YouTube Threatens Legal Action Against Video Downloader (torrentfreak.com) 321
Embracing over a billion users, YouTube has become the go-to source of many for music and movies. But the scale of YouTube has also given rise to piracy and copyright infringement. To fix this, the Google-owned video portal has started to contact third-party services that allow users to make a copy of a YouTube video and is urging them to shut down their functionality. TorrentFreak is reporting about a similar instance, in which YouTube's legal team contacted a popular service called TubeNinja. From the report: "It appears from your website and other marketing materials that TubeNinja is designed to allow users to download content from YouTube," the email from YouTube's legal team reads. According to YouTube the video downloader violates the terms of service (ToS) of both the site and the API. Among other things, YouTube's ToS prohibits the downloading of any video that doesn't have a download link listed on the site. Later, Google's video service adds that if the site owner continues to operate the service this "may result in legal consequences." Despite the threatening language, TubeNinja owner Nathan doesn't plan to take the functionality offline. He informed YouTube that his service doesn't use YouTube's API and says that it's the responsibility of his users to ensure that they don't violate the ToS of YouTube and TubeNinja. "Our own ToS clearly states that the user is responsible for the legitimacy of the content they use our service for," Nathan tells us.
TOS vs TOS (Score:2, Funny)
The Ultimate Showdown
Re:TOS vs TOS (Score:5, Funny)
It's a ToS up who wins
Everyone prefers their own ToS
They're all a bunch of ToS-ers
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And the only winner will be:
"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater."
--
BMO
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Whoever wins, we lose!
Waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
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Some people will.... However, fewer people will figure it out easily (People tend to give up if they can't find the tool easily), and they can go after those too.
Google's also in a good position to make it hard to find information on youtube-dl/etc.... They're a major search engine, so they can just self-censor their search results.
"Other products are available"--BBC (Score:2)
Google's also in a good position to make it hard to find information on youtube-dl/etc....
They're a major search engine, so they can just self-censor their search results.
Self-censorship? Let me Bing that for you [letmebingthatforyou.com]. Better yet, let me DuckDuckGo that for you [lmddgtfy.net].
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I'm sorry, I don't see how they can easily go after youtube-dl. It's not a service, it's a downloadable program. youtube-dl (the organization who produces the program) doesn't access the Youtube website; only the people who download their program do. And finally, it'd be easy for youtube-dl to simply move its website to another country where Youtube can't touch it.
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Sure, some will. Some people, however, can only copy paste a URL into a web-based downloader and cannot run a command line script. It would inevitably decrease the amount of illegal downloads.
That said, YouTube doesn't care if people download illegally, they just have to put up the front of caring. YouTube is the #1 pirate site on the web, but they hope you ignore that fact. Pretty much every video on there has copyrighted video and/or audio in them.
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That said, YouTube doesn't care if people download illegally, they just have to put up the front of caring. YouTube is the #1 pirate site on the web, but they hope you ignore that fact. Pretty much every video on there has copyrighted video and/or audio in them.
All they have to do is make sure it dls with the ad attached. because honestly, that's why they don't want people downloading the videos, because then they can't advertise to them.
"Visit Advertiser's Site" link (Score:3)
Even if the advertisement is prepended to the downloaded stream, how can a video download tool preserve the unskippability and "Visit Advertiser's Site" link?
Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF is an "illegal download?" There is no such thing!
If Google makes a video available on Youtube, they've made it available. Period. Splitting semantic hairs over "streaming" or "downloading" is trying to create a difference that doesn't actually exist! All streams are downloads, and all downloads are streams. The Internet cannot work any other way. If you don't want your shit downloaded, don't post it on the Internet to begin with.
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Thank you.
This battle should remain one on the technological level, where it is up to the content producers and distributers to make it physically difficult to bypass.
Everything else is just browser variants. I am pissed Chrome no longer permits right click save picture/open in new tab, presumably because the site has some copyright bit set. It used to.
Hint to other browsers that wanna grow.
Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
My company is one of those content producers, we have over 50 videos on YouTube that we make money with.
I'm sure someone has downloaded them.
Do I care? Not really, it is beyond my control. I try and worry about stuff that is in my control and if someone wants to use a tool like this to download videos, or use an ad-blocker, oh well.
Our business model has to survive that, because we can't stop it, and bitching about it is a waste of our time.
We post a video each week, our business will survive if we offer a good product that people want to come back for again and again and want to support us, not because we get lots of lawyers.
How long the user stores the video (Score:2)
WTF is an "illegal download?" There is no such thing!
A download that the user intentionally stores longer than the user agreed to store it. In the case of a streaming site like YouTube, one might assume this is for longer than the video's duration.
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That is still a semantic argument. How long is too long?....
"You've held your stream too long, we're sending ED209 for corporate enforcement of our policies. Please stop what you're watching. You have 30 seconds to comply"
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I love how copyright fanbois love to use that word "agree".. I, for one, have NEVER *once* "agreed" to ANY TOS/EULA.. The corps seem to think 50 pages of gobbledeegook that only a lawyer could possibly understand that you click a box saying you "agree" to whatEVER is in that 50 pages is a contract.. Ummm.. No, its NOT.. When I bought my house, I must have signed my name a hundred times on what was indisputably a CONTRACT.. Never signed my name to any TOS or EULA. and never will.... Go fuck yourself, corpora
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WTF is an "illegal download?" There is no such thing!
Illegal is whatever the law says it is - law and common sense have never overlapped much; law and technical details even less so.
All streams are downloads, and all downloads are streams. The Internet cannot work any other way
I'm pretty sure YouTube doesn't send you an unencrypted stream (anyone know for sure?). I've always assumed you run their EULA-bound, DMCA-protected software in order to decrypt that stream and watch it. Easy enough to save that, of course, but you have to bypass the DRM.
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Just because your friends and family are all retarded doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Said the guy who has never done tech support. Sorry, the ratio of people that could complete the task based on your instructions vs those who couldn't is extremely slanted.
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Just because your friends and family are all retarded doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Said the guy who has never done tech support. Sorry, the ratio of people among those who call tech support because they have difficulty completing technical tasks that could complete the task based on your instructions vs those who couldn't is extremely slanted.
Fixed that for you.
Yes, you're right that many people struggle with technology. On the other hand, tech support calls are obviously not an unbiased representation of the set of users as a whole, because those who don't struggle generally don't call.
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Knowing that one way to obtain the software to download Youtube videos is to enter that command, that's another story entirely -- that's the $9,999 piece.
On a tangent (Score:3)
Re:On a tangent (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it would be a derivative work. It doesn't matter if you change the format.
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So a Chrysler car is derivative work from lets say a Ford car (Ford existed earlier, or the first car company)? Both are cars
With that, you're just showing your ignorance and the fact that you didn't do basic research on the question.
Striking similarity (Score:3)
Who can prove that my string is not just my creation
The "striking similarity" doctrine in copyright case law [wikipedia.org] creates a presumption of copying, shifting the burden of proof of provenance to the alleged infringer.
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It would be copyrighted.
(Warning - long and boring rant ahead)
Once upon a time I tried to create a distribution system which (among more important goals) would make it possible to have parts or the whole of a copyrighted file on a computer with plausible deniability (and making it hard to prove that it's there). The distributed caching system was intended to ensure that parts of popular files were cached more than others so that one node that cached many blocks could with a high probability have all parts o
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hey, on this note, if you do decide that you can indeed copyright a string, then can I copywrite pi in base64?
Of course you can copyright a string. That's what a book is - a string.
No you can't copyright pi because it's NOT AN ORIGINAL WORK.
JDownloader (Score:2)
I have problems with Video Download Helper. It works but sometimes it is awkward. Ever since I discover that you could use JDownloader I have used that.
Much simpler more control.
I have never even heard about NinjaTube.
