I believe they have the actual videos to download, "exclusively for academic and non-commercial research." and you have to request access, https://projects.laion.ai/bvd/bvd-raw-access.html
They say they used yt-dlp and "employ a residential proxy network". But, yeah, youtube seems to now more aggressively block yt-dlp.
That’s a pretty penny on the bandwidth bill alone!
Ha, is it just me or does a “residential proxy network” sound like a fancy way of saying “botnet”?
Re:Laion Big Video Dataset
by MallocVoidstar on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:53AM
(#49460829)
Basically all of them are botnets, yes. They generally claim to have consent but I'm pretty sure 99% of it is "some app the user uses has it buried in a 200 page ToS"-style consent.
No, they are not. Just ask any AI.
Re:Laion Big Video Dataset
by MallocVoidstar on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:20PM
(#49469057)
The companies say they have consent because saying "yeah we'll give you access to a botnet" is illegal.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dis...
>These SDKs, which are offered to developers across multiple mobile and desktop platforms, surreptitiously enroll user devices into the IPIDEA network.
If I install an app with a big ToS and buried in there is "we use third-party monetization SDKs" and buried in there is "welcome to our botnet" they do not actually have my consent.
Nope, they’re different things. Proxy networks like Proxybase [0] use open-source clients and ask for the user’s consent before allowing them to join the network.
It's the "legal version" of botnets, yes.
Re:Laion Big Video Dataset
by maybewhenthesun on Thursday August 27, 2026 @03:53AM
(#49461350)
> youtube seems to now more aggressively block yt-dlp.
Another thing to thank AI for! /s
I was wondering if youtube blocked them a lot and they got a lot of videos from other sources - but no, you can see on this HF page that 93.1% of URls are youtube.com, https://huggingface.co/datasets/laion/BVD-URLs
I am astonished that the success rate is so high. How Youtube didn't block them, I don't know. But I think that this URL list won't age well because youtube will very quickly block any researcher trying to download these videos themselves.