We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs! The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of the music industry with how easily they can be used to create unauthorized copies!
i love how dead kennedys literally left one of their cassette tapes sides blank and printed "Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help." on it.
Well, following their logic behind DMCA compliant, I guess fiddling long enough with developer's console on Chrome or Firefox would allow you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube the same way youtube-dl does.
sed s/youtube-dl/firefox/g and voilà, DMCA for Firefox ready to submit...
Let's go further! Let's DMCA the Linux kernel because it runs Firefox/youtube-dl/curl/wget!
The logic behind the DMCA complaint is that youtube-dl is “marketed … for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work” [1], not that it “allows you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube.”
The hell it isn't. A unit test is a bench test for one particular functional unit. It's a check function. If you accept that tests as carrying intent, then I demand every weapons researcher or biologist to be arrested this instant. Clearly they are only out to murder people. That is patently ludicrous.
> If you accept that tests as carrying intent, then I demand every weapons researcher or biologist to be arrested this instant. Clearly they are only out to murder people.
Well, what do you think weapons are for? I’m not saying arrest them but that isn’t really a great example, considering the sole purpose of weapons is to kill or destroy. Using weapons for anything other than killing or destroying is basically a secondary usage.
One of the tests in question extracts the m4a audio file of a Taylor Swift song [0] that has nearly 3 billion views and shows me 2 ads before playing. That's a lot of revenue for UMG, who I guess are a bit unhappy with this mechanism that youtube-dl provides of listening to it without having to watch the ads.
I'm not a lawyer, and even if it was I could never tell you that anything would be "ok" in this kind of situation. But I suspect that it would be better off.
> Why stop with torrent clients? They should ban all browsers, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!
We're talking about an industry that normalized rootkit DRM and persuaded pretty much all hardware manufacturers to implement expensive encrypted pipelines to lock you out from trying to even take a glimpse of content playing.
After a few years of working near this industry I really cannot overestimate how rentseeking and scummy every single part of it is. They will abuse you without a second thought if there's a cent to be made.
All computers with the option to install applications or unlocked/unlockable bootloaders can be used to make copies of copyrighted materials. And it certainly happens a lot.
But then, when secure boot came, Microsoft was forced to grant every owner of an Intel compatible computer the right to unlock it for antitrust reasons (luckily).
So were is the borderline between a legal tool and an illegal tool? Well, lawyers will find out...
In the meantime youtube-dl needs to be distributed some other channel. Which of course might raise the risk of back-doored or otherwise poisoned version floating around.
Why stop with browsers? With enough creativity you can use any network protocol to download copyrighted material, so they should just ban computer networks.
So what does it mean when someone says "he got off on a technicality"?
There have been plenty of cases where exactly that happened.
There's the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, and many are persuaded that when someone hasn't violated the letter of the law, they haven't violated the law.
Judges, lawyers, and juries will vary on this, but in many cases the letter of the law will carry the day, and people will in fact "get off on a technicality".
Because browsers and network protocols were not created with the primary purpose of violating copyrights...
Intent matters in the law.
After after all, two guns can be physically and functionally identical, but if one is purchased to be used in a conspiracy to commit murder then it's evidence of a crime, and the other gun is still just a gun.
They would prefer it if you only used DRM input and output devices that only run approved code rather than general purpose devices that can run any code you can conceive of or download [1]
Same for any kind of information exchange, like speech or the written word. Common sense says their argument doesn't hold water at all. Should courts decide in favor of the takedown that'd just go to show how broken our legal system is. Let's hope not.
And you don't even need a browser for that. Your operating system comes with TCP support and that in itself is enough. (OK, some of them may probably be willing to build in all kinds of restrictions, so maybe they can get a RIAA stamp.)
We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs! The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of the music industry with how easily they can be used to create unauthorized copies!
Oh wait.