You're trying very hard to make a technical distinction but the problem is that this is a legal problem not a technical one and rightly or wrongly, legal definitions don't always align with technical ones.

For starters, intent is factored into the law. There's several different classifications of murder depending on intent. Likewise someone carrying a kitchen knife home, still packaged, from the shops is unlikely to be reprimanded compared to someone carrying a more decorative knife around. They're both knives but one instance clearly carries a different intent to another.

The problem with youtube-dl is that having tests which work against copyrighted content and having the README describe usages against copyrighted content, it's much harder to argue that the intent of this is purely for copyleft content. Your point about this being an access tool (which actually makes no difference in terms of circumventing DRM anyway -- which was the claim for the take down) also doesn't fly because this tool creates a file on your local disk so it's hard to argue that the intent is for that file to be temporary.

I'm not saying I agree with the take down notice (I don't) but something a great many techies on here miss is that not every argument can be won with science.

> ...intent is factored into the law.

What gets lost or missed is the underlying intent of the protocols and tools being used to share content. An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access.

I'm not saying people should be free then to republish/share copyrighted works. Just that we are free to use tools to retrieve files that have been served openly via the web.

Right, but even when offering free resources to the public you still maintain the manner in which they are accessed and distributed.

It's not as clear as let's say access to a public park on private land. But the idea would carry weight that youtube may control the manner in which their publicaly accessable website may be accessed.

Let's say you can access via the YouTube app which does not require an account, and now you reverse engineer that app to bypass the app all together. It's a bit like cutting a hole in the fence around the playground.

I'm not a fan of what happened it's just clear to me why it happened.

This was indeed bound to happen. The discussions we have are what's needed to decide how the internet/web moves forward. And there's a bit of cake eating and having it too from both sides.

There's an expectation from the publishing/serving side of the equation that the content is being served to a proprietary app or a web browser that works a particular way. With the browser being one of Chrome, Firefox, etc., along with Google's YouTube apps.

On the user side, especially those who understand how the content is served, that the browser is not the only abstraction allowed. Google themselves run bots to scour the internet employing all sorts of tricks to access and index content. There's a fundamental way in which the http protocol works and its content served that is client agnostic. Everyone, Google Search most of all, have benefitted from this.

Making tools other than browsers illegal will fundamentally break the internet in my opinion.

> An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access.

They don't use HTTP. HTTP is used to bootstrap the player, not to feed the content. The content itself is served over another protocol such as RTMP and that protocol is a streaming protocol (it sends chunked data) and it wasn't intended for downloading files and writing them to disk as a singular binary blob. Obviously it can be used that way but it's fair to say services like youtube-dl are using the protocol in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used rather than content owners serving content on a protocol that was always designed for distributing files.

It's a bit like recording something on VCR from an RF signal; there's nothing technically stopping you from doing that as recording a TV show is technically equivalent to watching it. But equally you can't blame TV networks for using RF to air their broadcasts knowing that risk is there.

The problem is any delivery system you can dream up for enabling consumers to view a recording will have some unintended method for copying said content. Even if it is as low tech as someone physically sat in a cinema with a handheld camcorder (how many movies have been leaked online that way?!)

This is why I keep coming back to the point that you can't use science to argue a legal issue; they ultimately serve different purposes. Science can prove something can be possible, the law is there to argue if something should be allowed to happen (putting aside for one moment the variety of differing opinions about morality et al). So if you have an issue with the youtube-dl take down then you need to treat it as a legal problem rather than a misunderstanding of a technical solution.

> They don't use HTTP. HTTP is used to bootstrap the player, not to feed the content. The content itself is served over another protocol such as RTMP and that protocol is a streaming protocol (it sends chunked data) and it wasn't intended for downloading files and writing them to disk as a singular binary blob. Obviously it can be used that way but it's fair to say services like youtube-dl are using the protocol in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used rather than content owners serving content on a protocol that was always designed for distributing files.

Not true at all, most YouTube videos are offered as plain webm files.

Also, keep in mind that recording TV's is legal.

> Not true at all, most YouTube videos are offered as plain webm files.

It's been a while since I've written a video streaming scraper but it used to be quite common for a file to be served over HTTP but that file was a small "shortcut" type file to an RTMP stream. So a webm file wasn't the content itself but instead a pointer to where to stream the content from.

I'd imagine the same would still be true for YouTube since, like most other video streaming services, YouTube can adaptively switch bitrate depending on the bandwidth available to the end user. That seamless switching can't be done with a HTTP GET of a singular video file but it can happen effectively with a chunked streaming protocol.

> Also, keep in mind that recording TV's is legal.

Yes but with caveats, depending on the country.

Though it is worth noting the only reason America and UK law is so relaxed regarding VCR usage is because corporations making video recorders were taken to court by film studios and won their case. So once again it comes down to presenting a legal argument rather than a technical one.

This hasn't been the case in a long time, most streaming sites no longer do RTMP unless specialised cases, because of scaling and ease of scaling. They're mostly HLS or equivalent now.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about HLS (doh!). But even there HLS, while based on HTTP, is still very different to the kind of GET requests the GP (or however many posts down it was now) suggested when they talked about downloading a file.

HLS is not about downloading a file, it's about downloading chunked data. It wasn't intended (though it can't be prevented) that the chunks would be used to recreate a video in full, unlike with a stream of bytes from a HTTP GET which are very much intended to be recreated in full at the receivers end.

HLS really only uses HTTP transport as headers to circumvent many firewalls (and in fact you can do this with RTMP too, eg RTMPT) but aside from that it's a completely different beast to GET.

