Music Labels Win Legal Battle Against Youtube-dl's Hosting Provider (torrentfreak.com) 45
A German court has ordered hosting provider Uberspace to take the website of the open-source youtube-dl software offline. The ruling is the result of a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by Sony, Warner and Universal last year. Uberspace will appeal the verdict and, meanwhile, youtube-dl's code remains available on GitHub. TorrentFreak reports: After hearing both sides, the district court of Hamburg ruled on the matter last week, handing a clear win to the music companies. The verdict wasn't immediately made available to the public but the music companies were quick to claim the win in a press release, stating that Uberspace must take youtube-dl's website offline. According to Frances Moore, CEO of the global music industry group IFPI, the court's decision once again confirms that stream-ripping software is illegal.
"YouTube-DL's services have enabled users to stream rip and download copyrighted music without paying. The Hamburg Regional Court's decision builds on a precedent already set in Germany and underscores once again that hosting stream-ripping software of this type is illegal. "We continue to work globally to address the problem of stream ripping, which is draining revenue from those who invest in and create music," Moore adds. Interestingly, the open source youtube-dl code remains available on the Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub. Whether the music companies have any plans to target the problem at this source is unknown.
Uberspace's legal representative German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) informs TorrentFreak that the decision doesn't come as a total surprise since the court already declared YouTube's "rolling cipher" to be an effective technical protection measure in an earlier case. That said, the defense believes that the order, which effectively amounts to a blanket ban on youtube-dl, failed to take the software's potentially legitimate uses into account. In addition, GFF believes that the court's decision severely restricts the hosting provider's freedom to operate. "If web hosts have to delete an entire website on demand of the rightsholders even in complex situations with no legal precedent, this poses a threat to the business model of web hosts and ultimately to the free flow of information on the Internet." Uberspace says it will appeal the judgement and GFF is confident the hosting provider will ultimately prevail.
"YouTube-DL's services have enabled users to stream rip and download copyrighted music without paying. The Hamburg Regional Court's decision builds on a precedent already set in Germany and underscores once again that hosting stream-ripping software of this type is illegal. "We continue to work globally to address the problem of stream ripping, which is draining revenue from those who invest in and create music," Moore adds. Interestingly, the open source youtube-dl code remains available on the Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub. Whether the music companies have any plans to target the problem at this source is unknown.
Uberspace's legal representative German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) informs TorrentFreak that the decision doesn't come as a total surprise since the court already declared YouTube's "rolling cipher" to be an effective technical protection measure in an earlier case. That said, the defense believes that the order, which effectively amounts to a blanket ban on youtube-dl, failed to take the software's potentially legitimate uses into account. In addition, GFF believes that the court's decision severely restricts the hosting provider's freedom to operate. "If web hosts have to delete an entire website on demand of the rightsholders even in complex situations with no legal precedent, this poses a threat to the business model of web hosts and ultimately to the free flow of information on the Internet." Uberspace says it will appeal the judgement and GFF is confident the hosting provider will ultimately prevail.
Hooray, surely it will prevent distribution of it. (Score:1)
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46%? Well, that's almost both of those still in operation, right?
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Re:Hooray, surely it will prevent distribution of (Score:4, Funny)
We got'em, boys!
Wait 'til they find out that Windows built-in voice recorder can record Youtube audio.
Business as usual in Hamburg (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem (Score:3)
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- save file your PC downloaded and save the music in a format on your machine for personal replay: you're in the clear.
- download copy of music somebody else is sharing to your computer: not legal in many countries
so from a "why bother" perspective: one is doing nothing different than taping your fav show from TV with VHS, record music from radio with casette tape. The other is actually making a copy. and "making that copy" is not seen as "legal" in many countries. (not all though, Hello
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Converting the file? The software does that for you. You ask for the specific streams you want, and optionally specify an output format, and it uses ffmpeg to recode it. I'd rather not introduce recompression artifacts, so I just keep the format — it's not like I can't play it with vlc or Kodi. You can even instruct the software to download only the audio and convert it to an mp3...
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Sort of a non-issue? (Score:3)
Last I checked, there still is an endless amount of freely available tools that allow ripping of YouTube content, including some like JDownloader2 which have been downloaded around 1 billion times.
Is this another re-run of Caddyshack where Bill Murray plays whack-a-mole [youtu.be] trying to shoot the gophers under the lawn?
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Well, it keeps lawyers in employ and money, it keeps the record company thinking they're still relevant and it keeps the courts busy that could otherwise make bad decisions in more important cases that have actually some relevant impact on the lives of people.
Don't say it doesn't serve a purpose!
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What does this accomplish?
A great many jobs in the world exist only to accomplish a payday for the person doing the work while being meaningless. Heck I feel like some of my days are meaningless. What does this accomplish? A bunch of lawyers got their paycheck. Job done.
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Not to mention as soon as its displayed on my screen and/or coming out of my speaker then I can keep a copy of it. Unless they want to try and claim OBS is illegal just for one example.
The "piracy" is all YouTube's doing (Score:4, Interesting)
The program makes a request, and YouTube sends the copyrighted data to it, without requesting any payment.
Did the copyright holder give YouTube permission to do that?
Re: The "piracy" is all YouTube's doing (Score:2)
I thought YouTube-dl was depreciated? (Score:5, Informative)
The active fork these days seems to be yt-dlp [github.com]. It also works with other video sites besides YouTube. I used to use it quite a bit to keep local copies of shows from Paramount+, before they recently decided to DRM just about everything.
