EFF Argues RIAA is 'Abusing DMCA' to Take Down YouTube-DL

While the RIAA has objected to a tool for downloading online videos, EFF senior activist Elliot Harmon responds with this question. "Who died and put them in charge of YouTube?"

He asks the question in a new video "explainer" on the controversy, and argues in a new piece at EFF.org that the youtube-dl tool "doesn't infringe on any RIAA copyrights." RIAA's argument relies on a different section of the DMCA, Section 1201. DMCA 1201 says that it's illegal to bypass a digital lock in order to access or modify a copyrighted work. Copyright holders have argued that it's a violation of DMCA 1201 to bypass DRM even if you're doing it for completely lawful purposes; for example, if you're downloading a video on YouTube for the purpose of using it in a way that's protected by fair use. (And thanks to the way that copyright law has been globalized via trade agreements, similar laws exist in many other jurisdictions too.) RIAA argues that since youtube-dl could be used to download music owned by RIAA-member labels, no one should be able to use the tool, even for completely lawful purposes.

This is an egregious abuse of the notice-and-takedown system, which is intended to resolve disputes over allegedly infringing material online. Again, youtube-dl doesn't use RIAA-member labels' music in any way. The makers of youtube-dl simply shared information with the public about how to perform a certain task — one with many completely lawful applications.
Harmon wants to hear from people using youtube-dl for lawful purposes. And he also links to an earlier EFF piece arguing that DMCA 1201 "is incredibly broad, apparently allowing rightsholders to legally harass any 'trafficker' in code that lets users re-take control of their devices from DRM locks..."

And EFF's concern over DMCA 1201 has been ongoing: DMCA 1201 has been loaded with terrible implications for innovation and free expression since the day it was passed. For many years, EFF documented these issues in our "Unintended Consequences" series; we continue to organize and lobby for temporary exemptions to its provisions for the purposes of cellphone unlocking, restoring vintage videogames and similar fair uses, as well as file and defend lawsuits in the United States to try and mitigate its damage. We look forward to the day when it is no longer part of U.S. law.

But due to the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions infest much of the world's jurisdictions too, including the European Union via the Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC.

Here's a link to the most active fork...

[RyanFenton]

https://github.com/blackjack44... [github.com]

And discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataH... [reddit.com]

I'd got a lovely name too - Youtube-DLC.

Ryan Fenton

Artificial scarcity

[ShanghaiBill]

We are moving from a world where most value was in the form of physical resources, to a world where most value is in the form of ideas and intellectual property.

If the physical world, we have real scarcity in the form of natural resources and production capacity. But in the IP world, there are no such limits, so we artificial scarcity in the form of temporary monopolies enforced by copyright and patent law.

Artificial scarcity affects much more than movies and music. It is a major cause of high drug prices. Drugs are usually expensive to develop but cheap to replicate.

We need to create a new economic system that allows for the abundance of digital creation while still fairly rewarding the creators.

Re:Artificial scarcity

[Ambassador Kosh]

Small molecule drugs are usually expensive to develop and cheap to replicate. Biological drugs (proteins, antibodies etc) are usually expensive to develop and expensive to replicate.

I would actually prefer a system where the government contracts out to labs to make medicines and just buys them from companies. So the government would put out a bid effectively for different conditions at different dollar values. If you make something that fulfills the need then you would be paid. The contracts would be fairly high because it would still have to pay for all the failures that occur since this stuff is the cutting edge of human technology. It would STILL be MUCH cheaper than the system is now and it would remove all incentive for any kind of drug marketing.

I think a system like that would solve a lot of the drug pricing problems and still keep a competitive market.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I would much rather see that NIH-funded research have a legal requirement to release research documentation, data and outcomes to the public domain so that all medical companies can produce NIH-funded drugs and vaccines, thus promoting actual price competition in the industry. Under the current scheme pharma companies can retain exclusive rights on drugs and vaccines under patent, locking out "generics", which allows them to charge whatever high prices they feel like until patent expiry.

Re:

[logicnazi]

I agree that one needs to incentivize IP development but the nature of the product makes a huge difference in how you do that. When we consider physical goods like cars the fact that if I take your car you now don't have a car creates a strong argument for a property based system. By creating property rights in the objects you allow a market to form and get all the nice optimality results that hold for reasonably efficient markets.

OTOH IP is fundamentally different in that the marginal cost to produce mor

Re:

[dotancohen]

Also you might not want to risk the partisan blowback from funding abortifacients or various kinds of hormonal or birth control treatments.

The drugs proposed for research with public money would reflect the values of the public at that point in time. If the public votes in a homophob, then hormonal treatments will not be given public funding.

That is exactly how all public policies are set.

Re:

[RazorSharp]

We need to create a new economic system that allows for the abundance of digital creation while still fairly rewarding the creators.

