What are the next steps for the community?
- Should we re-locate to a different space?
- Shall we wait until a lawsuit has been filed?
- Shall we wait until we have a legal response?
The good thing is that the website https://yt-dl.org is sill up, and the original author seems to have control over it. If there is some coordination behind it, I don't see why the community could not re-locate to a different place, where it is less likely to be sabotaged by what seems to be an inappropriate DMCA takedown.
- I'm not familiar with the ytdl codebase, but I believe its already structured as a general framework, with separate per-site extraction functions. The central framework should be stored in a "webvideo-dl" repo, and the separate extraction functions should be contained under separate repos - e.g. "wvdl-plugin-youtube".
This solves two problems:
1. If "wvdl-plugin-youtube" is DMCA'ed, the rest of the project continues to function.
2. Separate "plugins" can be maintained by separate teams. It sounds like the original youtube-dl was already running behind on responding to issues and PRs, prompting the creation of the youtube-dlc fork.
Hopefully, it wouldn't require as much effort as when a lot of the UNIX utilities were rewritten to get properly licensed versions back in the 80s - I remember a description of how they were rewritten from being cpu-optimized to being memory-optimized to avoid any code similarities.
The trick, I guess, would be to restructure the code so that the new "dl-webvideos" project would be hard to construe as a continuation of the original project.
The other trick would be, that the new solution has to be started fast to avoid losing momentum.
Youtube-dl was great and it's huge loss but it seems any efforts in improving or maintaining it will just be harder now. Instead if we could focus that energy on building something robust and resistant to such actions we might actually have solved this.
There are plenty of alternatives to Youtube, a bunch of them defunct. Youtube is irrelevant to this conversation; the DMCA takedown would have been equally effective had the copyrighted URLs been from Vimeo or Dailymotion or any other project that dies in a year because its creators don’t understand what makes a video site (and `youtube-dl`) is the community, not the tech behind it.
I think a better choice would be to fork/branch wget or curl and maintain a "supercurl" or "curl2" whose superset of curl functions just happens to be the merged functions of youtube-dl.
e.g. pip install wvdl-plugin-youtube
The name is good, there's a lot of really legal use cases -- downloading properly licensed videos for offline usage, archiving your own creations, etc.
The fundamental problem was that in the README and elsewhere, there were examples of ripping copyrighted content.
It would've been better to use examples of libre/public domain content, but I'm not sure how they can un-sail that ship.
The real solution is that we use the decentralized version control system as intended, and make this impossible to DMCA-away.
The only options are to move development to a server located somewhere beyond the reach of the DMCA and similarly take it off all repositories or to give up on making it possible to download every (or even most) videos from youtube.
The productive next step is to make youtube-dl compliant with copyright law, namely by removing the TPM-circumventing code from youtube-dl (`YoutubeIE._decrypt_signature`), and making the marketing material reflect that it's designed for non-infringing or exempted uses only. Unfortunately, you can't 'put the genie back in the bottle', so it's unlikely the original authors can continue to be contributors.
In the long term, put energy into reforming copyright law.
I fail to see how this code is non-compliant with copyright law, considering it is a necessary step to complete the transaction. Is the TLS decryption code in every browser non-compliant?
There are fair use reasons to download otherwise-copyrighted videos, and you would need to run this code to do that.
See also: DeCSS
Then the community can be like Popcorn time and say, ahem, no copyright infringing code here.
Or a version could even be released w/out the test cases and or README files that make any reference to any type of "illegal" activities.
Edit: Add to firefox a right-click option "Save Video As".
Git is already distributed and the availability of a lot of clones of the repository out there shows it is working as intended.
A good start would be using Fossil ( https://fossil-scm.org/ ) for its distributed issue tracker, wiki, and forums -- but not for the source code control! Let the code stay on Git as it belongs.
____________________________________Move parts of the infrastructure to decentralized platforms, like a Matrix chatroom, or mailing lists. Link that on the website. As long as the community keeps together, the rest can move around.
That's funny. You must have not been around on the repo for the last six to eight months. It was practically abandoned, with several broken extractors not being addressed, and essential PRs being ignored for months or even years. See this: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
As an example, take the tiktok extractor, which was (and is still) broken for almost a year without even being acknowledged by the maintainers:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
And twitch, a fairly important site, was similarly broken for three months due to maintainers' inactivity: https://web.archive.org/web/20201002044125/https://github.co...
You're likely to get flagged and certainly aren't helping your 'side' of the argument.
That said, you seem offended that someone might point out that an OSS product lacked timely updates. I don't understand your position, would you mind expanding on it?
>The value of youtube-dl wasn't the software. It was the community. It was the ability to respond, within hours, to a change made on any given site. I.e. youtube-dl stopped working? No problem, file an issue, wait a day, solved.
I don't think you need to preach to HN the value open-source maintainers provide. I think it's fair to assume most people on HN understand this.
If you have any info about where youtube-dl peeps hang out now, or what any plans are for the future, please feel free to post it; it would be delightful to know about.
Good luck, whoever you are, youtube-dl community.
