RIAA trying to take down youtube-dl, time to fight back

[NiHaoMike]

https://www.xda-developers.com/youtube-dl-riaa-dmca/
The simple answer: boycott the RIAA.

[ataradov]

How exactly do you "boycott the RIAA"? They provide no useful service to the absolute majority of the population. Hard to boycott something you don't use in a first place.

[NiHaoMike]

How exactly do you "boycott the RIAA"? They provide no useful service to the absolute majority of the population. Hard to boycott something you don't use in a first place.

Don't buy or pirate music from a RIAA member company, cancel subscriptions to music streaming services that feature content from RIAA member companies, use Adblock if you must watch a music video from a RIAA member company. If you already are "boycotting" them, great!

[rdl]

I guess they feel like playing whack-a-mole.

[NiHaoMike]

As evidence, the RIAA cited comments in the YouTube-DL source code that informed users on how to test the program against videos that their members own the copyrights to. The tests where copyrighted material was linked were intended to make sure that the library can download a normal video, a video with an age limit, and a video that included dollar signs in the name. These 3 videos used for testing were music videos from Icona Pop, Justin Timberlake, and Taylor Swift.

So replace those test cases with CC or other freely licensed videos. Naomi Wu can supply an age limited video, plenty of makers can supply a video with a dollar sign in the title, and normal videos can be supplied by pretty much any maker.

[coppercone2]

you can hit them really hard now, since going shopping in the store is a bad idea because of COVID, especially for nonessentials like music. Just don't buy CD's on amazon lol

I think most of their profit comes from physical media. If you want to boycott, hit that

*recommendation, scrutinize new albums to make sure that the artist is not pushing garbage being gobbled up by fanboys. Quality might go up also.

Normally you listen to a song you like, because you ran into it some where, radio, youtube video, movie, and then you buy the song (free advertising). Don't do the buying part now. Go through your collection of things you actually like and enjoy listening to the albums you only bought because it had 1 good song.. most people actually have PLENTY of music that they hardly got tired of. It's like having provisions. Spend the money you would spend on music on some hifi equipment so the stuff you already have sounds better.

I guess someone got upset that they cannot afford another solid gold humvee because concert ticket sales are down because of the virus........ I am not sure why we should have our freedoms taken away because metallica can't limit their spending for a while. Maybe if some of those producers decided to detail their own cars instead of forking it over for every little service, they might finish and save money by the time this whole crisis ends.

I am sure technology people can enjoy spending some time checking out the demo scene to get some free music and music videos also. I see tons of people are earphones only nowadays, try setting up some room acoustics and reenjoying music without cybernetic implants

[magic]

No, don't
I like the convenience of having a simple script which downloads the latest version when the old one stops working.

Besides, they already filed takedown notices on multiple G***ub repos hosting it.

“Indeed, the comments in the YouTube-DL source code make clear that the source code was designed and is marketed for the purpose of circumventing YouTube’s technological measures to enable unauthorized access to our member’s copyrighted works,” reads the RIAA’s complaint.

Well, if that's the law in America then there is obviously only one permanent solution and Supreme Leader Ali Chamenei knows it

[Berni]

Simple just make a GIT commit on there that replaces the youtube links in the test code to some other youtube videos that they don't own a copyright to.

But if making a tool to download a public music video from a public video platform is supposedly illegal then how is it legal for Microsoft to bundle a music CD ripping tool in pretty much every version of Windows since Win ME or Win 2000 or something in the form of WindowsMediaPlayer? Surely they are more Windows users out there than there are users of this youtube downloader tool.

Get over it you greedy bastards at RIAA

[magic]

The audio CD format has no copy protection and the act of putting something on CD was never meant to be copy protection, so ripping a CD is not bypassing copy protection.

On the other hand, the lack of download button on Y***ube is copy protection.

[james_s]

The RIAA has been waging a futile war with consumers for decades now and has gotten nowhere, aside from alienating lots of music fans. I've gone out of my way to avoid buying music from the usual sources for more than a decade, I either buy from independent artists or I buy used CDs and vinyl.