>> not every argument can be won with science.

Is this even a science argument though? The law and its enforcement may occasionally use science to illustrate specific cases (the implementation) but it's more the documentation of a giant, waterfall-based architecture project. Why are we suprised when we see specific cases that seem like failures despite agreeing with the fundamental premise?

Come off it, the other part of the name is "dl"

I use YouTube-dl as much as the next guy for lawful reasons but these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name.

Please remember that to reverse this YouTube-dl needs to go through a court. Courts are not code that can be tricked by clever wording. If anything you'll be trying to describe what it is to some old grandma who hasn't got a clue what GitHub is never mind convincing them this software isn't for downloading YouTube videos.

By all means everyone go on with coming up with clever interpretations of the law but you're just farting into the wind

P.s downvoting my comments doesn't change the way the law works either, but if it helps you feel good have at it :)

> … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name.

Regardless of the name, the tool supports over a thousand different sites, not just YouTube, and is routinely used for streaming rather than downloading, with no permanent copy saved. If you run "mpv https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY" to simply play the Blender Open Movie "Spring" it relies on youtube-dl behind the scenes to stream the video. (Though of course the difference between streaming and downloading is a trivial one; getting the content to the end user's device is the hard part.)

YouTube itself is the entity responsible for duplicating and distributing the content, and they have a license to do so, ergo there is no copyright violation here. The most any user of youtube-dl might be liable for, assuming they don't save a permanent copy or further redistribute the data, would be a violation of YouTube's TOS. Which is no concern of the RIAA. To call youtube-dl a "circumvention tool" is laughable; obfuscation of a video's URL is not DRM.

> You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union?

Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything about this through a quick Google search, but I'd love for this to be true.

To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL) a good example of this is the European Court of Justice Case C-355/12 "Nintendo v. PC Box" where europas highest court ruled that DRM must respect the principle of proportionality and circumvention of technical protection is only illegal if done for unlawful purposes. If DRM prevents lawful purposes, then the DRM is not proportional to consumer rights (or those of other corporations). If circumventing DRM is illegal is a question of the specific case and must take into account the purpose of the tech used to do it and what people actually use it for.

This, at the core, means it is very hard to argue that some library written to circumvent DRM is "illegal tech" and have it taken down in this manner, because the DRM could be inappropriate and it is not the copyright owner who has to decide that.

The ECJ was asked by a Milan court for a preliminary, so they gave instructions how the Milan court should handle the matter and how the law is to be interpreted. The base case was about a mod-chip sold by pc-box, who argued as a defendant, that circumventing nintendos DRM for the purpose of playing homebrews was ok and nintendo preventing that is inappropriate.

In the general case this was a huge win, because "circumventing DRM is illegal" is only true with a big IF, not as a blanket statement. And from that follows that usage of alternative clients is well within the consumers rights, but again i am not a lawyer.

However note that the Milan court then ruled in its case 12508/2015 that this particular mod chip is illegal. Nintendo gave a lot of evidence about the advantages of their DRM in terms of cost, ease of use, security etc, comparing it to inferior implementations of their choice that would fail to protect the copyright holders interests, as well as evidence of usage of the mod chip for piracy. On the other side pc-box defaulted, filing no evidence showing that their users are a vibrant community of homebrew gamers and techheads that circumvent DRM for purposes well within their rights, like running self written software on the hardware. The Milan court also argues that defendant has a burden of proof to show that a more proportionate drm method was possible, which i strongly disagree with, and which seems to follow nintendos argument that their solution is appropriate even if more restrictive then strictly necessary. Note that Milan does not speak for the EU.

The EU directive is a bit different to the implementations I've seen (which are stronger), but you still have a right to create such an alternate client (if it's sufficiently different in its expression, which youtube-dl clearly is):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:... article 6(1):

> 1. The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:

(a) you're allowed to use YouTube, (b) YouTube is undocumented, (c) this only applies to relevant parts of the code.

> 2. The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the infor­mation obtained through its application:

to be (a) used for other stuff, (b) distributed, (c) used for cloning or copyright infringement.

> 3. In accordance with the provisions of the Berne Convention for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the provisions of this Article may not be interpreted in such a way as to allow its application to be used in a manner which unreasonably prejudices the rightholder's legitimate interests or conflicts with a normal exploitation of the computer program.

Creating youtube-dl isn't infringing on anyone's copyright, and the rightsholder here is Google, so it's allowed. There's wiggle room for arguing – it's not as cut and dry as most Big Bold Legal Statements I make, so iamnotalawyerandthisisnotlegaladvice – but I'm fairly sure this is sound.

In the UK, you have unequivocal rights to do this. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/50B, based on this directive, says:

> (3) In particular, the conditions in subsection (2) are not met if the lawful user—

> (a)has readily available to him the information necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (b)does not confine the decompiling to such acts as are necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (c)supplies the information obtained by the decompiling to any person to whom it is not necessary to supply it in order to achieve the permitted objective; or

> (d)uses the information to create a program which is substantially similar in its expression to the program decompiled or to do any act restricted by copyright.

The wording in (d), here, is clearer than the EU directive – unless youtube-dl's existence can somehow be shown to be a copyright violation (specifically, if its creation was an act restricted by copyright), it's permitted. Not sure whether this would help in an EU court, but if other countries' implementations have taken the obvious interpretation of the directive, then the other language versions of the directive are probably clear on the matter.

> youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool.

What you’re describing is a circumvention device. The DMCA explicitly outlaws these. 17 U.S. Code § 1201

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201