Most frequently I do this because I am analyzing the audio, and it's hard to reliably seek in the web player; my offline tools are much better at this task.
Maybe I loaded the link to the ad but never downloaded it; the site didn't require this. Maybe I downloaded the ad but my user agent chose not to display it. Maybe it did get displayed, and my eyes chose not to look at it. It's the same thing either way: I, the user, did not consume that content. All of this content is offered for free on request. There is no moral obligation to consume one piece of content just because it is delivered alongside another.
You're doing the digital equivalent of saying "the pumpkins are right there for me to take, they were delivered outside for me to pick up and place in my car, for free. With no exchange of currency. I can just walk by the store and grab one and walk away".
In other words, you're ignoring both the legal contract (the terms of service) and the social contract (if everyone just grabs a pumpkin and walks away its obviously not going to be profitable and the company will stop offering it, we can only have the social 'nice thing' if everyone plays nice).
Just because its physically possible to do a thing doesn't mean the company consents to you doing it, or you deserve to do it.
You can easily litter. There's nothing stopping you. The ground is right there. You shouldn't though and you're rightfully called an asshole if you do.
If you applied your mentality everywhere, you would say "if you don't want me to litter in this National Forest, there ought not to be any businesses that sell disposable products within a 500 mile radius. It's not my fault you set this up for me to do so."
When reading a magazine, do I need to start from the first page and spend a minimum number of seconds staring at the multiple full-page ads before flipping to an article I might actually be interested in?
Do we need to make VHS tapes and DVRs illegal, if they allow the user to record only the parts of the program they're interested in, while skipping over the commercial breaks?
The pumpkins argument is a strawman: with physical goods, theft and loss of value has occurred. The legal owner of the unpaid pumpkins (the store) is now unable to sell them to a paying customer. When I choose to watch one video, but not another, I have not somehow taken value away from anyone. The original copy of the data is still on the server, ready to be delivered to the next viewer.
The littering argument is a strawman: when I choose to watch one video, but not another, I have not committed an act of vandalism. No person other than me can even be aware that this has transpired, unless I tell someone else about it. What I choose to focus my attention on affects me, and me alone. Littering affects others, making it a poor comparison.
Of course the endgame - which we already see - is embedded video ads and product placement. "Hey youtube I'm going to provide the 10 second answer you were searching for, but first let me tell you how to lose money fast with crapcoin..." I was going to say that music doesn't have that yet but I'm not sure that is the case.
In any case, a download button is basically like a DVR. It is also an obvious feature that
- is easy to add
- is logically part of any video hosting site
- is wanted by most users
DVRs may be legal according to the law, but youtube and other sites spend an extraordinary amount of effort to make it hard for users to record the videos they are watching. It's basically a technologically enforced ban on video recording for the 99% of users who can't easily use youtube-dl or other tools.
> In any case, a download button is basically like a DVR.
> DVRs may be legal according to the law …
The recordability of analog video (in the sense of whether it's OK to do so, not whether it is physically possible—although there was that useless tab on videocassettes), and the acceptability of using a DVR, have not always been settled subjects. To the extent that such things can be quantified, I'd suspect that the amount of conflict over them was roughly comparable if you account for (1) the increased number of people in a position to have an informed opinion and (2) the increased visibility of conflict.
Analog seems pretty well settled in the US for the past ~40 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
But my point is actually a bit different. Weren't VCRs a good thing? Isn't it a bad thing that it is so much harder now to record internet TV than it was to record broadcast and cable TV in the 1980s-2000s?
Yes, but not always. There was a time when it was a new thing, and, when so, it was much argued.
> But my point is actually a bit different. Weren't VCRs a good thing? Isn't it a bad thing that it is so much harder now to record internet TV than it was to record broadcast and cable TV in the 1980s-2000s?
Yes, they were! Yes, it is! But my point wasn't to disagree with you on either of these points, just to observe that it's not that the content owners who went along with previous innovations are suddenly balking at this. Rather, my invocation of even long settled questions like analog recording was meant to point to the fact that content owners have always argued against use of their material that they didn't like, which was any use of their material that they didn't completely control and directly profit from.
I am reminded of the backlash against player pianos, and of Sousa's "The Menace of Mechanical Music." He wasn't wrong of course, though the cat had been out of the bag since the advent of orchestrions, crank organs, and other technology dating back to the 18th century and probably earlier.
Edit - the parent wildly edited their comment so mine no longer makes sense.
While YT might originally have started with the Yous of the world creating content, it has greatly evolved from that where very professional types are releasing to it. Of course YT loves that as it means much more interest from users to their site. However, you know that concessions had to be made to convince music labels to release their content on the platform. We all know what those mean.
That's what automatic SkipMode is for!
https://explore.tivo.com/how-to/SkipMode
Unfortunately:
"Note: The SkipMode feature is available only on certain recorded shows; we hope to make it available for the most popular shows on the most popular channels watched by TiVo subscribers"
A limitation that 0.000% of viewers wanted.
Previously I'd tried to record video and never succeeded, but it (currently) works full-screen on youtube!
Edit: Apparently the audio is just a limitation of QuickTime Player. So... Mac DVRs should work with youtube and possibly some other sites?
I guess the one angle I can see is that by watching the local copy, you aren't seeing any ads that might be on the page/video. But the website could embed ads into the downloaded video.
Really, how is this any different than recording TV on a VCR (or DVR)?
It really isn't. Except that we don't have easy-to-use DVRs for internet TV the way we used to have easy-to-use VCRs/DVRs for broadcast and cable TV.
Each time a viewer watches a video a monetised channel makes a little more money. This money either comes from ads or Youtube Premium fees (Premium viewers are worth significantly more than free viewers).
Programs like yl-dlp bypass this - non-premium users can download ad-free videos contributing a single view to a video and consume that content any number of times. Youtube no longer makes advertising revenue per view, and content creators no long get their cut.
None of this is the case in TV, where ad revenue must be based on metrics other than straight-up view count, which cannot be counted meaningfully.
> But the website could embed ads into the downloaded video.
Many video creators do embed their own ads, but revenue from these ads are often based on view counts maintained by Youtube as well.
Why should they get a cut every time I view a video? If I watch a video saved to disk I use 0% of YouTube's infrastructure and cost the creator 0% in extra expenses.
Do I owe them a cut if I remember part of a video? Do I owe them a double amount of ad watching if I watch the video with someone else? Do they owe me a cut if they repeated a detail from a Wikipedia article I edited or web page I wrote? What about their college history professor that taught them a historical fact, do they need to go back and pay them when they reference it in their video?
For any bit of created media there are hundreds of uncredited and uncompensated second order contributions. The idea that someone making a YouTube video should get compensated every time I watch it is absolutely absurd. They're certainly not tracking down every second order contribution to the video and compensating them in turn.
If you buy a CD you pay for it one time. The artist doesn't get a nickel every time you play a track. You could put it on repeat for 50 years and they'll never get more than your up front payment. The only entity being paid is your power company for running that CD player for 50 years. If you powered the CD player with a solar panel and battery would you feel the utility company needs to be paid for your use of electricity despite not using any of their infrastructure?
You don't send a plumber a check every time you flush your toilet. If I watch a YouTube video once it's simply ludicrous to suggest I need to pay for a second viewing if I'm not using anyone's infrastructure but my own.
And YouTube Premium already offers a Download button. It downloads it in the exact same format as they send it to your device in - m3u8 parts.