YT-DLP is Being Treated as a Piracy Tool By The IFPI
https://itsfoss.com/news/yt-dlp-ifpi-piracy-watchlist/Open linkView original on lemmy.caSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.cahttps://itsfoss.com/news/yt-dlp-ifpi-piracy-watchlist/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
118 replies
It would have made an interesting ST: TNG episode where the Federation orders the Enterprise to attack a planet where the National Potato Council claims there are pirates writing replicator software to distribute free food. Meanwhile, the B plot is Data struggling to manage his subscriptions to holodeck sims.
Tricky to make that work in the (moneyless) Federation. Maybe the Enterprise gives a Whateverian ship asylum against the Ferengi just inside Federation borders, and then the Nagus (Wallace Shawn's Nagus, of course, I can't imagine that Rom would do such a thing) demands that they extradite the Whateverians to face prosecution for theft. An investigation ensues, and it turns out that they didn't actually take anything physical, they just pirated a replicator pattern for the Whateva root, the root of an extinct plant which the people of Whatever III desperately need and are running out of. So now Picard has to figure out how to not cause an interplanetary patent incident and still make sure that the Whateverians get what they need.
The B-plot is pretty solid, though. That can basically stay as-is.
Bypassing ads is already technically piracy as the concept of piracy is the idea you are stealing potential revenue.
So YT-DLP would be piracy aswell since it denies them revenue by allowing you to download the media.
Just wait till they start sueing people for each YouTube clip they download like they did with mp3s.
However, If you incorporate... feel free to pirate everything, unless youre Chinese...
No, piracy is about distributing unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Revenue has nothing to do with it.
Thats what it used to mean for physical shit. For digital media is purely just denying revenue. Also yarrrrr
No, piracy is about "Yaaaarrrr!"
Ok, so add YouTube to the list.
This is the equivalent of calling right-clicking on a picture piracy. Utterly insane.
There are scripts on some sites that attempt to block right-click saving, you know.
Next up: uBlock Origin filters get called piracy
Fyi, if you didn't know: Shift + Right Click in Firefox always brings up the context menu, even if JavaScript tries to block it.
They already have been
Omg, web browsers will be next!
You joke but killing general purpose browsers to sandbox everyone into curated apps would give most middle managing MBAs a priapism.
more than that, they want it filtered through their ai agent
Nice use of the word priapism.
Github after that
Git never needed GitHub and Microsoft is terrified people will remember that.
You joke, but even the browsers capable of parsing the nightmare JS calls, are restricted in resolution on free platforms. Not to mention any niche browser.
People have actually gone to prison for using the “view source” button in the web browser before. The RIAA mafia is deeply unserious.
There’s an EU piracy watchlist? Did anyone submit Facebook to it?
Sounds like a spam this agency project.
...Hmmmm.. It should. If you read the linked article it claims the group lists X, discord, telegram and vimeo as sites that encourage infringement, so there's that.
Company happly sends media to my computer when requested.
Company angry my computer do what I want with the media it got.
All of it is strings of ones and zeros that are instructions that tell my computer what to display.
Its basic freedom of speech. Imagine not beign able to give instructions in other contexts because you didn’t pay to use the words.
wait until they hear about vhs recorders 🙄
of course they are crying about piracy again.
the music industry cries about piracy every time their sales slump.
Couldnt possibly be 90% of music is copy and paste slop. not to mention the rise of actual AI slop "music"
I don't think these assholes understand that its a VERY useful tool for archiving the internet, which helps keep powerful people accountable. We must fight to keep this tool so that journalists and activists can keep speaking truth to power.
They are the powerful people, and they know why they don't want to be kept accountable.
These assholes understand that perfectly. They represent rich and powerful people who don't like being held accountable, and who treasure the ability to keep selling you shit without you actually owning it.
Yeah, the content mafia really hates everything that makes us actually own something.
Because if you have it, they can't charge rent to use it.
and they can't keep collecting your privacy data to sell when you try to go watch it again
Oh man, I just had flashbacks to the days we used to refer to the riaa/mpaa as the MAFIAA
Man fuck them. A garden hose is a tool, just because I can choke my asshole neighbor to death with it doesn't make it a garrote.
This sounds like one of those Internet comments that eventually winds up getting entered as evidence
It's ok, I already told the FBI agent watching me that it was a joke.
In Sweden you are allowed to make copies for private useage. I can record and save whatever piece of media I want, as long as I don't distribute it to other people and the material itself is not illegal (abuse material for example).
The problem in cases like this is not the copying, but the ability to bypass DRM. Creating and distributing tools that can do that is illegal in the US due to the DMCA. I think there are similar laws in the EU but I'm not sure.