[daqq]

Ah, RIAA and similar organisations world wide... the scummiest of scum. Our local equivalent ( SOZA ) is pretty much an extortion racket. They demanded that the village where a few kids performed folk music pay up. Oh, and there's this delight:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/and-the-bullshit-legal-concept-award-goes-to-private-copying-levy!-congrats!/

[Electro Fan]

How exactly do you "boycott the RIAA"? They provide no useful service to the absolute majority of the population. Hard to boycott something you don't use in a first place.

Maybe play less vinyl records. (just kidding)
https://ledgernote.com/columns/mixing-mastering/riaa-curve/

[nuclearcat]

Long live China.
https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
I hope authors will just relocate there and 100k+ stars repository will give more reasons to sign-up and use gitee.
If you can't fight meaningfully RIAA, you can fight github.
International code repositories like github should be hosted and operated in countries with more reasonable laws.
P.S. I wonder if youtube-dl code is in their fancy-pancy Arctic vault and if they will mess up with it and remove it from there too.

[tom66]

I pay ~£5 a month for unlimited music via a Spotify family plan.  I can't argue with that pricing.

If the RIAA make a bit of money off me, it isn't much.  I certainly haven't bought a CD or download album in a decade, or more.

[tszaboo]

I pay ~£5 a month for unlimited music via a Spotify family plan.  I can't argue with that pricing.

If the RIAA make a bit of money off me, it isn't much.  I certainly haven't bought a CD or download album in a decade, or more.

Companies like RIAA make mayority of their money from other sources. For example in a few European countries, they charge extra money for selling blank CDs (this was relevant like 10 years ago), empty USB flash drives, playing music on the radio, playing music in a shop, TV shows playing music and so on. Probably they get money for online steaming nowadays as well. They have significant B2B sources, and they are backed by governments with making laws that support them.  I dont know what sources RIAA has exactly, but you cannot make a dent on it as a customer. Even if you manage to, they are just going to make other sources, like they start charging for your internet or other bullshit like that.

[thinkfat]

The simple answer is not to boycott RIAA which will be largely ineffective, but to donate to the EFF.

In fact, do both: send the money you'd normally give to Amazon for buying music etc to the EFF.

[magic]

International code repositories like github should be hosted and operated in countries with more reasonable laws.

There are no countries with reasonable laws and there is a lot of things that China would ban but America wouldn't.
You just need to learn which country's search engine / hosting to use and for what.

Hint: it helps to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Russian and I'm sure the same goes for Chinese

[nuclearcat]

International code repositories like github should be hosted and operated in countries with more reasonable laws.

There are no countries with reasonable laws and there is a lot of things that China would ban but America wouldn't.
You just need to learn which country's search engine / hosting to use and for what.

Hint: it helps to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Russian and I'm sure the same goes for Chinese

There is countries, where you can expect opensource code repositories to last longer than just DMCA takedown email, at least on claims like youtube-dl have, or sanction madness.
US is too well known for cases of quick punishment without trial and investigation.

[edy]

Whack-a-mole indeed! Now that I know about this, and many others do, we will all go and download the python library from alternative sites such as this one, while it is still up:

https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

I understand their point is to get rid of a central "repository" where all different downloaders get their core code and update whenever YouTube changes something (so each developer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel each time) but they will just find a hidden way to distribute it. Or you will have 10 other public "forks" pop up that stay below RIAA's radar.

This reminds me of the whole fiasco where computer makers started to disable the internal "loop-back" for audio stereo-mix recording so that you couldn't record off the "output" stream... say if you are playing audio on your computer. The older computers could do that, but the newer computers drivers were forced by RIAA presumably to disable this. What a load of wankers!

"Details of Dell's surreptitious collusion with RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) have emerged. Apparently, the computer manufacturer disabled the Stereo Mix/Mono Mix/Wave Out sound recording function on certain notebooks to assuage RIAA. The hardware functionality is being disabled without any prior notice and one blogger has even alleged that he was asked by Dell's customer support staff to [shell] out $99 if he desired the stereo mix option. Gateway and Pac Bell are the other two manufacturers to have bowed to RIAA at the expense of their customers' satisfaction and disabled stereo mix without warning."

Now there are 3rd party "virtual patch cable" drivers that let you screw around again with the internal audio stream paths, but really? Do you think RIAA actually did anything to thwart piracy? I believe the music industry is going towards streaming subscriptions... few people will buy physical media, or buy a digital download. Most people will pay some monthly fee to have access to a large library of content and just listen to streams as needed.

