Re:YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA
by gamblor956 on Saturday October 24, 2020 @02:06AM
(#24877301)
Gets complicated, but watching ads to watch a video is a separate issue from the underlying copyright for the content.
The content holder licensed the content to Youtube (or Vimeo, etc), but does not necessarily control the monetization of that content by the licensee. (Generally, the license will say something like royalties shall be X% of revenue derived from the content, without limiting itself to specific methods of monetization.)
Youtube doesn't have a license to give to the viewer; the license they have is merely to show you the content.
I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.
This has been the law for several decades already. But the key thing to understand is "fair use" doesn't mean "to avoid paying." If digital content is available for purchase, the courts generally have not found making a permanent copy from a streaming source to be fair use. (Where it gets complicated: multiple copyrights applying to a single work, such as the dancing baby Prince video. The creator of the video was okay with people viewing it and downloading it freely, but Prince was not. In the music arena, this would be a non-issue due to compulsory licenses, but those licensing schemes don't exist for other types of media. Ultimately, the court said that the focus of the video was the toddler dancing, and that the music was incidental, so including it in the video was a legitimate fair use. But it took more than a decade for the case to be resolved.)
The content holder licensed the content to Youtube (or Vimeo, etc), but does not necessarily control the monetization of that content by the licensee. (Generally, the license will say something like royalties shall be X% of revenue derived from the content, without limiting itself to specific methods of monetization.)
Youtube doesn't have a license to give to the viewer; the license they have is merely to show you the content.
I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.
This has been the law for several decades already. But the key thing to understand is "fair use" doesn't mean "to avoid paying." If digital content is available for purchase, the courts generally have not found making a permanent copy from a streaming source to be fair use. (Where it gets complicated: multiple copyrights applying to a single work, such as the dancing baby Prince video. The creator of the video was okay with people viewing it and downloading it freely, but Prince was not. In the music arena, this would be a non-issue due to compulsory licenses, but those licensing schemes don't exist for other types of media. Ultimately, the court said that the focus of the video was the toddler dancing, and that the music was incidental, so including it in the video was a legitimate fair use. But it took more than a decade for the case to be resolved.)