I think there should be a blanket "compare to the ease of semi-automatic weapon acquirement" rule.
If <thing requesting to be censored or removed or otherwise hidden from the plain view of the public> has less potential effect on an individual than a semi-automatic weapon can have, then the request should be laughed at and/or publicly shamed for its anti-freedom, and therefore anti-US, ideology.
Prefaced on the relative ease that it seems semi-automatic weapons can be procured, and their potential for individual liberty restriction.
(Happy for flaws in my logic to be pointed out, I haven't gone particularly in depth in thinking about edge cases here)
Edited to replace "automatic" with "semi-automatic", thanks for the clarification tempfortwitt90.
Auto's manufactured pre-1986 are legal for civilian ownership and use, assuming 1) you are legally allowed to own a firearm, 2) It is not illegal to own an automatic weapon in your state/jurisdiction 3) fill out the ATF Form 4, 4) pay the tax stamp and 5) you can afford a $20k+ gun and ammo. They aren't cheap because they are rare. There are approx 700k in existence in the US.
> Automatic weapons aren't allowed and I haven't even ever seen one even while being around guns for 20 years casually but not THAT casually.
Uh, yes they are, there are just more rules in place for them than other firearms. I've been around guns casually for a similar amount of time, and I've shot fully automatic weapons, and can see them pretty much any time I want at the local range. I don't even live in a "gun friendly" state.
You mean a class 3 transfer stamp. One can legally own a class 3 firearm in the US, yes. There are extra requirements for background checks, storage and so on. Machine guns in particular are expensive and fall out of most people's purchasing power. Ammunition is another thing entirely. For example, this Galil is 23k[1].
You mean an NFA transfer tax stamp. Class 3 SOT is a status given to certain FFLs to allow them to deal in retail sales of NFA restricted items. It does not refer to the NFA items themselves.
Yea, I have a friend in California. There is usually a shootout of some kind every week after sundown.
It's been happening for about 4 years straight at this point. He had to help the police last year due to a small gang bust that happened on his street.
It's seems that things are getting desperate, especially since civilians are apparently needed to help. (He does have a short military service record, which is why the request happened at all.)
(Happy for flaws in my logic to be pointed out, I haven't gone particularly in depth in thinking about edge cases here)
How about instead of "ease of semi-automatic weapon acquirement" (which could be read as critical of gun regulation), the wording was "comparison of semi-automatic guns" - which is clearly aimed at assisting gun users in assessing guns, and is the direct equivalent of the page at issue in intent and wording?
The company in this article may be misguided or deliberately overreaching - but there is also the possibility they have a point.
I think they do have an interesting point, though I also think it fails on the idea that these tools are necessarily used for ill. Gun owners would argue the same, I suspect.
It's more of a baseline level of the trust of the freedom of an individual to choose their own actions in their use of available tools.
I'm not intending to be critical of gun regulation, but it's a great example of a big, thick baseline for comparison because it has precedent for being protected as sancrosanct in the US.
does that still apply when the argument for one could just as easily be the argument for the other?
the real flaw in the reasoning--not the logic, but the reasoning--is thinking it does any good to point out hypocricy. yes, if we can't control guns because of the personal freedom of individuals to own guns then that same reason ought to apply to an individual's ability to access information that's totally lawful for them to access. it's just, you can point out hypocrisy all day, but the fact is what you can do or can't do or what you're supposed to do or have to do is shaped by moneyed interests, not by a pressure to maintain or establish some internal consistency.
> If we turned down every complaint just because it wasn’t deemed as harmful as another complaint that was turned down, few things would change.
Or, maybe we'd think differently about some things that have been normalised and are worthy of re-consideration.
Regarding "few things would change", like all these things, that can be good or bad, it depends on the situation.
> the logical fallacy you’ve stumbled upon is termed as “whataboutism”.
I think they're comparable in this context: "can be used legally, can be used illegally, the freedom of choice is given to the user".
I'm specifically not comparing "why is this an issue whilst animals are still being experimented on by companies that make beauty products". I'm explicitly trying to avoid whataboutism, to provide some logical comparison.
