[ldarby]

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM

[xdrosenheim]

So it's only a problem if the video has a lot of views and ads? If that's the case, we should ban all Pi-holes, too, as they _can_ be used to block ads. What if I have YouTube Premium, then I don't see ads, so am I allowed to download via youtube-dl?

[ldarby]

> So it's only a problem if the video has a lot of views and ads?

Pretty much, yes. No one is going to hire expensive lawyers to enforce copyright on something not generating revenue, although legally they can.

> If that's the case, we should ban all Pi-holes, too

If Pi-hole is anywhere saying or implying "use us to watch $vendor's content without watching their ads" then yes pi-hole is waving a red flag at $vendor who is now motivated to try to ban pi-holes. If there is a legal action they can afford to take they will.

> What if I have YouTube Premium, then I don't see ads, so am I allowed to download via youtube-dl?

No, downloading is a separate "right" from the right to watching without ads. (Downloading is the first step before uploading elsewhere and literally stealing the ad revenue.) But I think there's a legal grey area if you're watching (streaming) with youtube-dl, without saving the file. I'm sure it's against Youtube's TOS though.

[feanaro]

> literally stealing the ad revenue.

Are you sure you want to say it's literally stealing the ad revenue? I would imagine literally stealing the ad revenue would require robbing the bank or safe where the ad revenue money is stored.

[ldarby]

Yes. You have reduced the amount of cash they have and increased the amount you have by the same amount. If that's not stealing I don't know what is.

Trying to say that's not stealing is like trying to say "Someone hacked into to my bank account and "obtained" my money" is not stealing either just because there was no physical cash involved.

[feanaro]

How does it increase the amount of cash I have? I watch the video, without ads, and I have exactly the same amount of cash as before.

It also does not decrease the amount of cash owned by the content owner or hosting company (apart from hosting costs, but that's the nature of the internet and they are willfully participating in it). The only cost involved is opportunity cost.

[ldarby]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881914

[sudosysgen]

How does watching an ad decrease the amount of money I have?

[ldarby]

> How does watching an ad decrease the amount of money I have?

There are at least 5 parties here:

    · Content producer (spending time and effort making original content that people watch)
    · Platform
    · Advertiser
    · Content consumers
    · Thief

In your comment you're Content producer. The advertiser pays the platform who pays the content producer, and the amount they get is based on the number of views (there are other factors, but I think views is the main one). Let's say they're getting X views per day. Then the theif takes the content and uploads it to their own account with ads enabled, and gets Y views per day, and gets paid for that. No one is going to watch the content on the producer's channel a 2nd time just to make up their view stats, so now the producer is only getting X-Y views per day and hence is paid less.

This is the reason Youtube's Content-ID exists.