Yt-dL is surely nicer and more convenient, but from an evidence standpoint, a one time $500 (to go wild) setup should have you covered, no?
(Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)
* the quality drop; recompressing, non-matching frame rates, non-matching resolution--all the same goes for audio. You're very likely clipping (losing) data. This is assuming you're doing screen-capture. If you're literally video taping a monitor you will get moiré in the video, room tone in the audio, losing any stereo separation, and other audio/video artifacts.
* performance; must be done in real-time, cannot queue up multiple sources. This is likely the biggest efficiency killer and makes things 100x more labor intensive.
* reliable Internet; if you get a blip or have a slow connection you have to hopefully catch it and start over. With youtube-dl you can pause, resume, confirm even on the slowest, spottiest connections.
* metadata, organizing, indexing; likely hand-typed separately, prone to error, prone to not knowing if you've done that video already.
* Chain of custody; grabbing the original video allows you to prove two identical copies match (using file hashes or other comparisons) screen recording makes that difficult to impossible to confirm--maybe with fancy AI you'd have to run by the courts?
> the quality drop; recompressing, non-matching frame rates, non-matching resolution--all the same goes for audio.
Are you trying to preserve quality or prove something? My response was in context for "gathering evidence" but not police work, and not archival quality. Would such a copy cause your problem to prove libel, copyright infringement, illegitimate disclosure, etc?
> performance; must be done in real-time, cannot queue up multiple sources
Can most definitely queue up multiple sources. Just make a youtube playlist and record it. Yes, it takes "real time latency", you'll take 10 hours to download 10 hours of video in general -- that's not an issue for evidence or gathering in a non law-enforcement context.
> metadata, organizing, indexing; likely hand-typed separately, prone to error, prone to not knowing if you've done that video already.
Again - consider the context of my answer, NOT archival quality anything. The "cc" stream GP mentioned, which can be searchable etc - has also seen many revisions for many files when the Google STT algorithms are revised, and with corrections.
> Chain of custody; grabbing the original video allows you to prove two identical copies match (using file hashes or other comparisons) screen recording makes that difficult to impossible to confirm--maybe with fancy AI you'd have to run by the courts?
You have no chain of custody. You can prove two downloads are the same, but YouTube does not guarantee they keep the file the same (indeed, they've modified files several times, changing formats and even remastering old '80s videos). If a file is later pulled (which is what GP was talking about), what are you going to compare it to?
Chain of custody is law enforcement business. They'll get the files from YouTube directly, with affidavits and statements about it and any modifications, if they need it in court. You are going to civil court, and youtube-dl is not making your evidence more valid than a screen recording.
Did I expect anyone, ever, to propose that? Let's just say, 2020 is full of surprises. I want off this wild ride.
Various detectors are more or less thwarted by it. It actually surprised me how strong the artifacts from some GANs are - they can survive several passes of re-encoding, but accuracy does suffer.
But I still need the raw 720/1080 stream for training.
But when I find myself on a locked down computer - e.g. watching a movie on an AppleTV, or when I was shown surveillance video but was refused a copy for some bureaucratic reason (or it required a different license to export, reasons were unconvincing) - I use a mobile device.
Filming the screen, means that in order to fake it, you have to setup something that routes youtube.com to your own fake version of youtube, before filming. To me, that sounds much harder than say "this file was downloaded from here on that date"
I kind of expect a serious investigator to archive these materials just for the sake of it. I don't expect them to make it harder on themselves for no good reason.
It's just a GitHub repository which is lost, not ytdl itself.
I am not saying it’s as convenient (more options >> less options except for analysis-paralysis). But I don’t understand how it tips the scale to making any archiving or evidence gathering unusable or uneconomical. (I am not saying GP is wrong - just want more explanation so I can understand)
Suppose there is some legitimate non-infringing use of some material. Interoperability, law enforcement use, fair use, accessing public domain material which is distributed using the same technological measures, whatever.
You create and distribute a piece of software to interface with the material for those purposes.
It's the same piece of software as one designed for any other purposes, because the software has no knowledge of your intent and your intent has no technical effect on its operation.
If that is allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a dead letter? If you make the tool available for non-infringing uses, the tool is available.
But if that isn't allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a contemptible offense against all of those important interests? And possibly unconstitutional as a result?
Now, if what you really mean is that is is vague, then I agree. But I don't see any case for it being incoherent.
Except that it isn't, as already discussed, because the code doesn't change based on the design intent. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's used for interoperability or fair use or to rip songs for The Pirate Bay. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's produced by a university researcher or the developer of a media player app or a literal sea-faring pirate with a parrot and a peg leg who is the founder of a political movement to abolish copyright and promote civil disobedience.
But prohibiting a specific person (who may have had a particular intent) from distributing it is incoherent (or at least futile) if it means you can just get some other person with some other intent to distribute the exact same thing. And it's also incoherent to say that the other person can't distribute it even if they genuinely do have a different intent, if the intent is supposed to be what matters.