Re:JDownloader (Score:5, Informative)
I am using Youtube Downloader HD. Hilarious that the first thing they're going after isn't the program literally named Youtube Downloader. Not only do I like to save YT videos, but it's also the only way to watch long ones without interruption, especially recently. YT has been hanging and even crashing my browser a lot lately. The only way to get through a long video is to download it first. I don't see ads anyway, because I am blocking them.
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There nothing YouTube can do about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, the video is already on your computer. If they shut down internet service, it'll move client-side. Hell, if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
It's futile. They know it and we know it. But I guess the shareholders or the lawyer are just not happy if Google doesn't do anything about it. So they do this.
Re:There nothing YouTube can do about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
As a kid, I used to record music off FM radio, through the headphone jack to either cassette or reel-to-reel (gawd I'm old). Then the 80s came along and "tapes are killing music."
Which it didn't.
Videotape was supposed to kill movies.
It didn't.
The Internet was going to kill brick-and-mortar stores.
It didn't.
Corporations are composed of lying liars with lawyers who lie for them.
--
BMO
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The Internet was going to kill brick-and-mortar stores.
It didn't.
This one is quite incorrect. There are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that died due to the Internet.
Before you say "well there are stores that didn't", then I guess I can say "Cancer doesn't kill people since there are a non-zero amount of people that don't die from it"
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This one is quite incorrect. There are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that died due to the Internet.
And good riddance, most of the time. On rare occasions, I am actually stupid enough to think that it's a reasonable idea to try looking in a brick-and-mortar store for something that would be useful for me today, not in two days from Amazon. Almost always, the brick-and-mortar store doesn't have the thing in stock, but "can order it for me." Why the fuck would I go to the trouble of driving out to the fucking strip mall where the box store is, if I wanted it "ordered"?
Most modern brick-and-mortar stores sho
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Brick and mortar stores can not even seem to figure out what's in any given store at any given time. Sure you have loss from theft but pretty sure 4 bikes walked out the door etc. So drive down to find out they lied to you, great customer services guys.
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And good riddance, most of the time. On rare occasions, I am actually stupid enough to think that it's a reasonable idea to try looking in a brick-and-mortar store for something that would be useful for me today, not in two days from Amazon. Almost always, the brick-and-mortar store doesn't have the thing in stock, but "can order it for me." Why the fuck would I go to the trouble of driving out to the fucking strip mall where the box store is, if I wanted it "ordered"?
Well, you know, they do have this thing called the "internet," where many chain stores make their inventory available online now. You can easily search online and find out what is in-stock, and then you only end up going to a store you actually know has what you want. They'll even often tell you what aisle to find the item in. That's particularly useful when looking for something obscure at a giant store like Lowe's or Home Depot -- it's actually faster to search online before leaving so I know where to
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All it means is that stores have to change their business model from selling stuff to people who walk through the door into basically showrooms, where the customer doesn't walk in the door, but deals with the stores to put products on the shelves.
As in, the store doesn't stock product anymore. Instead, they offer a showroom - manufacturers approach them, pay the store some amount of money to display the product on the shelf. If desired, said manufacturer can pay a bit more to put stock on the shelf so custo
Mail order lacks its own showroom (Score:2)
Amazon's disadvantage for physical goods is that it lacks its own showroom [pineight.com]. When buying apparel online, you don't get to feel the fabric or try on the fit. When buying a laptop online, you don't get to try the keyboard or screen, and you can't feel its size and weight without constructing your own similarly sized and weighing model out of (say) cardboard. Or what am I missing?
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There's plenty of brick-and-mortar stores that still work well, for various reasons. I'll name a few:
1) grocery stores (which you mentioned): groceries tend to be high-volume, and low dollar-density, that is, they take up a bunch of space but aren't very valuable. Think of a loaf of bread: it costs a dollar or two, but it's pretty sizeable, and would cost more to ship by UPS than the bread itself is worth. Also, lots and lots of people within a 10-mile radius want to buy it, and on a very regular basis t
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Perhaps the internet made more brick&mortar stores I don't remember there being a dozen places to buy internet connected devices in my little town during the 1970s
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No it isn't as the Internet also _saved_ a lot of stores* that otherwise be closed! That isn't the fear mongering those that promoted that view intended.