Bypassing copy protection is not a crime in my country. The DMCA is a joke here and TPB creators knew it. Unfortunately the media companies used their threats of sanction on Sweden if they were not persecuted. Straight up maffia tactics.
Edit: TPB wasn't really relevant to copy protection but I brought it up because of DMCA. TPB never hosted any copyrighted content and should not have been held liable.
I grew up in a town with a huge standing weekly flea market everyone knew about where everyone knew you were buying stolen stuff, fake IDs, bootlegs, etc. The way I finally convinced my family that TPB wasn't illegal was by asking them if it was a crime to tell someone where the flea market was.
The funny part is if you could buy fake IDs then technically it was a crime to tell them where the flea market was.
Knowing where to commit a crime is not illegal.
Aiding and abetting is though my dude.
Telling someone how to do a thing isn't aiding and abetting.
If I tell you that you can kill someone by shoving them off the Brooklyn Bridge, I'm not potentially taking part in a homicide.
No, drm of that kind is also illegal
DRM of what kind is illegal where?
You're going to get downvoted because pirates, by and large, feel entitled to other people's labor for free. I've been pirating for two+ decades and I'm fully aware that what I'm doing is wrong. It'd be great if people could stop trying to justify their actions.
Its actually the capitalist class that feels entitled to other people labor for "free", or grossly underpaid
Their labor was already exploited before it became a product for you to download
Think of the poor billionaires!
Piracy is morally right, we don't owe them anything.
We see that copyright only matters to them if it is convenient, the latest example is training AI on copyrighted works without licenses. But there are many others.
It is also ironic that copyright was originally created to protect small authors from having a big corporation steal their creation and profit from it. Which is still happening. This is also the reason why originally copyright supposed to last 14 years. Because it was thought that 14 years was long enough time to have monopoly on idea
Only after corporations started bribing politicians they extended it to such ridiculous times and completely changed what copyright really was.
I didn't make a statement on the morality of piracy, though. I only stated a fact about the DMCA and said I'm not sure what the EU situation is, hoping someone might know and add to the discussion. If people are downvoting me because they think I said piracy is bad, as you believe, then they are imagining things.
Personally, I think piracy is totally fine most of the time. The copyright system is immoral and does much more harm than good. Case in point, downloading a video from youtube should be allowed and the DMCA is working against the interest of the average person in making it illegal.
Now can the IFPI treat genAI vendors as "commercialized piracy outlets"?
When I first got into emulation as a very early teen, I've heard a rumor about an admin of an Amiga ROM site being shot to death for piracy. However, nothing similar comes to against those who do it on an industrial scale, specifically to destroy a portion of the human experience.
The justice system will continue to be two-tiered until the ruling class decides that they want to stop being corrupt, sorry
The justice system will continue to be two-tiered until the
rulingEpstein classdecides that they want to stop being corrupthangs from the trees, sorryFixed that for you.
Thank you, I like what you did with it
That's just politicians caving to their financial sponsors. The American entertainment industry tried and failed to make the same case against VCRs in the 1970s, and audio cassette recorders in the 1960s. Downloading by itself isn't "piracy".
Nah, bro. I'm using it to train my ai. Trust me bro.
cassette tapes are going to melt their brains
Wait till you learn that most European countries require you to pay a protection fee to these fuckheads every time you buy anything capable of storing data including hard drives, SD cards, blank CDs etc. just because you could maybe store pirated music on them.
Man, the industry pushed so hard into cd's to get away from tape and recordable media.
It’s not like you couldn’t burn CDs back in the day from limewire rips. I still use SoulSeek.
When the CD format was ratified, the media consortium did not foresee home CD production. It was a mass-production, high-tolerance plastic-pressing affair.
Chucklefucks. Some unsigned artists, especially underground rappers, uploaded their tracks to Youtube, long before Facebook video and Spotify. That I also use DLP to grab very interesting videos before they can be unlisted or deleted.
Which of course ends up being a boon for said underground artists to actually get a chance to spread via word-of-mouth. Can't have someone actually have success and creative freedom, no sir!
Allow me to explain why piracy can’t die in a way buisness majors can understand.
She’s gorgeous. She’s fantastic in bed. She pegs you and won’t tell anybody. You want to marry her.
You will be subjected to nonstop crazy bullshit for the rest of your life. She’s no longer fun, just expensive. She’s abusive. Nobody is happy.
And now she has ads.
You drink more. You stop coming home after work until she’s asleep. You refer to local hookers by their legal first names.
One day she throws a clot and dies. And you feel relief. The abuse, the lies, the manipulation, the pretending to be happy is finally done. You are free.