We certainly do, but I have had a hard time coming up with one. When it comes to music, I think it's easy: there should be no copyrights for music, but a specific recording is owned by the musician. Before we had recordings, people were paid for performing music and it was often difficult if not impossible to trace the authorship of a song. This is pretty much how folk music works, as well as reggae and if you go back even further, bards. For multi-million dollar musicians, people pay for a personality, not

Re:

[dabadab]

If the physical world, we have real scarcity in the form of natural resources and production capacity. But in the IP world, there are no such limits, so we artificial scarcity in the form of temporary monopolies enforced by copyright and patent law.

That's patently bullshit.
It may be true that the second and subsequent copies are very cheap to create but to create the thing that can be copied still takes very real and substantial resources.

Re:

[edeefelt]

I would contend that the powers that be create, and use scare tactics to convince us of scarcity in the real world as well.

Copyright law needs to be reset

[martynhare]

Copyright was invented as a means to limit unauthorised reproduction of a protected work. That is all it should control, no more, no less. If you have an authorised copy of a work, you should be able to modify it in any way you please and if that upsets the copyright holder, then they should not have sold you a copy in the first place. It should be that simple. Nobody gets sued for scribbling comments on a book they purchased but dare to alter them software binaries and THE LAW happens.

Well, the law as it stands is stupid. It says I can legally download a copy of a song from YouTube as part of streaming it and leave the end result in the browser cache but if I then dare to play that same cached song using VLC or move it to a new folder... somehow I would then be breaking the law.

Re:Copyright law needs to be reset

[Artemis3]

Yes, set it back to the 40 years or so max it was meant to last. Even 40 years looks like an eternity in this age, and no one cares about Mickey Mouse, except those with the money to lobby the copyright law so it extends eternally, precisely like the printer guilds from England had over written works which copyright was meant to put an end to when they made a country out of a bunch of rebel colonies independent from the Empire...

To be clear, copyright was made to put a limit to the monopoly of the works, so that they would eventually go into public domain for the benefit of all. This last part seems to be crucially destroyed by the current corporate mindset.

Also there should be a lot of exemptions for non-commercial use, archiving, research, time shifting, etc, etc. And the tools themselves should be exempted as well since its the people that would infringe not the tool. What if I have legal permission? This is never considered.

"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will ...", I mean, the more unauthorized copyright infringement will be. Some works were only preserved because of this "unlawful" activity...

Re:

[Wise Raptor]

I'd be fine with resetting copyright back to 20-30 years for the initial right. If an author or author's estate thinks that copyright is worth retaining then they need to pay for it after a certain point. I'd like to put an increasing copyright tax after the initial period. It needs to be increase fast enough that an equilibrium market price for the average work is reached after 40 years. After that it should it start getting expensive. As in after 100 years or so it should be the yearly profit of a large p

Re:Copyright law needs to be reset

[johannesg]

Make it 10 years for free. Then allow indefinite extensions, _at a progressive rate_.

The public wins: the majority of works go into public domain fairly rapidly. The publishers win: works that are still valuable remain in their hands indefinitely. The government wins: extra taxes. Winners all round!

Re:

[logicnazi]

Technically, what youtube-dl violates is not copyright but the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause. I'm not a fan but there are at least obvious reasons for it. Namely, the fear that without it piracy would be so prevalent few people would pay for things. Now that's obviously not true in many cases but I do think there is at least some valid concern for certain kinds of work. For instance, consider computer programs that appeal to a very narrow class of consumers and require a lot of developer time per sal

Re:

[91degrees]

Well, the law as it stands is stupid. It says I can legally download a copy of a song from YouTube as part of streaming it and leave the end result in the browser cache but if I then dare to play that same cached song using VLC or move it to a new folder... somehow I would then be breaking the law.

This is something of a disconnect between tech-minded people and legal people. To us it's obvious that there's no significant difference between a browser cache and a data file. The law sees them as different.

Routine use around here?

[rnturn]

Downloading a video because so many browsers are unable to play the video. I.e., download using youtube-dl and play it in some standalone video player. I'm not talking about whole movies... it's barely possible to watch brief news clips. If YouTube would lay off changing the video formats every two freakin' weeks and wrecking so many browsers' ability to play them, youtube-dl wouldn't even need to exist.

Re:

[c-A-d]

But Chrome plays them just fine. I don't see what the problem is.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see what the problem is.

Obviously. The DMCA isn't a legal option or retort for anything except when someone copies your protected work and posts it online.

The MPAA has stated they wrote all the code in youtube-dl and they own it.
This is a lie. They did no such thing.

Based upon that lie, then they illegally and criminally used a DMCA notice to trick a 3rd party company into removing youtube-dl based on the MPAAs claim they wrote that code.

The problem you fail to see is no one is holding the MPAA accountable for their crimes.

If yo

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

You have a browser that doesn't autoplay videos? Dear god tell is what it is! I can't get them to stop even by disabling javascript and using html5 blockers.

