bandwidth utilization.
| ddoolin wrote:
| There are hundreds if not thousands of these bots, some are
| already close to Groovy's size. My initial reaction is
| that...this won't have much of an effect?
|
| I wonder if a "bot factory" would be more effective, so then
| you're in the same boat as torrent trackers (we just make the
| gun, we don't use it).
| stnmtn wrote:
| This is a bummer, but when I heard the news last night it
| inspired me to add this functionality to the bot I've made for
| the server I'm in with friends.
|
| For anyone looking for a fun, quick project to do I recommend
| checkout out discord bots, discord.py is a great library that
| allows for some pretty cool stuff!
|
| The most fun I've had is hooking it up to OpenAI so that typing
| "!ai some prompt" here will get the bot to respond back with
| OpenAI's response
| mnvxdynbx wrote:
| Why is your reaction "let's build another bot Discord can shut
| down whenever they want" and encouraging others to have this
| same experience when you could run your own server, maybe
| Rocket Chat or Mattermost or Matrix, and write a bot against
| software that is at least open source?
|
| Discord is just Slack for gamers. Its popularity, and misuse of
| the term "server," for a cloud product, just kills me
| rektide wrote:
| theres a core idea gere of sharedistening beung nothing more than
| a feed of links that is not gonna die.
|
| the copyright & control world is rearing up very heavily here,
| with twitch, in so many places so many ways. unhosting the
| stream, simply providing metadata about what you are listening
| to, is a liberty these large powers that be will have a much
| harder time wrenching back from humanity.
| riffic wrote:
| > simply providing metadata about what you are listening to
|
| scrobbling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last.fm#Scrobbling
|
| edit: I had to go just a bit further into this rabbit hole.
| Apparently the term "scrobble" is still a registered trademark
| of Last.fm, a company owned by ViacomCBS.
|
| There's the open source ListenBrainz project, which uses
| "listen" instead:
|
| https://listenbrainz.org/faq/
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room,
| Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos,
| joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users
|
| It's not surprising that this was shut down like most "freeload
| until we get caught" hobby crafts.
|
| But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of
| any existing music services?
|
| For example, if you were able to give Groovy your Youtube Music
| API key at a subscription level premium enough for your Discord
| server, but that doesn't exist on Youtube.
|
| I can imagine there isn't much upside for the big players in
| these hard spaces to support "glue app" value like Groovy, but
| how can you build Groovy without building your own music service?
| janci wrote:
| What about just syncing the playlist and seek position and
| leaving the actual playback to every client with original
| youtube player (or even better music.youtube.com) ?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on
| top of any existing music services?
|
| Probably not because it would count as a performance and no
| consumer music services are licensed for that. You'd need
| something like whatever pubs and shops use.
| wldcordeiro wrote:
| So the question is how do we create a space for something
| like this? I don't think most people consider this kind of
| music as a "performance" it's just the RIAA dictating stuff.
| sli wrote:
| Realistically this will probably spawn a bunch of small
| scale (i.e. single server), bespoke music bots doing the
| exact same thing.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The way to enable this would require some legislation. It
| doesn't matter what most people consider, legally it is
| performance and RIAA has the right to dictate stuff
| regarding it unless/until the laws change.
|
| So the way to go is by public advocacy and lobbying, not by
| looking for e.g. some technical solution.
| belorn wrote:
| > But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on
| top of any existing music services?
|
| One could always build an AI that train on the youtube data to
| provide background music that take a suggestion from discord
| and then fill in music that is generated with portions that are
| recognizable from copyrighted music but then does not do
| provide the whole song. User can then rate the background music
| and provide input to the AI.
| blibble wrote:
| I'm always surprised the source code doesn't accidentally leak
| out when this sort of C&D occurs
| notamy wrote:
| The code used for scraping YouTube and streaming audio to
| Discord has always been open source:
|
| - https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer
|
| - https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink
| me_me_me wrote:
| > a big "fuck you" to google
|
| Ehh, I'll be the devil's advocate, google makes money via
| tracking and ads. Both were avoided by using the bot. big
| brother is just protecting their business model.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I'd take a bet that the email chain that began the process
| to send Groovy the C&D started with one of the companies
| who license music to YouTube.
| ddoolin wrote:
| Discord.js (the primary Node.js interface to the Discord API)
| is chock full of exactly this code -- as examples even. Using
| ytdl to stream into voice channels.
| zorr wrote:
| Any service that broadcasts licensed music to users is going to
| have issues like this someday. See how tricky it is to have
| legal background music on a Twitch stream.
|
| I think the best way forward for this kind of thing is to not
| broadcast the music but instead have each user use their own
| local player with their personal Spotify/YouTube account and
| sync the playlist through a shared service.