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Yeah. youtube-dl was broken the last time I used my copy. The patch needed was incorporated into yt-dpl but not back ported.
The trouble is: youtube-dl is based on python 2.x.x whereas yt-dlp is a python 3 app. Installing python 3 breaks too many things on my system. So, no.
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https://github.com/ytdl-org/yo... [github.com]
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I just ran the following command and it downloaded a file just fine.
yt-dl -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
p.s.
be sure to grab all your favorite meme videos... who knows if they will survive the dmca... :/
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Yes, yt-dl works. But I can't afford to break dozens of other applications by installing python v3.
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Yeah. youtube-dl was broken the last time I used my copy. The patch needed was incorporated into yt-dpl but not back ported.
Which, yes, it still works.
The trouble is: youtube-dl is based on python 2.x.x whereas yt-dlp is a python 3 app. Installing python 3 breaks too many things on my system. So, no.
But youtube-dl does both python 2 or 3 as per their readme on their git. Which, I can confirm. This laptop here uses python v2 while my main laptop uses pythong v3, both run youtube-dl just fine.
youtube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, and it is not platform specific.
So... you saying youtube-dl is based on python v2 and you don't want to install python v3, but both youtube-dl and youtube-dlp can run on python v2. And you confirm that youtube-dl is working despite you earlier saying it's broken which is why you use youtube-d
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youtube-dl is based on python 2.x.x whereas yt-dlp is a python 3 app. Installing python 3 breaks too many things on my system. So, no.
What kind of busted-ass system are you using? Installing python 3 should in no way affect python 2.
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You don't have to install python3 globally. Install it in a standalone directory and use pyenv [github.com] to switch versions.
yt-dlp plus firefox addon open-with and IPFS (Score:2)
yt-dlp plus firefox addon open-with works great for me!
plus these tools are up on IPFS and torrent sites, so good luck banning these specific tools, let alone all of them.
Historians and other researchers use these tools to archive and also to get videos that may be taken down later.
These tools have good fair uses and help prevent the memory hole from becoming real.
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Hush! Why do you think we told the record industry about this one and not the other one?
You're obviously no parent. You have to keep the kids entertained with your old phone so they don't break your new one.
DeCss T-shirt (Score:2)
So, when could we see a YouTube-DL tshirt? ;-)
I don't understand the difference (Score:2)
What's the difference between:
1) Listening to a song 100 times on YouTube (without ads... I have a browser add-on that blocks 'em), or
2) Downloading it once and listening to it 100 times?
How is (1) any better for the record company or artist than (2)? If (2) is prevented, all they will have achieved is to waste a bit of my bandwidth.
Sure, the video analytics will be a bit skewed, which may affect YouTube's recommendation algorithm, but is that really a huge deal for a popular song?
Re:I don't understand the difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, sense, reason and logic in a discussion about copyright? They don't even have observer status in this.
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It's all about money and control.
Eternal money and control. (copyrights do not expire)
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(without ads... I have a browser add-on that blocks 'em)
YOU MONSTER! Sue him! Sue him! Why are you hurting the artists. Do you want to destroy the music industry!!!! /s
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Youtube pays for each time you play the video. If you play it a hundred times instead of once, Youtube pays 100 times more. Your or Youtube's bandwidth cost doesn't concern the music industry. Neither does your ad blocker. That's Youtube's problem.
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With (1), YT probably pays a small streaming fee to the the rights holder (probably a fraction of a cent, but still). YT makes up for it with ads. So in the first scenario you are maybe short changing YT, but the music company still gets their cut. If you DL the song, they don't get their sweet, sweet play count up and they miss out on whole pennies.
Paying for what? (Score:1)
german court system (Score:2)
What you need to know is that in Germany you can go "court shopping" in various ways. The district court of Hamburg is a favorite among media companies of all kinds and is known for being very, very friendly and understanding towards their interests. Which is why its decisions are quite commonly successfully appealed - but since not everyone can afford the appeals process, media companies still prefer to file there over other places.
It's a flaw in the legal system that is not easily removed because in most
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It's a flaw in the legal system that is not easily removed because in most other circumstances it's a desireable feature. The same feature is, for example, responsible for you as a normal customer to sue a company that's on the other side of Germany in your local court, when going to their local court would be too costly for you and thus prevent you from excercising your rights.
It's very easily fixed. Just require that businesses go to court where their documents say they are based, or in the venue where the other party is based.
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It's very easily fixed. Just require that businesses go to court where their documents say they are based, or in the venue where the other party is based.
The same way that tax evasion has been successfully fixed by requiring a company address in the location they claim taxes in? Which is why the Caiman Islands have impressive office towers with thousands of company offices - in 3-floor buildings where the mailboxes fill the entire ground floor?
Don't think that ANYTHING that companies have a vested interest in can be fixed with an easy fix. If the fix is easy, so is circumventing it.
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Don't think that ANYTHING that companies have a vested interest in can be fixed with an easy fix. If the fix is easy, so is circumventing it.
The problem isn't that there isn't an easy fix. The problem is that they have bought enough politicians to prevent its implementation.
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They have also bought enough lawyers to find loopholes in any law anyone would pass.
Fuck the Music Industry (Score:2)
"We continue to work globally to address the problem of stream ripping, which is draining revenue from those who invest in and create music," Moore adds
Ah yes, of course. The... *checks notes* ...0.1% of the revenue that go to the creator, and not the 99.9% of the revenue that goes to corporate fatcats and lawyers whose entire job is to hassle people for not paying more for music they didn't make or produce or do anything but charge you for, which cost them basically nothing to distribute.