[reedlaw]

I don't think it's a tragedy because if it was very popular and easy to use YouTube would likely block it. It's directly competing with their own YouTube Red. Also look at popular Linux distros like Ubuntu. As soon as they reach mass market they lose what made them special to begin with and start experimenting with advertising and so on.

[throwaway7767]

> Also look at popular Linux distros like Ubuntu. As soon as they reach mass market they lose what made them special to begin with and start experimenting with advertising and so on.

Well, ubuntu is a company. It was always their intention to become profitable at some point, even if they were willing to operate at a loss to build their market.

I very much doubt debian would go the same way if it got the same level of publicity, for example. But then, as the GP said, it's unlikely to happen because they're a community project without a marketing budget.

[morganvachon]

> Well, ubuntu is a company.

A minor nitpick: Canonical is a company, Ubuntu is their (main) product.

[reedlaw]

What made Ubuntu special was making Linux and other free software easier to use. But when it became too easy they started to take away the "free" part by adding intrusive "features". It's was never a given that as a company they would try to make money that way.

[Kristine1975]

Is it really possible to block youtube-dl? All it does is the same thing Youtube's own HMTL5 player does, except that it saves the video instead of playing it back.

[throwaway7767]

They can change their site around enough to make it not worth the effort to maintain the tool. But it's always a cat-and-mouse game.

[lelandbatey]

It isn't quite possible to block youtube-dl but not other ways of accessing YouTube. However, if you're downloading a lot of videos from one IP address, Google will blobk your IP from accessing YouTube. I know this because it happened to me after I ran a service to allow people to make gifs from YouTube videos, and the way I got them was with youtube-dl. After a while (about two years) they blacklisted my IP.

[nsgi]

Once every two years isn't a bad failure rate. Easy to get another one.

[baldfat]

Certain videos will download without audio then I update youtube-dl and that usually fixes it.

[undersuit]

Youtube could always switch to using EME. Then they get to lock down all unauthorized players. Serve some low res videos un-DRMed to continue allowing embedding.

[cookiecaper]

Yes. It's called a cease and desist.

[MrBra]

From https://www.quora.com/Is-downloading-YouTube-videos-legal/an...

Downloading from YouTube is in most cases not illegal - it could be considered time-shifting for personal consumption, in some cases fair use, both of which are legal in US. In some cases though - like downloading the movies that are paid or videos with limited distributions and not available in the States, could be considered copyright infringement.

What downloading does though is break YouTube's Terms of Service. Even though some courts already stated explicitly that breaking Terms of Service is not illegal, doing so might still get you in trouble in civil court, as you are breaking an agreement between yourself and the company services of which you are using.

If you would be using YouTube APIs for your product, they would probably suspend your access if they wouldn't like your product, so something to consider.

Is it ok to download the videos for offline viewing? Your choice - might not be illegal, but not 'ok' from YouTube's point of view.

Doesn't youtube lose out on advertising revenue this way? Yes - that's is precisely the reason for the rule :)

The big unknown here is that the issue has not been presented in US courts yet, at least as far as I know, so there is no precedent.

Hope it helps.

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Also check http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/is-it-legal-downl...

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Also check http://lifehacker.com/5901773/breaking-a-terms-of-service-is...

[cookiecaper]

Unless his attorneys are going to go up against YouTube's attorneys and drag this through to the Supreme Court (that is, unless he has a few million dollars sitting around earmarked for his lawyer), it can and will be stopped by a cease and desist. If YouTube sued him, they'd probably get an injunction preventing him from distributing youtube-dl until the case was resolved.

Even if it were litigated all the way up to SCOTUS, there is no guarantee that the Supremes would see a video downloading device the same way they see a video recording device (and the ruling that stated home recording was fair use, Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc (colloquially, the "Betamax case"), was itself a controversial 5-4 ruling) instead of the way they see a peer-to-peer distribution network like Napster.

There are many spurious C&Ds sent to people for violations of the CFAA based upon a site's Terms of Use each year; big companies squashing competitors they dislike, or even non-competitors that embarrass the company by providing a service that they've as yet been unable to figure out, etc. The argument that violation of the Terms of Use constitutes unauthorized access under the CFAA has prevailed in court multiple times, and even if it hadn't, once a C&D is received, the authorization is at that point certainly revoked and thus, continued access equates to a violation of the CFAA.

There are copyright and trademark issues here too, even if you can prevail on the CFAA issues (not likely). Judges have ruled that downloading a webpage into RAM in order to extract non-copyrightable data is copyright infringement, because the momentary existence of the entire page in RAM is an unauthorized copy.

Various counterarguments that shift the blame to the consumer, e.g., "we don't actually talk to YouTube's server, we just take a URL that the customer submits via the extension and convert it to another URL, and that doesn't involve accessing YouTube's servers", usually fail (though logically extension developers shouldn't be any more liable than browser developers for their customers' use). One could be considered a conspirator or an accessory to CFAA violations.

So, yes, it could and would be stopped by a C&D unless Richard Branson or some other megamillionaire is secretly bankrolling youtube-dl, and even then, its chances of surviving the legal battle unscathed are pretty slim.

Similar considerations apply to something like PriceZombie, which Amazon just shut down because it doesn't like what the data reveals. The legal situation here is a seriously understated social problem.

You may read this and say it sounds like web crawlers like Google are illegal. Well, yes, they are. The difference is that Google was able to hit critical mass before such a devastating lawsuit was brought, and now they're effectively too big to sue out of existence. If you are making an internet company or product, you have to hope this happens to you before you make someone mad and get sued to death.