| panic wrote:
| The best way forward would be to abolish copyright. The only
| people making serious money in the current system are a
| fraction of a percent of the most popular artists and a
| constellation of middlemen who skim money off the top. And as
| sibling comments point out, the status quo is actually
| _harmful_ to artists who want to play their music online.
| sova wrote:
| Metallica played BlizzCon and the stream on Twitch had their
| audio replaced / covered up by elevator music [1]
|
| [1] https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/9529030/twitch-
| metal...
| Macha wrote:
| Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li
| (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music
| on Twitch during the pandemic. While in Li's case, it's
| possible that he didn't consult other rightsholders, Mike
| Shinoda mentioned that rights for Linkin Park music are
| held by a small number of people (possibly just the band?)
| and he offered Twitch that he could provide explicit
| consent from those people if they could exempt his channel
| from DMCA enforcement of LP music - twitch replied they
| simply didn't have a system in place that could handle
| that.
| albatross13 wrote:
| > Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li
| (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music
| on Twitch during the pandemic
|
| My god we live in a strange world.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| We've even see law enforcement blast copyrighted music to
| prevent video from ending up online. I think you're right,
| the ability to synchronize clients via playlist versus
| streaming is going to be the path forward.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on
| top of any existing music services?
|
| Discord surely have enough lawyers and, you'd hope with a $10bn
| valuation, enough financial clout to wave at the record
| companies to get the kind of license they'd need to give their
| users background tunes.
|
| But that would cost them time, money, and put them on the hook
| for shenanigans...
| echelon wrote:
| I was prepared to be angry at Google, but this probably stems
| from at-volume use of licensed material outside of the ToS. It
| probably impacts their deals with the music industry, etc. and
| requires intervention. (Not that this couldn't also be a salvo
| fired against an upstart competitor, but I doubt that's the
| primary reason.)
|
| Seems like Discord could estimate the value of Groovy to its
| users, and if non-negligible, could come up with their own
| license deal. Perhaps with Spotify or another company.
|
| The people to be angry at are the recording industry.
| Macha wrote:
| Discord does in fact have a Spotify integration, but it has
| limitations - you need to link your spotify account, if anyone
| is a free user everyone else gets silence while they have ads,
| and you can't use it at the same time as voice chat (the last
| one is largely why bots like the topic of this post are still
| popular).
|
| https://support.spotify.com/us/article/discord-and-spotify/
| rchaud wrote:
| Well, yeah...anything that depends on a third party API will last
| only as long as the API owner is OK with it.
|
| 10 years ago, back when Windows Phone was a thing, Google
| wouldn't make an official WP app for Youtube. So somebody created
| MetroTube, a native YT client. Incredible app, with a completely
| seamless experience.
|
| Then Google changed its API rules and it was dead in under a
| year.
| danuker wrote:
| There is NewPipe for Android if anyone is interested (just not
| on Play Store of course).
|
| https://newpipe.net/
| notamy wrote:
| > anything that depends on a third party API will last only as
| long as the API owner is OK with it.
|
| Discord bots generally use a library like lavaplayer[0] to
| scrape YouTube for music streaming purposes; no API access per
| se. It was always at best a grey area, especially since many
| large bots rotate through IPv6 blocks to avoid YouTube's IP
| bans.
|
| [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer
| rolph wrote:
| i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to snarf
| audio tracks.
|
| it seems YT-dl has had its fight on the hill with google and won
| out for the time being, its possible a discord bot using YT-dl
| might wake a sleeping bear
| izacus wrote:
| It would pretty much guarantee that YouTube would kill youtube-
| dl access.
|
| The music content industry is very aggressive with using legal
| pressure to make sure they get their dime.
| stnmtn wrote:
| This is exactly what I made last night so I hope not!
| rchaud wrote:
| That would be awful. Youtube-dl feels like Slsk to me. As long
| as its under-the-radar enough, the big dogs will let it live.
| That it's a CLI tool is enough to deter most users. If somebody
| creates a GUI app for it however, I imagine it would be snuffed
| out quickly.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| youtube-dl already has a gui app.
| rchaud wrote:
| I wasn't aware of that. I know about NewPipe which is
| almost certainly using the API. But not a desktop app.
| mod50ack wrote:
| NewPipe isn't using YouTube-DL. There's a GUI for desktop
| platforms, and DVD on Android. They know about it plenty.
| It's still not going anywhere until and unless they add
| DRM to YouTube. Which I could see happening in a few
| years.
| notamy wrote:
| > i wonder how it would work out if a bot used youtube-dl to
| snarf audio tracks.
|
| youtube-dl + ffmpeg was the "traditional" way of doing it, but
| it didn't scale very well. These days, the majority of bots use
| lavaplayer[0] based solutions like lavalink[1] to stream audio.
|
| There's also YouTube IP bans to be concerned about. Most bots
| get around it by rotating through blocks of IPv6 addresses.
|
| [0] https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer
|
| [1] https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink
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(page generated 2021-08-26 23:02 UTC)