This in an anolgy for streaming services.
😆
You’ve met thier kids…
Yeah butt no more pegging 😔.
Sniffies.com
An association has to always look like they are doing something for their members. that's all.
OK. Is ffmpeg piracy or are they gonna continue to use it and not fund it?
There aren’t enough bullets going through their corrupt faces, apparently.
IIRC Google researchers have publicly used it for machine learning experiments. For example, for grabbing a sample video as part of some demo code.
And here we see copyrighta blightus, the copyblight firm to the rest of us, looking to expand it's territory.
This species is, of course, an invader to the quiet widely watched waves; an invasive element that can, and will, upset the local ecosystem.
If you listen closely, you can hear the call of these parasites; it sounds a little like "you wouldn't steal a car".
Ridiculous horseshit, fuck these clowns.
How soon before WINE is included in this?
Valve is heavily involved with that project now. Nobody would dare tilt at that windmill now.
Bold of you to assume that the boomers at these outdated organisations know who valve is
At least Valve has money to get a great defense lawyer for this not to happen.
That’s my point. The boomers don’t need to know who valve is. The lawyers know.
Of course it's the music industry...
Can it download any of those paid movies? That might be the only thing that makes sense
It cannot.
Then it's not piracy.
It's not piracy anyway even if that worked as the owner isn't being deprived of what they own.
That's not what piracy is, though. That's why piracy isn't theft.
Piracy is an act of robbery on the high seas.
Robbery is larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat.
Larceny is the unlawful taking of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it permanently.
In this context, we are referring to the "Copyright or patent infringement" definition, which is not theft.
That's not directed at you specifically.
technically it can, but not for free. if you have a subscription to access the media, the site is supported and drm-free, and you have a way to pass the account credentials to yt-dlp, it will download. if it plays inside a browser with drm disabled, yt-dlp can likely get it for you. you could download stuff from crunchyroll that way before they added drm. if it does have drm, you can still download the encrypted stream and decrypt it later with something like gpac if you have the keys, but that's a bit besides the point.
however there's very little supported sites now that have paid subscriptions and no drm. and in neither case is yt-dlp circumventing anything, it cannot access something you had no access to in the first place.
Even free streaming services like Tubi often use DRM for large portions of their library. So in turn nearly every paid streaming service also uses DRM.
I would expect it can as long as you can provide a cookie for a login that owns the movie. But you know what can also do that? Firefox with OBS running, it just takes the full runtime to download.
AFAIK, most streaming services have some sort of a DRM system that won't let you screen capture a video. Not like it is impossible to circumvent. Not even hard, I may say. But it is still there.
I mean technically speaking unless you have permission of the copyright owner to download their video any tool you use to download (almost) any YouTube video would be a piracy tool.
Your web browser necessarily has to download a YouTube video in order to display it to you. It just doesn't provide an easy way for that data to be more than ephemeral.
Going to YouTube and having your browser download the video so you can watch it would be an approved way to download the video, making further copies of it more than likely not.
YT-DLP doesn’t make further copies. It downloads a video file from YouTube the exact same way your browser does.
Nnnnnnope. Time shifting.
Time shifting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting
It's why DVRing is legal. This tool is no different functionally than a screen recorder pointed at the video. That's how they used to work, but that changed once TV went digital (they don't reencode, they store the pre-compressed segments.
Ok that's fun I was unaware of this term. It's kind of interesting though to apply the term to something like digital streaming media that's already, for lack of a better term, pre time-shifted.
Interesting idea. If i subscribe to a streaming service for one month, i can save 31 days * 24 hours of content for later viewing. That would keep ke going quite a while since i only have the time to watch tv for a couple of hours per night...
Doesn't parse, please make it make sense.
I thought this said the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry and got really confused lmao.
Well, that particular federation can't be mad at yt-dlp right now, because PornHub support is broken right now. It appears. I've been told.
The version 2026.08.19 - the current version in the Gentoo repo - works fine on PornHub. I just tested it.
They can suck the skin off my dick
The Who?
I mean, yeah? Isn't that what we're all using it for?
Yes, but no one likes to think that. Read other comments, people seemingly think downloading or distributing copyrights-protected material (just like movies) is perfectly legal. There really isn't many videos on YouTube that uses public domain or creative commons.
EDIT: The downvotes literally prove my point. Irony right here.
And yes, while some educational content uses CC, it's by no means that common.
Tons of science and education content does.
Lotta people seem to think its not theft of some sort to skip the payment part of the agreement (the ads) to consume their media.
How is skipping ads a form of theft?