As pasquinelli points out in a sibling comment, the fallacy I did make is that of pointing out hypocrisy and expecting that to be worth anything. Sadly, that's a true fallacy at this point in civilisation. Unfortunately, I'll keep banging my head on that wall until either I'm dead or the wall relents.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your original argument then. I read it as saying this company shouldn’t be allowed to make this request because semi-automatic weapons are still legal. That, to me, is whataboutism.
People turn to programs like youtube downloader because the underlying desire is to have the bitstream to watch (or not) at, and in a form/manner of your own chosing, not the higher level function of "watching it inside this specific end-to-end managed session"
I appreciate this really comes down to "well buy the goddamn content" but the thing is, even when we do buy digital content we're frequently told we only bought a licence to use, not the bitstream itself.
The side fight about google allowing us to upload our own music ("our" -the solecism of that word in the context I am speaking about) and then listen to it and higher fidelity bit products in the cloud, but then change the terms and conditions and worsen the experience to drive us off Google Play Music (which they shut down) into youtube music (which is awful)
I moved to tidal. I find it works tolerably close to my expectations, it integrates with plex, I can handle its playlist format, and it at least formally belongs to (albeit a super rich sub-set) of musicians.
Sounds like the don't understand that official music and video content like rental films are DRMed - youtube-dl and other downloads error out when trying to download DRMed content.
The official music industry position is that all YouTube content is DRMed, whether or not it invokes an EME decryption module, because the URLs are obfuscated. They've been trying to get YouTube downloaders banned for years now on that basis.
I think it's a bit of an understatement to say that YouTube video content URLs are just obfuscated. I don't think this is referring to the youtube.com URLs of public videos, which are public so not "obfuscated", but the underlying URLs that serve the raw video data to the client. These are temporary and generated per-client.
While only paid content and some special videos use the serious DRM that requires browser extensions like WideVine, all YouTube videos require a pretty complex process to download.
Famously, yt-dlp has its own minimal JavaScript interpreter which is needed to evaluate the obfuscated JS script[0] that YouTube provides so the client can determine its actual video download URL. The end of the process does just result in figuring out an obfuscated URL but that URL is temporary and limited per-client. Here's the yt-dlp JS interpreter (though I don't know in which situations it actually needs to use it): https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_d...
There's some obfuscation going on fetching the actual audio and video, the URLs to which are never shown to the user. Those URLs are decoded with a bit of JavaScript. Youtube-dl (and yt-dlp) contain enough of a JavaScript interpreter to evaluate that JavaScript in order to decode the URL.
Since the purpose of the obfuscated URLs and JavaScript is to gate access to the video and audio through a browser hitting the YouTube site where they can't be saved, this scheme constitutes an "effective" copy protection measure. Bypassing this gating mechanism is thus circumvention, illegal under the DMCA.
Surprisingly enough, it's even simpler than that. You can trivially access a direct URL that serves the entire video or audio (they're served as different files).
Just open up DevTools, look for requests to googlevideo.com, find the request with the video or audio (i.e. content-type response of either video/mp4 or audio/webm), copy the entire request URL, remove the range parameter entirely, open the link, and voila!
Those URLs are temporary and locked to the IP that fetched them. You can't effectively share the URLs since they're generated uniquely per-client. Not sure if this changes anything though.
edit: some quick testing confirms these URLs are temporary, but they don't appear limited to the IP that generated them. Your IP is embedded in the URL though, and you can't modify it without breaking the URL, so I'm guessing some IP limits kick in at some point.
I have a browser where I can right click on any video and download it locally.
I do not interact with obfuscated URLS, JavaScript, opening any kind of console or dev tools, and no source code.
I save it just as I would save a photo or a pdf.
How is this circumvention? I'm using a feature offered by my browser and using it in a way intended by the creators. The media files are already on my computer (memory or storage, who cares, its been copied already) I am just renaming some metadata like its directory and filename.
This thread is about YouTube. But the videos you mentioned are fine and no one would call right clicking on a video and downloading it a DRM violation.