Technology changes - and the world used in connection with similar technologies changes with it. That's the natural order of things.
(* one example (of several) I personally know about was a small bookstore in a small city specializing in mainly old literature about hunting, fishing and general outdoor things. The population was to small to generate the nece
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I'm curious. What "illegitimate activities" were supposed to kill brick & mortar stores? Because selling things via the internet isn't, in fact, an "illegitimate activity", nor is competing with a brick & mortar store.
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Supposed illegitimate activities on the internet didn't close brick and mortar stores. Which is the theme of this entire post. Which you knew. Which you chose to pretend not to understand to make an irrelevant point.
What supposed illegitimate activities would close brick and mortar stores exactly? I doubt the OP meant it that way, and the parent has the right interpretation. You are the wrong one here.
Napster killed record stores (Score:2)
Supposed illegitimate activities on the internet didn't close brick and mortar stores.
Except when Napster killed record stores. A pawn shop employee pinpointed the time when used CD prices plummeted as the fourth quarter of 1999, which happens to be when Napster took off.
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As a kid, I used to record music off FM radio, through the headphone jack to either cassette or reel-to-reel (gawd I'm old). Then the 80s came along and "tapes are killing music."
If you lived through that period and were paying attention you'd also remember the Private copying Levy [wikipedia.org] applied to various types of media.
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I do remember it.
It's what killed DAT.
The Wikipedia claim is that the cost of the recorders (Sony DAT required a spinning head) was the problem, but people bought more expensive tape decks that had Dolby and metal capability to deal with tape hiss /all the time/, and since DAT effectively did away with tape hiss and low-bias, these would have sold just fine.
But the RIAA had shit-fits about "perfect third-generation recordings" that only /partially/ ended when Sony bought CBS.
They still don't like CD-Rs. "No
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Re:There nothing YouTube can do about this... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, the video is already on your computer. If they shut down internet service, it'll move client-side. Hell, if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
It's futile. They know it and we know it.
Absolutely. Moreover, I think there should be some more legal examination about the legality of downloading streaming content. I've never quite understood why making a copy of streaming content is not directly analogous to making a copy of "streaming" cable or over-the-air TV, a practice that was explicitly ruled legal 30 years ago in the so-called Betamax decision [wikipedia.org].
File-sharing has always been a bit more nebulous, because it often involves someone making available copies of pre-made copyrighted files to simply make more copies. Here, YouTube is actually NOT making those files directly available to end users -- instead, a service is allowing you to essentially preserving a "recording" of what would otherwise be an ephemeral stream.
The Supreme Court has explicitly legalized "time-shifting" for VCRs. Why is it necessarily illegal when we essentially do the same thing for streaming video over the internet? (The only answer I can come up with is just because recording is now "easier" than with VCRs... but that doesn't seem like a good legal argument about what should constitute "fair use".)
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I've never quite understood why making a copy of streaming content is not directly analogous to making a copy of "streaming" cable or over-the-air TV
Please see replies to neghvar1, who wondered the same thing [slashdot.org].
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I mean, the video is already on your computer. If they shut down internet service, it'll move client-side. Hell, if I wanted I could output the video/audio of my screen and record them.
It's futile. They know it and we know it. But I guess the shareholders or the lawyer are just not happy if Google doesn't do anything about it. So they do this.
IANAL but I suggest that they are doing this to protect themselves from litigation. There's nothing to stop _you_ saving the stream of bits coming direct from youtube to _your_ computer onto _your_ hard drive. But a third party publicly offering a service whereby they retrieve the bits on your behalf, parcel them up, and then make them available to you is a different legal situation altogether.