Not so fast. Let's not be so quick to mourn a loss that we do it prematurely. Remember, GitHub /has/ to take youtube-dl down at least /temporarily/ in order to be procedurally compliant. That doesn't mean it stays down. Relevant HN subthread about Popcorn Time being reinstated earlier by GitHub [1]:
"""
GitHub isn't siding with anyone here. They're not increasing liability to protect Popcorn Time, they're only following regular counter-notice procedure by reinstating the repositories after 15 days of the MPAA not filing a lawsuit against the owners of Popcorn Time[0,1]. This procedure will also happen with youtube-dl if they decide to counter-notice.
0: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...
1: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-0...
"""
The way you've described it, this isn't a problem with a technical solution. Discouraging or eliminating the ability of an organization to deplatform a software community requires a social/legal solution. Presumably, someone hoped to reignite interest in the social solution yesterday by pointing at [0] gittorrent. Ultimately, I affirm your general sentiment that this can only be an occasional flower in the desert and tall weeds get cut. Any network I can find, RIAA can find.
In the same way, did the RIAA remove youtube-dl from visibility and awareness? just watch.
- Streisand wanted privacy. Once private information is broadly released, it can't be hidden again, and trying to take the private information down just disseminated it more.
- The RIAA just wants to stop a tool from being used to violate their copyrights because that causes them financial damages. Unlike Streisand, they have the legal power, under the DMCA, to go after the creators of those tools for financial damages. It doesn't matter if people make copies of the tool, since they can go after all of the copiers. So, unlike Streisand, they can be made whole for their financial losses.
In fact, I would be surprised if someone from the RIAA wasn't on Github right now recording the usernames of the people forking/PRing the youtube-dl code.
But does it actually cause them financial damages? I highly doubt it does.
GitLab, unlike Github, offers a self-hosted plan. In theory, youtube-dl could self-host, as long as they found a hosting provider that isn't subject to the DMCA and is willing to ignore DMCA notices (even many non-US providers will respond to them) and doesn't have any DMCA-like laws in their own country that could affect youtube-dl (many others actually do, although they're less publicized on places like HN).
This is supposed to be the whole point of the Internet but somehow people are behaving as if the end of the US-hosted GitHub repo is the end of everything!
Most Asian countries don't care much about IP, but what host would they be able to find that users could trust enough to download the software from?
So a few ideas...
1) YouTube alternatives already exist (Libry, PeerTube, DTube, etc.)
2) It should be possible to clone as much content from YouTube as possible using the last version of YouTube-DL while it still works
3) We can migrate the content off a platform that wishes to make it impossible to share and remix work and put it on a decentralized model that does. Even better are platforms which allow you to download it directly without the need for hack tools.
I think the future is simply getting enough people to use the existing alternatives and contribute to them.
Or if someone wants to live dangerously setting up a PeerTube instance outside of RIAA jurisdiction would work just as well.
For now, these kind of things serve as a demonstration of spirit and of the fact that there are many people who do not agree with this interpretation of the law.
Would that solve the legal issue?
(I assume then the download functionality can be unlocked using a few lines of code)
There's no legal distinction. It is a user agent, it's a web tool (agent) acting on your (the user's) behalf.
This means that most developers in the project could contribute in a completely legal way.
don't have to be grey area, offline viewing is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions
The fight should be an ideological one - akin to first amendment protections.
> all it takes is to ... do a couple hours of research at tops.
is this not answering your own question
There's more than one video site that doesn't simply offer the browser a link to an .mp4 or other media file, but uses Javascript to download storage blobs, which aren't referenced by filenames, and then stream them using complex Javascript code. I know for YouTube the Javascript code is important and has to be reverse engineered. The YouTube mobile app probably does the same in native code.
The 'hundreds of people' also comes in because youtube-dl supports much, much more than just YouTube (almost want to say 'hundreds of sites' but I think it's more like 50 or so).
> Is it that complicated to assemble the query string?
Again there's much more going on with some video sites than the query string.
The value of youtube-dl wasn't the software. It was the community. It was the ability to respond, within hours, to a change made on any given site. I.e. youtube-dl stopped working? No problem, file an issue, wait a day, solved.
That is now gone. And the world is simply going to have to accept that it is gone, or figure out a way to get it back. Because that was the sole reason youtube-dl mattered. Not the software.
Yes, this youtube-dl2 thing is certainly ... clever. I guess that's the point, right? "Look! youtube-dl can still be downloaded!" That's why it has 34 upvotes right now, right?
... But so what? In a day, no one will remember it, and it won't have any impact. There's no community here. The community was the key.
I just don't understand why people will do ten thousand mental backflips to avoid admitting defeat here. Yes, go ahead and clone this software far and wide. Make three youtube-dl templates! Etc.
In three months, after youtube-dl is broken on most websites, no one will know where to turn, or how to update it, or how to file issues, or any of the things that made youtube-dl special. Because youtube-dl wasn't software. It was people; the combined effort of hundreds (thousands?) of people. That collaborative space is now gone.
I am mortified to hear myself speak so negatively, with not one positive thing to say. I used to despise people like that. And here I am, doing the same thing.
But you know what? You, personally, can solve this problem. You have the power to build The Next Thing. The thing that doesn't suffer this same fate.
The tech can exist. I urge you to (a) think about a long-term solution, and then (b) devote years of your life to making it a reality.
Until then, though, just accept that youtube-dl is gone, and be done with it.