For people who are in favor of DMCA on youtube-dl
Copyright incentivizes production of bullshit and discourages sharing of noteworthy content. Here's a nice text by completely unknown guy about authorship and style. I think it's bit verbose to my taste but he elaborates on things that I'm raising up now.
There are few things you should know.
When something is being displayed on your screen, that screen has a copy of the content. There does not exist a technically strong measure to prevent further copying. For example, you have copy of my content right now on your reading device.
Youtube-dl is on a git-repository. This means that not only there exist hundreds of copies of the mentioned program, the whole project can continue normally despite the strike on the central "hub". This kind of robustness is a hallmark of great, well engineered infrastructure.
I had very easy time getting access to the source code, although I'm not interested about this application as-it. I'm reviewing it now. Here's a little technical review about youtube-dl:
- Youtube-dl contains small scripts that on each website checks where the video can be downloaded from.
- When you give it an URL, it downloads the video behind the URL for you. I suppose it also gives some metadata if you request that. The download functionality is the same as in a web browser.
- If the video is in a weird format, it re-encodes it. This functionality comes from a different program that is also similar to that functionality in the web browser.
Youtube-dl circumvents the problem that websites make their content difficult to access. It's a bit crappy in a sense that I have no idea why we even need this program? In a web browser there's "save as", it moves the content on your machine from temporary store into persistent store and that makes my website accessible for later time.
Try do "save as" on youtube.com, you get some sort of shell that playbacks the video, however the video stays inaccessible. Youtube has broken the "save as" button and youtube-dl is an attempt to fix that button.
Youtube in itself is kind of shitty in a sense that it's corrupting my personal playlists. I wonder which video I had here?
I don't know what I heard and it really bothers me that I do not anymore know which song I no longer hear. I got Genelecs on my desktop yet I'm really discouraged about collecting music or listening it because of you guys. It's just discouraging to look into my playlist that has permanently lost content AND information about what that content was.
I am also discouraged about producing music because there is a local three-letter institution that's racketing Youtube with a legal right to racket money from content that Finnish content producers produce. They use it to "support content producers" by giving it back if you're a registered content producer. I don't know if it's still true, but this is discouraging.
Don't worry though, this is not the sole reason why I'm not producing music. It's just discouraging that there's a grifter trying to gain from it if I were going to produce it. Good thing that instead of having to play with electronic synthesizers I can just focus on ordinary software.
Copyrights suck and I've been wondering how to get rid of copyright laws? I think I know the solution: It's to fucking ignore them. To allow this I drop MIT/BSD-2/BSD-3 license to stuff I produce and CC-license to other content I produce.
This gives you a legal right to ignore my copyright as long as you're nice about it, however I see that my kind of person had no way to enforce copyright in the first place. I see plenty of services that I foresee they eventually try make money off my content and it's a losers fight to fight them. They earn few euros from my content, not enough to sustain me. But they will come eventually back at me and fuck with my presentation of my own content because they've copyrighted some derivation that's "surprise surprise" not too different from what I originally created.
To avoid this from happening I prefer to disregard most copyrighted content so that we won't have copyright some day.
- I disregard patented products and protocols.
- I disregard non-open source content.
- I disregard people peddling their shit services.
- I disregard videos and games etc. This shit is going to be forgotten and it won't be there because the authors sucked and didn't archive it themselves properly. Remember who you were? Lol. I'll mark up the guys who made the free alternatives and promote those guys as original authors instead. What was Nintendo or Sony? Um.. I dunno. They were a laserdisc music video service in 1995?
- When creating software on my own time I also disregard the needs when it comes to protecting intellectual property.
Sure when I get a chance I will still consume and use copyrighted works, but I won't tell about that for anybody else, advertise or write home about it. I won't tell anybody if I enjoyed it or not. I won't even insult them. Best of all, aside from reading this post you won't know that I did this.
Why do I think this works? It's leading by example and this leads to changes in culture. Laws lag behind cultural values. When everything's ready for change, eventually somebody will send a DMCA to somebody again. It will be shunned upon and copyright laws will be refined or repelled.
"But my business depends on IP and copyright!" .. Um. If you started a business after year 2000 and still depend on copyright, where you've been keeping your head? This whole situation is only useful for exploiters and cheaters. If you depend on copyright at this year, then you're an exploiter because I see how futile it is to support copyright and not be an exploiter. Fuck you. Despite this all I'm on your side but please make a business that doesn't depend on copyrights and patents.
Copyright is an amnesia for the society. It completely ignores how culture and technology should be eventually transmitted and passed to the next generations. Everything gets that middle-man who tries to racket off from decades old works. We have that been going on for a while now and people are getting dumber than ever because of this. Nobody knows how to do anything these days.
There are Lots of programmers though! I wonder why?!