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Sony Betamax principle (Score:4, Interesting)
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Score:5, Informative)
Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case) established that time-shifting can be fair use and that producing a tool with a substantial non-infringing use does not incur secondary liability. The difference here is that unlike viewers of a TV broadcast, viewers of YouTube are subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that gives teeth to website TOS. So a tool can incur secondary liability for TOS violation even if it does not incur secondary liability for copyright infringement.
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Stevens decision in the Betamax case applies only to time-shifting of advertiser-supported content carried by television stations. He specifically excluded pay-TV services like the then-new HBO. Stevens found that the fair-use defense applied because time-shifting via VCRs expanded the audience for the advertising. Downloading content from YouTube with the advertising included intact might qualify under the Betamax decision, but that would require a new court proceeding.
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"We know that many of our viewers subscribe to our service so that they can tape uncut movies," said Peter Chernin, executive vice president of programming for Showtime.
To accommodate those viewers... Showtime will begin in August a weekly, late-night double feature "of the best films we're offering that week. We'll run them probably at 2 a.m. to allow subscribers to set their VCRs and tape the movies while they sleep," Chernin said.
Later in the article, an executive from HBO is also quoted as agreeing that "We know that a lot of movies are taped from HBO and we are not immune to the desires of our consumers." He therefore explicitly rejected an early form of DRM which could attempt to decrease home taping quality.
So, not only did Stevens NOT reject pay-TV taping or taping without advertisements, the p
If you look there is tons of stuff. (Score:3)
It's easier to download and watch, then it is to stream.
Funny if you go beyond the junk they have on the surface, you can find tons of good good stuff.
I picked up C++14 ( having known known C++98 ) from CppCon and from BoostCon.
you an pick up information about languages and tools: Go,Groovy, Haskell, Clojure, Scala, emacs/vi/Eclipse/IntelliJ configurations and plugins, bigger libraries.
Plus old shows nobody cares about. THe short lived series Probe ( the one that Asimov worked on ), The Early Kurt Russel Secret of Boyne Castle etc.
Oh one that realy caught my eye Scott Adams on Bill Maher talking about Trump.
The real reason why Google is concerned about this (Score:3)
It's actually quite simple, Google is concerned about lost AD revenue.
If users can download videos and play them locally then they lose out on the AD revenue from the ADs that are injected into the video sequence. If Google can figure out a way to make this more difficult or time consuming to do, then it's less likely that everyday users will download content vs streaming it.
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Oh, that's okay then. I never see any ads anyway so I can download as much as I want!
LOL (Score:2)
I ACCIDENTALLY download youtube videos every now and then because i forgot to close jdownloader. Can't say google is doing much to prevent ripping their vids
Don't Download? (Score:4, Insightful)
"YouTube's ToS prohibits the downloading of any video that doesn't have a download link listed on the site."
Then your own ToS stops you from operating legally, because in order to stream or watch, ONE MUST DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING DATA.
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in order to stream or watch, ONE MUST DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING DATA.
Watching doesn't require storing the data longer than one web browser session, which is what these tools do.
YouTube download link (Score:2)
Is it worth all the fuss? (Score:2)
Seems to be that most movies make almost all of revenue within the first year. By that time, there may be a tiny trickle of income from DVD rentals, or online streaming services, but that is about it.
By the time a movie, or a song, or a book, is over eight years old; I doubt it's bringing in anything.
Actually, I think about the revenue, from a movie, may come from the opening weekend.
So why the huge hissy fit about old movies on youtube?
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Ad revenue. If you watch a movie on youtube, they can get paid to show you ads. If you copy the movie to your computer, they can't.
Pointless arm waving by YouTube legal, really ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can understand why YouTube feels it needs to take these legal actions ... but in the end, it's just symbolic gesturing.
In the "real world", the very fact you've allowed a video clip to be transmitted from YouTube's server to a client on the other end in a viewable format means the receiver has the technical ability to save a copy of it.