The times are changing and artists and labels need to adapt. RIAA's policy has been to spam-litigate  and now with repos becoming hidden away, it will be tougher for them to find infringement. Nobody uses peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Kazaa and Napster anymore. Torrents are also going bye-bye. That means they can't stick a fake node in the network and lift people's IP's. Stuff is getting squirrelled away in online storage boxes where they encrypt the contents so that even the companies running these sites can't figure out what's hidden there. But RIAA is tasked to do *something* so they have to go after whatever is the "lowest hanging fruit".

As always, I advocate supporting artists directly for their work. I like places like Bandcamp because there are smaller emerging artists on there and more of your money goes directly to them. Volunteering at a radio station in my college days I had access to the "demo recycling bin" where every week, hundreds of recordings would land and be prime for the pickings. I picked up so many great professional amazing recordings by artists who never became "big" and dropped off the radar for any one of a number of different reasons (none of which was due to the quality of the music itself). Music industry is a fickle one, where many other factors push some artists to the front and keep others hidden behind. I can't stand commercial radio because of this, not to mention pay-for-play or "payola" that was rampant in the past (and I'm sure they found another way to do it today that finds a loophole around this illegal practice). For every "mainstream" artist you can find 10 other talented ones that make amazing stuff.

What the large labels pick up is usually the result of many years of development, promotion, investment, touring and various other antics to increase an act's popularity, or commercial promotion and priming of the market by the likes of American Idol and other such venues, or instant YouTube stardom by someone already in the industry whose influence is being applied on what they see as "the next hit". Thus, many others who have interesting music but are missing the "stage performance" or "image" aspect remain in the shadows.

[SilverSolder]

The RIAA has been waging a futile war with consumers for decades now and has gotten nowhere, aside from alienating lots of music fans. I've gone out of my way to avoid buying music from the usual sources for more than a decade, I either buy from independent artists or I buy used CDs and vinyl.

Same here, but people like us are probably a tiny minority of consumers.

[SilverSolder]

[...]  they are just going to make other sources, like they start charging for your internet or other bullshit like that.

I think they should just sell special supporter RIAA memberships to ordinary members of the public for something reasonable, like $10 a month -  in return, the paying RIAA member is allowed to download and copy whatever the heck they want for personal use. 

I'd gladly pay $10 a month to support artists etc.,  and I would surely enjoy not having to deal with DRM ever again.

[magic]

Actually,

Currently our dev repository is taken down due to DMCA takedown notice by RIAA.

Downloads still work as usual.

So it's a nothingburger so far.

I understand their point is to get rid of a central "repository" where all different downloaders get their core code and update whenever YouTube changes something (so each developer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel each time) but they will just find a hidden way to distribute it. Or you will have 10 other public "forks" pop up that stay below RIAA's radar.

That's the whole point. Stuff that's hidden from public view and stays below RIAA's radar will also stay below the radar of a typical consumer. But see above, they haven't even managed to take down their main website yet.

Besides, as you said, true piracy is almost dead. Kids these days just watch those junk 96k streams on AdsTube because it doesn't require any of that "downloading" rubbish

[Berni]

The way the music industry works behind the scenes is a whole new can of worms.

In order for an artist to become hugely popular they will generally have to sell there soul to one of the big record labels. This involves signing a hugely unfair contract that lets the record label take most of the money, or put the artist deep in debt if they don't succeed. In return for selling there soul to them the record label pulls the appropriate strings to make them popular by getting there music out there, helping them record a music video, get it on all the music platforms, MTV, radio etc..

Its very rare for a artist to make it big without getting bootstrapped by big labels. And the stuff that makes it is the usual pop music that is tuned to at least slightly appeal to the widest possible audience in order to make sure the record label can make as much money as possible from it.

And yeah these are the sort of companies that pull the strings behind RIAA

[coppercone2]

for some reason I can see a sound review board arguing if a 3 second sound byte of a song should be changed to target a certain demographic better 

[madires]

RIAA's YouTube-DL Takedown Ticks Off Developers and GitHub's CEO: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/10/27/2230218/riaas-youtube-dl-takedown-ticks-off-developers-and-githubs-ceo