Only in the eyes of the law. The RIAA can no more stop people from downloading YouTube videos than the DVD CCA could stop people from cracking CSS. Pirates haven't lost yet, only ever been delayed, and rarely by all that much.
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.
No they're winning slowly. Fifteen years back everyone I know could easily download mp3 from various p2p applications. But now the present generation of youngsters seem to think it is Spotify/Amazon or nothing. They haven't even heard of p2p. Similarly Netflix is slowly eating away at torrenting.
The platform owners can and will tighten the noose gradually. End users and hackers have much less power than they like to imagine, especially the latter segment.
Will they keep providing the media like that once the threat from piracy is gone? Even right now most video platforms only offer the lowest quality to people on platforms free from DRM.
I can easily get a 4k h265 video packed in mkv to play on my Linux laptop. I haven't tested lately but a while back Netflix would serve 720p max.
Spotify has been very cool, going as far as delivering a .deb package and Ubuntu repo for their client. However, Rogan podcast doesn't work on Linux because it includes video. Will it before they go exclusive? Maybe, maybe not. I can easily youtube-dl the latest podcast and watch it on Linux.
Not really, because Spotify/Amazon/Netflix aren't giving you media, they only rent it out to you. They can and do retroactively take away access to any piece of content, while keeping the money.
They're not renting media to you, they're selling you an access license to something they may or may not have at any given moment. Literally Nothing-as-a-Service.
Spotify, Netflix, etc., are possible today because the copyright owners created streaming licenses that recognize that ephemeral access to content is a different use case than downloading. (Streaming licenses are cheap compared to download licenses; my old employer streamed millions of hours of music from the Big 3 labels for a total annual cost of less than $2500.)
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.
People stopped torrenting because Netflix and company made it extremely easy and more affordable to consume a wide range of media. Affordable enough that the hassle of torrenting was no longer worth it. If that changes, you'll see a resurgance.
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.
Assuming there's something to go back to. General purpose computing has been limited by the rise of mobile. These devices are both limited by battery and CPU and more constrained in their abilities by tightly controlled operating systems.
And yet surprisingly many young people don't have anything better. Most still have laptops but it's also not a great hardware platform for torrenting.
Internet connections have been moving away from wires to more convenient but less spacious radio. And even wired connections are often degraded by carrier grade NATs.
Now, the very tools for gathering content are under assault. We need to act because a free and open Internet is not one of the laws of physics and corporations are capable opponents.
i feel like we're one streaming service away from people becoming fed up with the whole idea and going back to torrents. having to pay for five subscriptions just to see the one show you want in each every quarter will be too much.
But this boils down to convenience not prevention.
It's so, so easy to get access to a million pieces of media through the accounts your parents or siblings already have. Further those services provide specific family plans to make it even easier again.
As gaben said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
Although I get your point, there is an important difference between those two though. Once you've bought the CD you can listen to it forever, that is not true for subscriptions - _that_ is why they are cheaper.
I kinda use a hybrid - I discover new music on free tier of subscription services, and once I identify songs that I love, I buy them from iTunes DRM-free. I'm just afraid that option won't remain there forever.
These streaming services are approaching the right price (digital media’s marginal cost is $0), but at the expense of user freedom to backup, time shift, collect, and use offline. Is $9/mo streaming better than $20 CDs? Maybe, maybe not. The higher quality product (DRM-free files you can store) is still free and unencumbered by usage rules.
CD's do break, and I'll tire of the music on it. Spotify is cheaper than a CD a month and provides a superior service than radio or music TV ever did.
I have absolutely no need to own a piece of music.
I'd start here about Spotify not paying artists enough. But honestly, the music industry - as a whole - has been screwing over artists for decades, at least, so it is pretty much same thing in a different dress. If I'm going to support musicians more directly, I'll head over to Bandcamp while still giving the artist listens on spotify if they have music there.
Spotify and Netflix offered an easier alternative to piracy. I've heard a few people mentioning there's so many video services to sign up to now that they're back to flying the internet jolly roger having cancelled them all.
If any big exclusive content music services pop up we'll be right back on the pirate bay for everything again
ah, with netflix i believe it _was_ going well... but we're getting to a point (with disney+, etc and moving content) where it's fragmenting again to the point where I don't want to pay $50 for 4-6 different services to watch whatever I want.
I think that'll be the return of either torrenting, or the casual pooling of subscription services between people.
My growing sense is that this is less a straight-line progression and more a set of pendulum swings.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
But if the farmer actually sometimes got money out of legal action, I'd start to fear that the farmer's business model would BE legal action. Or at least the business model of the lawyer that gave the farmer legal advice.
My cousin lives in a place with shitty internet, and regularly creates a list of YT URLs for later downloading when they go in-town. This is going to devastate them. Especially when they need to repair something or do maintenance where a rando’s video is 100x better than the manufacturer’s instructions and they download all the videos.
I do the same thing before a flight or train ride (Canada has $5-$10/gb wireless pricing) so I can catch up with my favourite subs on-the-move.