But I'm quite confident you can't view or download YouTube videos if your browser doesn't run JavaScript. They require the client evaluate intentionally obfuscated JS in order to determine the video content URL's signature. Whether this counts as DRM or not, I don't know, and I hope it doesn't, but it's clear that YouTube is making it difficult intentionally.
Oh apologizes! When you said you don't interact with JavaScript I thought this meant you didn't run JS but I see your point now.
You can right click on YouTube videos to download them? That sounds slick! How did you set this up? Is something YouTube-specific happening or is it generalized and just happens to work on YouTube? That's totally something I'd like.
I have no idea what that means legally, but to me it certainly supports the argument that doing something so simple clearly isn't bypass DRM/violating the DMCA. (though I'm sure the media industry would argue that whatever browser/extension making this possible is guilty of defeating DRM. )
Not the parent, but most any browser should support this for basic videos. And with JS disabled I think it's only basic videos you'll see.
That is, any <video> HTML element can be right clicked and downloaded, at least in Chrome and Safari where I tested. Interestingly this even works when for `<video controls controlslist="nodownload" ...>` elements where the developer tries to prevent downloading. (in Chrome that removes the download option from the video player's controls, but not from right-click)
One could argue that browsers themselves violate the so called "spirit of the law" because they interpret javascript.
Browser names/standards/whatever are not codified in law. youtube-dl is no different than Google Chrome in this regard. Good luck proving otherwise. If the video had legitimate copy protection and used encryption, etc. I could understand it, but the videos can be pulled by anything that can interpret Javascript. Ask Oracle and Apple how those lawsuits turned out.
That's a video with music from a YouTube channel owned by one of the most copyright lawyered cartoon companies in the world. They successfully made videos of a cartoon mouse stay protected after it was supposed to enter public domain.
Yet, I hear that this video is also able to be downloaded without problem with yt-dlp.
So when these videos are able to download without problem, idk what public videos on YouTube would not be able to be downloaded with yt-dlp.
The piece mentioning "rental films" leads me to believe they're referring to the paid content available on YouTube. Much like Amazon Video or other sites, YouTube allows movies to be rented or purchased. These are unable to be downloaded via programs like yt-dlp.
This is not in reference to copyright. It's in reference to DRM, which isn't present on public videos (but seems to be present on purchased and rented videos).
> Sounds like the don't understand that official music and video content like rental films are DRMed
And that's what I was responding to. Not YouTube Music.
There are plenty videos with music from the original distributors, like those I linked above, on regular YouTube, and which as mentioned will be able to download with yt-dlp.
FWIW I've never seen this happen. In fact, I've handed Youtube Music URLs to yt-dlp and so far haven't had any problems downloading the content. (Admittedly I don't do this often; but at least one of the things I downloaded was a soundtrack by Disney, whom I'd expect to be more strict about this sort of thing.)
I have a script that uses ytdlp to download every item on a Youtube Music playlist I maintain so sync mp3's to my watch. I have never seen it error out from DRM.
I've found that most every song I've searched for on YouTube is on there in one form another (music video, lyrics video, etc). I have YouTube premium, so I don't see ads, and can download the videos.
I mostly consume videogame soundtracks as my background music. My downloader script solves several problems:
- I can play the entire OST on company / otherwise awful internet, where bandwidth is not free
- The player doesn't pause midway through every 3rd track to obnoxiously ask me if I'm "still listening"
- When the OST inevitably vanishes from youtube, I still have it to listen to
(Mind that many of these OSTs are not available for purchase where I live, so this isn't a "vote with my wallet" sort of situation. Nintendo in particular is real bad about this.)
There are other more elegant solutions, but unfortunately the means through which I've purchased the game's soundtrack the normal way (the game itself) is generally a poor means to actually listen to it. I would pay for this service if it existed; where's spotify for soundtracks? But no, it doesn't exist, so tech solutions get to deal with the problems. I do at least pay for YouTube Premium, that's the closest thing, but I'm not going to suffer its various inconveniences if there's a better option for the actual playback.
Dozens and dozens, too many to list. Modern favorites include Celeste, Hades, Ibb and Obb, Shovel Knight, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and Cadence of Hyrule, just to name a few.