None of which depends on what you judge a give person's intent to be after the fact, because it's a defect in the legislation, not the judgment in any particular case.
It requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for circumventing technical measures in place to prevent infringement. Just infringing copyright isn't a violation of the section.
A tool designed to be used by police and marketed towards police is legal, as its intended purpose is not infringement. A tool advertised as "hey, kids, use this to infringe those copyrights" is totally different, even if it's literally the same tool.
Moreover, that would save the law from being a dead letter in the sense that there would be circumstances when it could theoretically be enforced (i.e. when someone is overtly marketing it as a tool for infringement), but wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that? It's still exactly the same tool. And then what does the tool have to do with anything anyway, when what you really have is a law against speech promoting copyright infringement?
HN is not a court of law, most people here are not lawyers, let alone well-paid and competent lawyers like the ones the RIAA can afford.
> wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that?
Sure - which is why you're not seeing many ads for tools to steal cars or pick locks. But it's not only about the way the material is promoted, it's also about how it's obtained, whether the seller could reasonably know what it would be used for, and a bunch of other stuff.
You can't look at this from a binary perspective; despite depictions in popular media, the law is typically not about "aha" moments, but rather about putting a number of coherent pieces together to paint a certain picture.
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As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (i.e. that has been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion to youtube-dl.
A note on the service that they don't host the infringing content, but just link to those who do, is evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. The same goes for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization.
Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the legitimate purchase of content.
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* youtube-dl is not just for Youtube (ie. google). It supports heaps of sites, and youtube is probably less likely to have the sort of content I'm referring to than twitter, pornhub, liveleak, who knows.
* I am in Australia, so for a subpoena (or similar) my friends would need to issue an MLAT request, which would indeed take a very long time. In fact, this often does happen, but in the meantime a formal preservation request (to the service provider) and a local copy (via something like youtube-dl) are important steps.
* Many investigations don't go to court, for a litany of reasons (that's a pun I guess). In such cases, a subpoena isn't in context: law enforcement have to investigate what has happened, to figure out if it needs to go to court.
* Some investigations are important but do not meet the 'serious crime' threshold for forcing companies or parties to provide information. If you can imagine being the victim of a minor crime, that someone filmed and put on twitter, I'm sure you can imagine the local police may want a copy of the video before the tweet gets deleted - but also know that there will never be an international cooperative justice process. It's just a local issue.
* Publically posted video is very common and often important, and it is not surprising that the police need a tool to download it. There are so many sites and web browser technologies, and the cops are not efficient spending their time coding youtube-dl equivalents.
I feel quite strongly about youtube-dl being taken down for copyright infringement by the RIAA, but have tried to answer in an informative way. Sorry if it comes across harsh - no ill will intended :)
If I have a subject who has relevant video on a service like YouTube, and I decide to go the subpoena route, here's the process:
- Find the exact video, document the URL, Content creator's account name, and video upload date.
- Submit a preservation letter to Google to ensure the video will still be accessible when the subpoena is auctioned.
- go to my prosecutor/legal team to determine what jurisdiction the subpoena has to go through. It could be the county I'm in, the county the subject lives in, the county the video was uploaded in (unlikely), or the county where Google hosts the video.
- draft the subpoena and get it reviewed by whichever judge/magistrate applies.
- wait who knows how long for the subpoena response, hopefully it comes back with the real video and important content.
- face defense arguments in court that my subpoena was improperly obtained/submitted
No, it doesn't. And that "forever" are human rights that are established and should require a subpoena to contest.
(I can imagine lots of cases how this could be used to fight police corruption.)
If you post a video of murdering someone publicly - no subpoena should be required.
In this thread we're talking about publicly available data.
The fact that the path that works for non-public data is burdensome is good because it reduces abuse. Demanding that it be used for public data too just creates more pressure to undermine the (already insufficient, IMO) protections that exist for private data.
If you don't want your videos to be used against you in court, I would recommend not publicly broadcasting them to the entire world.
I think we can tell what the RIAA thinks about that.
Being public doesn't mean publicly owned. It means publicly accessible... Like your local shopping mall.
If we have to play by those rules, LEO should too. Boo hoo if it's harder.
They haven't shown anything. They made a claim. We'll know what rules we have to play by if it comes to a court ruling.
Aside: Wonder how gitlab handles DMCA requests.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/dmca/
For a self-hosted instance, obviously it would be different. In that case, I assume the notice would go to the webhost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(I understand the environment variable convention but if you think about the reason for the above rule, it's clear what needs to take precedence.)
Imagine if source code was posted on some type of blockchain like ETH2.. Or a decentralized file sharing service, like IPFS. I wonder if websites or self hosted interpreters using some kind of services like those would make serving a take down request nearly impossible.
Well for now we can pay m$ to host code in ways people rely on for the long term. Until, they don't and the codes all taken down in something analogous to modern book burning.
Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence.
Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.