Re:YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
by murgindrag on Saturday October 24, 2020 @08:41AM
(#24878844)
You missed it. OP has rights to the work. The question was whether downloading from Youtube breaks any laws. Youtube's add is transcoding, which is not a creative transformation. Ergo, OP probably has a legal right to download from Youtube, at least as far as copyright law is concerned.
Re:YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
by gamblor956 on Saturday October 24, 2020 @03:34PM
(#24881405)
No, I saw that. I was responding to the immediate parent, not the OP. The comment I was responding to was whether transcoding is an act covered by copyright, and it is.
The OP's comment was different. He was using youtube-dl to download videos uploaded by his own clients, which was fine because they're the copyright owners. Transcoding doesn't generally create a separate copyrighted work because at least for these types of media, the underlying representation of the bits doesn't matter.
Note: this isn't fair use. Fair use is a defense to violating copyright, and a copyright owner can't violate their own copyright ...but if they licensed one or more copyrights to a third party, they could violate the third party's copyrights depending on the terms of that license.
In fact, if transcoding a video added anything creative to the process, you would have two copyrights: one for the original creative work, and a second for the derivative (transcoded) work.