No life events really, it's just that when I code I prefer my music to not have lyrics, and soundtracks are pretty much perfect for that. They're often designed as background tracks anyway, and a given soundtrack tends to have consistent atmosphere, good for setting the mood for some task.
Sometimes they're just good songs? For example the soundtrack to Nier: Replicant could go head to head with anything big name Hollywood composers have written.
There's got to be some social reason why you're listening to Nier: Replicant as opposed to something else.
I didn't expect any downvotes, but it seems I hit a nerve.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone, that wasn't my intention, I just don't know anything about the kinds of people who would listen to video game soundtracks. I figured there might be some stories to share.
I think it was just your comment maybe felt like it was implying they were doing something weird or unusual.
I also listen to a lot of video game music when coding. Why? One night, years ago, I got talking to an Uber driver about music and he shared a Spotify playlist of video game tracks. Years later, I generally listen to the full soundtracks of the games he included in that playlist (most of which I’ve never played or even heard of). Thanks Munib!
I sometimes listen to video game soundtracks while I work. Usually older stuff in my case: Legacy of the Wizard (NES), Shadowgate (NES), Final Fantasy IV/VI (SNES), etc.
I don't have a particularly interesting story to share. The music is familiar and brings back good memories; it is energizing; and it is easy to listen to.
In the original game setting, the music would play in the background and hype you up for whatever task you were trying to accomplish. Nowadays, instead of attempting to defeat the Warlock Lord, I'm trying to finish a section of a research paper. Both tasks, at least in my view, call for the same mood.
I listen to video game soundtracks almost exclusively for background music. It’s not that I don’t like mainstream pop music. It’s just that the lyrics get stuck in my head and drive me crazy. Video game music can also get stuck in my head but it’s much less intrusive without lyrics.
I think I also just get bored of a lot of songs if I listen to them too much. I don’t get bored of game music though. I am not sure why.
I read an article that said video game music is ideally suited for when you want music that won't distract you, as it's literally intended for such circumstances. So that's why I mostly go for videogame OSTs when writing, coding, etc. I've played almost none of the games.
The YouTube frontend downloads the video file (the .mp4) from googlevideo.com/videoplayback and adds it to a locally playable playlist.
However, the implementation is really wacky.
If you are online and you go to watch a video that you have previously downloaded, then instead of serving you the locally cached version through the service worker, instead the frontend redownloads the whole video.
Again, and again, every time you watch it.
So if your goal is to save mobile data, or if your goal is to save a video that might possibly be deleted in the future, it is not working.
Does the YouTube app really download the video again each time you play it? I have noticed that downloaded videos always play in full quality. (In fact, that's the main reason I use downloads: play a short, stop it, go to history, download the short, then play it again. Because shorts have no quality control option, and also no download option except from the watch history. Shorts have a very weird and annoying UI. It's also impossible to add them to a playlist.)
its more like download in netflix/spotify where the downloaded content is on your device but not directly accessible, only via the application (or website).
on the other hand, if you have yt premium, you have yt music
The problem is a behavioural one, not a technological one.
Youtubedl is a great technological solution, but does nothing to nullify Google's desire to fight it and enshitten the internet.
If every download was accompanied by a request to the uploader to also upload their video to peer tube or sth (and also consider different funding streams), Google would not only NOT present such obstacles to their users, but they'd bend over backwards trying to improve the experience to prevent losing their viewership to open solutions.
(Well, that and they'd try some shitty legalese on top and lobby for laws against double uploads, no doubt)
If <thing requesting to be censored or removed or otherwise hidden from the plain view of the public> has less potential effect on an individual than a semi-automatic weapon can have, then the request should be laughed at and/or publicly shamed for its anti-freedom, and therefore anti-US, ideology.
Prefaced on the relative ease that it seems semi-automatic weapons can be procured, and their potential for individual liberty restriction.
(Happy for flaws in my logic to be pointed out, I haven't gone particularly in depth in thinking about edge cases here)
Edited to replace "automatic" with "semi-automatic", thanks for the clarification tempfortwitt90.