The "low hanging fruit" for their legal team to go after are the web based services offering to make this process easy, since they're effectively advertising to the whole world that they're enabling an illegal activity. Sitting on branches just a little further up are the folks writing plug-ins or extensions for browsers advertising the same functionality. (In those cases, I think we'll wind up with a legal battle, as soon as one of those developers wants to fight rather than give in. If nothing else, I think that's because there's a subtle difference between distributing code that *allows* someone to download/save the video content, and hosting a server that's actually DOING it for users.)
Personally, I think that YouTube will have to move to some sort of encrypted video transmission method if they want to get serious about preventing people from saving videos to redistribute. (EG. You have to install a YouTube app in order to look at videos on the site.) Even with THAT, it only gives the level of copy protection used by services such as AT&T U-Verse with its Cisco set-top boxes. (You won't be able to dump the data saved in its DVR's hard drive to any other device and watch it. But it can't stop something like a VCR or DVD recorder from copying the video and audio coming out of the box, headed for your television.)
Anyone can write software that acts as a "middle man" (similar to the VCR concept) that grabs each frame of video from the video card as it's displaying it on your screen and saved it to a new video file, while doing the same with the audio headed to the sound card output.
What will the judge say when they try to read the (Score:2)
What will the judge say when they try to read the 50 page TOS line by line in court to a jury?
Look through your favorites... (Score:2)
There's a good chance that many of your favorite YouTube videos have been deleted over the years. Downloading is the only sure way to save YouTube videos you like.
The Internet in general is a temporary place. We need to be able to save content we like.
tit for tat (Score:2)
time shifting (Score:2)
Does it persist? (Score:3)
Unlike tools such as youtube-dl, web browsers do not write a copy of all segments of an MPEG-DASH stream to a file intended to persist longer than an hour.
Re:Does it persist? (Score:4, Insightful)
A distinction without a difference. "Downloading" a video puts a file in /Downloads. "Streaming" a video puts a file in /Temp. Maybe /Temp isn't "intended" for long-term storage, but the things put there are files on the drive just the same.
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Popular web browsers respect HTTP cache control directives. These downloading tools do not.
Re:Does it persist? (Score:4, Insightful)
HTTP cache control directives -- just like everything else sent by a web server of any kind whatsoever -- are nothing more than suggestions.
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A distinction without a difference. "Downloading" a video puts a file in /Downloads. "Streaming" a video puts a file in /Temp. Maybe /Temp isn't "intended" for long-term storage, but the things put there are files on the drive just the same.
Well fortunately the law can decide it doesn't only matter what you do but why you do it, like murder and self-defense. Or less seriously, watching a movie by yourself or with your friends and family as opposed to public display. Copies that are temporary or transitory are treated differently from those that are permanent, otherwise all those copies in memory and network buffers, frame buffers, audio buffers and whatnot would all have trouble with copyright. And yes, that includes actual storage in caches a
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Intended or not, Youtube videos will persist in a browser session for days or even weeks (assuming no reboot or browser restart). I listen to certain soundtracks that way, keep them loaded and play when I feel like it.
I'd bet they are written to disk in the form of swap or maybe even browser cache.
The six-week Chrome/Firefox update cycle (Score:2)
assuming no reboot or browser restart
Then let me slightly weaken my previous statement: Unlike tools such as youtube-dl, web browsers do not write a copy of all segments of an MPEG-DASH stream to a file intended to persist longer than the time between security updates to your web browser.
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In this case, it's clear and well-understood that "Download" is used as a lay term to mean "save locally as a file". People don't consider downloading to memory as downloading in a general sense.
The same reasoning is also what makes the ridiculous ass dance TubeNinja is pulling a complete failure in court--and possible grounds for liability. If TubeNinja seriously tries to argue that their material, despite being clearly designed to market the downloading of YouTube content, is not liable because, whil
Re:Fair Use? (Score:4, Interesting)
And how do Google think people can create their own copy/edit montages of other peoples' videos.