Re:

[RazorSharp]

You have a browser that doesn't autoplay videos? Dear god tell is what it is! I can't get them to stop even by disabling javascript and using html5 blockers.

In Safari if you turn on dev mode you can tell it to turn off autoplay.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

First they came for your software...

[DontBeAMoran]

RIAA argues that since youtube-dl could be used to download music owned by RIAA-member labels, no one should be able to use the tool, even for completely lawful purposes.

Gun owners should be up in arms about such a thing going to court, because the same logic will be applied to take their guns away.

Re:

[Mononymous]

Seems that ought to be covered by the Betamax [wikipedia.org] precedent.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely. These sorts of actions are always brought about for financial motives.

e.g.: youtube-dl is bad for RIAA members because it cuts into their advertising revenue streams: once somebody downloads content from YouTube they can watch it however they want, whenever they want, as often they want, without the need to watch it on YouTube (and be forced to watch advertising) ever again.

There's a significant amount of money in the US economy around the purchase of weapons, accessories and consumables. None of

Re:

[nyet]

Are you saying you are not ok with the RIAA using that line of reasoning, but you are ok with gun control advocates using the exact same fallacious reasoning?

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

I'm against guns myself, but those gun-loving people should watch about such things setting bad precedents in courts.

Re:

[nyet]

Are you ok with them using the same fallacious reasoning or not? It is a simple yes/no question.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

I'm not okay with either group using fallacious reasoning.

Re:

[Mononymous]

once somebody downloads content from YouTube they can watch it however they want, whenever they want, as often they want, without the need to watch it on YouTube (and be forced to watch advertising)

"Forced"? I don't know anyone who watches advertising on YouTube. No downloading needed.

Re:

[N7DR]

RIAA argues that since youtube-dl could be used to download music owned by RIAA-member labels, no one should be able to use the tool, even for completely lawful purposes.

Gun owners should be up in arms about such a thing going to court, because the same logic will be applied to take their guns away.

Ditto for computer owners. It's hard to use youtube-dl without a computer.

Re:

[logicnazi]

Well, under current law that may be true. It may violate the anti-circumvention provision. But it's also irrelevant. You can't go file a DMCA takedown notice on someone for random illegal things. It's illegal (even an actual crime with criminal libel) to libel someone but you can't file a DMCA takedown notice on a libel. So it's totally irrelevant that they argue it's illegal under some other theory still doesn't get them around the problem that the DMCA demands they submit a declaration under penalty

Re:

[nyet]

There is a flip side to this. Are you up in arms over gun control?

Re:

[nehumanuscrede]

There is a flip side to this. Are you up in arms over gun control?

By the logic of the RIAA, they believe that since a thing CAN be used to break the law, then said thing should be illegal. Though it is amusing that the RIAA is using DMCA ( in ways it was never designed nor intended ) to fraudulently remove content they don't want available to the general public.

Imagine if we applied this line of thinking to other common items:

Books
Guns
Cars
Money
Alcohol
Sugary Foods
Speech
Math
Education
etc. etc

Backup

[ruddk]

You could also use it to backup your own live streams. YouTube doesn't provide a link in YouTube studio in high quality.
But I suppose you would have just saved to disk at the same time using nvenc for the stream and qsync in the CPU for the backup.
Unless of course you are streaming from the phone, then you will need to download them from YouTube.

Non-RIAA use: tutorials

[MrRemj]

I use it to grab Blender tutorials, so I can curate my own collection of knowledge, offline. Watching on an airplane, riding on the bus, traveling internationally.

Makes me wonder what kind of copyright youtube posters have, or assume to have. (I appreciate the Creative Commons licensing on Thingiverse - not 100%, but good enough to communicate expectations of use.)

So Illegal but no RIAA Standing

[logicnazi]

So it seems like the (correct) point they are making is that the RIAA takedown notices are inappropriate because regardless of whether or not it violates the DMCA you can only issue a takedown for copyrighted material you own or have licensed. That seems correct. Indeed, I'd expect someone would be able to win significant sanctions against the RIAA since (after the initial notice I believe) they need to swear, on penalty of perjury, that they believe the identified material to be infringing on their copyright. As the ban on digital protection breaking tools isn't a copyright that anyone holds the RIAA would be (at a minimum) filing a false statement and likely would be on the hook for attorneys fees.

Or is there some aspect of this I'm missing?

You don't get it, EFF.

[BAReFO0t]

Copyright is a *distributor*'s privilege to a monopoly for the purposes of (imaginary but effective) artificial scarcity. It has nothing to do with protecting creative people or the like whatsoever. Or even giving them a privilege based on a desperate crutch of a solution for an outdated pre-Internet situation. (I know, because we had such a law in Germany, called Urheberrecht, until it was twisted into this too.)

Abuse is the whole and only point of the DMCA.

So does "abusing the DMCA" mean they did somethin