People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, where people are not criminalized when downloading content and making copies for personal use (even when copy protected).
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I hate to break it to you but distribution of tools related to bypassing DRM/technical protection measures (which is what the RIAA takedown letter actually cited) is illegal in Switzerland and has been since 2006.
Indeed, you can be sent to prison for it with a maximum tariff of a year in prison. https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19920251/...
youtube-dl does not circumvent any protection measures, so hosting it should not be illegal in any country, including Switzerland.
The only problem here is the absurdity of how the DMCA and similar works in the US, which allows companies to easily spam invalid claims and require content removed unless the victim puts in the work to prove the claim invalid. And, of course, that legal cases tend to be settled not moral and innocence, but by the lawyers paychecks.
> youtube-dl does not circumvent any protection measures, so hosting it should not be illegal in any country, including Switzerland.
That's a different argument to "Swiss law is different to the US and permits this" though. Bluntly the international treaty wording that is integrated into all national laws is vague enough that I just don't know if what youtube-dl does would be found to trigger it. I certainly wouldn't gamble my own freedom on it. I also wouldn't instruct on it if I were the RIAA tbh.
Honestly I suspect if you put it to courts in various territories a hundred times you'd probably find it came out about fifty fifty. It's a badly drafted law, but unfortunately many laws are badly drafted and only clarify themselves through precedent and we don't have enough of that here.
> The only problem here is the absurdity of how the DMCA and similar works in the US, which allows companies to easily spam invalid claims and require content removed unless the victim puts in the work to prove the claim invalid. And, of course, that legal cases tend to be settled not moral and innocence, but by the lawyers paychecks.
Not especially. Ultimately if you have a free hosting service you shouldn't be especially surprised they're not willing to gamble the literal freedom of their staff for you to go to bat on legal cases. You get what you pay for. The DCMA doesn't have a takedown regime in these circumvention cases, it's just that Github becomes jointly liable when it becomes aware, and have obviously looked at it themselves and decided they are not willing to take the risk.
In that regard, the law is pretty similar in the US to pretty much every member country in the world that belongs to WIPO.
Are you a lawyer? If yes, in which country?
>youtube-dl does not circumvent any protection measures
It does.
Where? Can you show me the code?
YouTube uses encrypted signatures as a way of hiding the URL of the video.
https://github.com/l1ving/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/...
Hey, what's that?
https://github.com/l1ving/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/...
So if you open devtools in your web browser and go to the Network tab, where you can manually download all audio and video files -- congratulations, your browser just circumvented protection measures, because it interpreted some javascript. I guess we have to take down browsers too now. This is completely retarded.
That downloads and runs a web page, the same as your browser does when it visits youtube.com.
It's like closing the door and hanging the key next to the door for all to see. Definitely not an effective technical measure to protect the house.
EDIT: And not to forget that Youtube hosts many CC-BY licensed videos which explicitly allow unlimited use (incl. decryption if necessary), and that Youtube has contracts with copyright collectives in most countries so for any user it is save to assume that the video is legally uploaded (and thus download and store for personal use is legal in most countries).
The DMCA does not require the technical measure to be highly effective, or even that it be effective at all.
It simply requires that a technical measure of some sort exists.
Thus, it doesn't matter that it's hanging the key next to the door; it is sufficient for the purposes of the DMCA that there is a closed door.
> (and thus download and store for personal use is legal in most countries).
That's a highly questionable statement. Certainly, most European countries do not have such a law in all circumstances, and it's dependent on if the personal use copy is made of an asset you are licensed to have permanent access to (which you aren't of a collectively licensed work) or a broadcast for timeshifted purpose (which an on-demand asset isn't).
I love how that last line of the highlight is line 1337.
youtube-dl has circumvention code needed to download copyrighted music from major publishers, which have a slightly different cipher than the rest of the site. They even had integration tests for this code path.
The alleged "circumvention code" is just a JavaScript interpreter.
I don't think youtube-dl violates any of the points in the referenced paragraph.
EDIT: also note that it states "effective technological measures" ("Umgehung wirksamer technischer Massnahmen" in German); if there is no (effective) protection measure such as in Youtube then the referenced sanctions obviously don't apply (nulla poena sine lege).
Indeed, what is an effective technical protection measure is highly debatable.
The only problem is the only likely chance of definitively finding out in your territory is to have a criminal action against you and see if you win in court.
> the only likely chance of definitively finding out in your territory is to have a criminal action against you and see if you win in court
The plaintiffs would have to prove that the videos that can be downloaded with youtube-dl are protected by an objectively effective technical measure and that the tool circumvents this protection, that the accused was aware of the effectiveness of the measure and the illegality of his actions.
I studied law at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and would be calm in face of such a criminal prosecution. The plaintiff's risk of litigation would be considerable and the defendant would have little to fear.
In Switzerland.
youtube-dl was, and still is, hosted in the U.S. And the DMCA is not as lenient as the laws of Switzerland.
And on that note, neither are the IP treaties that most Western countries have made with each other, Switzerland included.
This subthread is about Switzerland, see above.
And the action is also on thin ice in the USA. The assumptions on which the takedown is based on are very questionable. I am curious to see how the proceedings that have now been initiated will turn out.
No, the RIAA notice is on pretty solid ground in the U.S.
You'll note that organizations like the EFF haven't weighed in on this like they normally do when content owners get overzealous with enforcing IP controls, nor have many of the usual IP law commentators.
And more importantly, the youtube-dl creators would have already filed a response if the RIAA notice was as week as so many people in this thread have claimed; they've had a week to do so. The fact that they've yet to respond indicates that either they or the lawyers they've spent the last week talking to are having difficulty finding a response to the RIAA's notice. (This doesn't mean that they won't file a notice, just that the issue is not a piece of cake like so many people on HN believe.)
Is there a major git host located in Switzerland? I guess one could rent a VPS there if not.
Nothing like the Github or Gitlab services I know of, but there are a couple of hosters where you can rent a (virtual) server.