In my country it's not illegal to download copyrighted movies/music. It's just illegal to share them.

So how was I infringing copyright by downloading something from a public website where copyright holder left the content publicly accessible to anyone?

I'll give you that it may or may not be against ToS of the distribution service, but that's all. But it's not a distribution service causing the ruckus around youtube-dl, but the copyright holder, so that's kinda beside the point.

Thank you so much for the thread here! I would like to share the service on https://streamingsites.com where you will find many good paid and free streaming sites and apps with cool movies to watch. It was really helpful to me, I have to say. I am sure that you will like it a lot too, good luck with it!

Which country would that be for the curious?

What even is the relevance of this? So host a youtube-dl repo and reject DMCA requests then. Github, as it so happens, is American so it has to listen to America.

Relevance is "Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright?"

I'm not pretending if I'm not violating, even if I'm downloading the copyrighted videos.

Well obviously it doesn’t apply to you then. I feel like this is really easy to understand.

The word "any" has a specific meaning. Most people in the world aren't American and most countries at least from my experience allow private copying.

> most countries at least from my experience allow private copying

Most countries in the west allow it in the American sense. Only a very limited few countries allow it in the sense of Spain and Switzerland.

Hmm, where do you get that from? All of Eastern Europe pretty much, Scandinavia, France, Canada, Spain and Switzerland, at the very least, allow you to copy copyrighted content you legally have access to legally.

It's not a "limited few". I think most of the Eastern Europe allows downloading copyrighted content for personal use.

I genuinely can’t believe you’ve decided to do this. I’m ashamed to have even participated in this. I’m outtie.

The only thing I use it for is via Tartube to download videos from my young nephew's channel. He's enthusiastic about making YouTube videos, but doesn't understand the nuance of copyright law or the ToS.

For example, the first thing he did after I helped him set up OBS was to fire up a game + Spotify to make a live stream. I had to explain to him why he's not allowed to stream music like that. He doesn't do it now, but there's still a decent chance his channel that gets 5 views per video will get struck or banned for a similar misunderstanding in the future.

He doesn't know much (under 10) beyond using the Windows Game Bar or OBS to upload something and doesn't have a bunch of spare storage, so he doesn't keep copies of videos anyway. I download them so if he gets banned I have an archive and can help him set up a new channel on another platform.

I know it'll be easy for someone to say "do X, Y, and Z" then, but the reality is that it doesn't take much for it to become "not fun" for younger kids and the opportunity to encourage them to learn valuable skills like video editing, etc. are lost when they lose interest.

AFAICT I have not used youtube-dl to view videos that I couldn't watch on the site (except perhaps incidentally) - but I don't like executing random code on my computer and youtube web is in my view actively user-hostile and last I tried it had serious performance problems.

I had a feeling I was using youtube-dl to avoid ads (not blocks), but after some retrospective, I don't think I would have seen ads on most videos I watched from youtube and I think most were freely available videos, often embedded on author's pages - except people have an understandable habit of hosting them on youtube.

To conclude, I would disagree that we are all using youtube-dl as complained.

To add to this (which I 100% agree with) is the chorus of voices suggesting that their usage was OK because they weren't downloading RIAA content.

Just because someone isn't an RIAA member doesn't mean they don't have copyright over the content they upload to YouTube. There are some YouTube creators that would be totally fine with you downloading their content but you can't assume every creator is the same. Just because a user filmed, edited and uploaded some video from their own house doesn't mean they have any less rights than music or video from major labels or Hollywood studios.

Yes but a tool is not illegal just because it can sometimes be used illegally. If some are OK with it and some are not, then it suggests it has legitimate purpose (though you need to go a lot deeper).

Note, I'm not arguing copying small-label stuff is OK, I'm rather more OK with copying RIAA stuff.

AFAICT, if a DRM prohibits fair use, breaking it is legal. In some jurisdictions. Or at least it should be. That should be enough of a reason for youtube-dl to exist.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that it is illegal or that it should be -- clearly that it shouldn't! I'm simply saying that the program was designed to download content that the site and/or creators didn't want to be downloaded and that the vast, vast, vast majority of people using said program were using it to circumvent those restrictions.

Again, if anyone is guilty of anything, it's the users (like me) who use the program, not the program for merely existing. And frankly, since I don't distribute the content I download or profit from it in any way, I welcome the RIAA coming after me, just as I did 20 years ago when I was a high school student using Napster on her dial-up connection.

There are creators, who are ok with downloads.

> but I really dislike pretending like we weren’t all using the program for the exact purposes the complaint laid out

Speak for yourself. I used it to pull down youtube videos to watch on a 14 hour plane ride over the pacific.

Proxy support is a standard feature of all browsers. It's a necessity because in some network configurations you don't have direct access to internet, but only through a proxy.

I wasn't, and it's not. I genuinely think you're in the minority here (which is unusual, on the 'net, where piracy's concerned).

I don't think this necessarily infringing copyright. There were court cases around timeshifting / tivo that OKd this.

https://www.playon.tv/blog/playon-legal

As long as you don't rebroadcast copyrighted material, you should be fine.

If I'm seeking out to infringe upon a copyrighted video, Youtube-DL isn't even in the top 5 of things I would think to try.