That's another can of worms. Too many people are creating videos using other people's copyrighted work, get called on it, and scream "fair use" for what they're doing. Several lawsuits are underway regarding that issue. It's better to create your own unique content that doesn't use other people's copyrighted content.
Ensuring uniqueness (Score:2)
It's better to create your own unique content that doesn't use other people's copyrighted content.
How can I ensure success in doing this? For example, if I write a song, record it, and put a music video on YouTube, how do I make sure it isn't substantially similar [wikipedia.org] to any other published musical work in order to avoid losing a million dollar lawsuit like George Harrison (Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs over "My Sweet Lord") and Pharrell Williams (Gaye v. Thicke over "Blurred Lines")?
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How can I ensure success in doing this?
No one will care about your song or video unless you're making some serious money on YouTube. Attorneys go where the money is. If you don't have it, they're not suing you. Until then, you're more at risk for a DMCA takedown notice and being banned from YouTube.
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Attorneys go where the money is. If you don't have it, they're not suing you.
Tell that to Joel Tenenbaum [wikipedia.org] and Jammie Thomas-Rasset [wikipedia.org]. A copyright owner through its attorney can still seek statutory damages.
Until then, you're more at risk for a DMCA takedown notice and being banned from YouTube.
The question would have the same answer even with a different penalty for failure: How should a singer-songwriter confirm that his song is original before posting it to YouTube, SoundCloud, or another site intended for publishing original video or music in order to avoid losing his account on said site?
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How should a singer-songwriter confirm that his song is original before posting it to YouTube, SoundCloud, or another site intended for publishing original video or music in order to avoid losing his account on said site?
If you want legal advice, go see an attorney.
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The fact that every author needs to first become able to afford a consultation with an attorney before publishing anything is part of the problem.
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The fact that every author needs to first become able to afford a consultation with an attorney before publishing anything is part of the problem.
That's the cost of business.
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It's also a sure indication that copyright law is broken.
If your business model is to create videos from slapping together other people's copyrighted work and claiming it as your own copyrighted work, you're looking for trouble. This is where people are getting into trouble.
Copyrights is supposed to encourage the creation of new works, not inhibit it.
Nothing prevents you from creating your own original copyrighted works.
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Why's that? Fair use is on solid legal ground. You can't sue someone merely for taking short segments of a video and adding commentary.
The problem is most YouTube content creators don't understand the concept of fair use. They want a broad definition to cover anything and everything when "solid legal ground" applies only to a narrow definition.
You haven't cited these lawsuits you mentioned, but if their whole basis is just taking short segments and adding commentary or parody, the plaintiffs will lose, pure and simple.
Check out this YouTube video by Eli of Failed Normal. He discusses the consequences of fair use, including the lawsuits playing out. Starting six minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSSzDreoUR8 [youtube.com]
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How do I watch a video without downloading it?
It's not that you download the portion of the video that you're watching as much as whether your user agent stores a copy of all chunks of the video. What they "outlaw" is storing the downloaded data more than ephemerally.
Re:Color me Confused (Score:5, Informative)
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I wonder how the lawsuits against audio cassettes ever turned out?
In some countries, they turned out with cassette manufacturers paying a tax to the major record labels.
What if you view a video of a book and remember enough of the text to write your own copy by hand?
Infringing.
What if you have a eidetic memory and viewing once is enough to replay the videos in your mind while you toil in the salt mines of the bleak future?
Playback in your mind is currently not recognized as "fixed in a tangible medium".
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So all browser caching is going to be illegal? Tell that to Microsoft, Apple, Firefox and Opera.
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There are laws governing caching. For example, 17 USC 512(b)(2)(B) [cornell.edu] protects a cache mechanism only if it respects a reasonable expiry policy indicated by the site operator.
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It's not so much that Google is trying to be evil, as that they are trying to get you to do everything on the Internet.
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I think the defense of "it's not our problem if users of our product, designed specifically to do X, irresponsibly use it to do X" doesn't have a great track record of success.
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