There Github[0] page is still active so I'm assuming they may have dodged the take downs. I believe they integrated youtube-dl into the application, but because they don't outright mention it on the page they may have dodged attention from the RIAA. This is just a wild guess from me.
While I do appreciate that feature, it's also very spotty. More than once I downloaded something only to later find that it won't play when I'm offline on a plane. Also, whenever Youtube decides to ban or suspend a video, it automatically disappears from the downloads area as well. Plus, this requires a mobile device, which is not necessarily where you may want to watch these things.
The war on general purpose computing is strong. The RIAA has been at the forefront of restricting & preventing user freedoms since time immemorial.
Only this time, unlike with Betamax[1], they are winning. Backed by anti-circumvention laws like the DMCA section 1201, which makes any lock, no matter how poorly built, a criminal violation to break or even to build or discuss ways of breaking.
Hint: if on Android, Firefox will allow you to do that anyway, even allowing you to do other things on your phone with YT playing in the background. And with uBlock, you won't even get ads.
Periodically the downloaded videos become unavailable offline if you don't have an internet connection to refresh them. Maybe once a month or something. Which means you can't hold on to a video through their service indefinitely.
There are no exceptions except for things like paid TV shows (not clips, actual TV shows and movies you can pay for[0]) - you can download any video and, as said in the sibling comment, it only expires after 30 days of being offline.
The "normal" app yes, but there is another one called Youtube Go, which you can download and save the video on your phone, IDK if it´s avaliable worldwide.
Well, if you are counting overage charges I guess.
My (national) provider has an all-in, bring-your-own-device plan with 9GB of data (recently with a 2GB bonus, for a total of 11GB) for under $60/month. I'm sure the competitors are similar. So, while not perfect, it's not as onerous as you describe.
Even ignoring the fact that your plan as described falls within the specified range ($60/month/11 GB = $5.45/month/GB), I have never heard of plans or overage charges this cheap from any of the three major Canadian wireless providers. Last year, the three major providers simultaneously increased the price of the well-publicized $60/10 GB offer by at least $5/month. I'm not aware of any standard plans offering more for less, although you may be able to bargain for less. You may also be able to find slightly cheaper rates with a smaller provider, but despite offering nominally nation-wide coverage, the practical coverage usually ends up being substantially poorer.
Regarding overage charges, I would be genuinely shocked if anybody, including a minor provider, has overage under $10/GB, seeing as by your own admission, even your standard rate exceeds $5/GB. Rogers overages are $70/GB, Bell is $110-120/GB, Telus is a whopping $130/GB. If overage charges are under the normal rate, then that's not an overage, that's pay-as-you-go.
>Even ignoring the fact that your plan as described falls within the specified range ($60/month/11 GB = $5.45/month/GB)
Are you talking about data only, or full phone service? Perhaps our calculations look different.
These plans includes: unlimited voice calling, texting, long distance, voicemail, call display, 5 hours of unlimited data per month (great for using a hotspot) and that amount of data.
The basic phone plan is about $30, so you're actually paying about $3 per GB. Overage is an admittedly ridiculous $15/GB.
This is Fido, owned by Rogers, obviously a major carrier. The standard plans aren't quite as good ($75 for 10GB), but there's always some kind of promotion going on. It's not wonderful when you see what some other countries are paying, but we're in a far better place than even a few years ago.
Yeah, in France a basic SIM phone plan with 50mb data is something thrown in for free as a part of their internet/cable/DVRs which is $30/mo (incl tax) for the first year and then $65, but it’s so competitive that you just need to call in or switch.
Text/calls are increasingly over data. You’re getting terrible value for $30 for what is 100mb.
Yeah, Canada is definitely behind the times. Some of that can be attributed to our vast land area making infrastructure buildout expensive, but some of it is also due to our telecoms having a government supported monopoly. It's getting better though, at least in my opinion. I'm paying less today than I was just a few years ago, for far more data.
Starlink might solve the issue of providing internet to far-flung places, which is great. But I'm skeptical they'll be able to massively undercut all of the telecom providers. Building, launching and maintaining a satellite constellation isn't cheap; it's still a question as to whether the economics will work at all.
If it can offer anything near the speeds advertised without the BS of incumbents, I could see a massive amount of demand.
I figure 5% of consumers « served » by both cable and xDSL can’t get good service, and then they have virtually every rural customer that’s anything more than a low-data user. And I’d expect them to capture that one day with a « light » plan. It’s a massive market.
When you said undercut their competitors I assumed you meant undercutting the price consumers pay so I told you the price they are currently offering. I do not know that their costs are and since SpaceX is a private company I don't think we know how much it is costing them to provide it.
There is invidious which is an alternative front end for YouTube. It doesn't use the YouTube API or require a Google account. You can host your own instance or use one of the public ones[0]. It seems like the download button is broken but I was able to right click save a video.
I'm not aware of any, and any such platform that is comparably featured would be susceptible to the same problem. This isn't a platform problem, it's a law problem.
There's a few that are used, but Google's shrewd marketing combined with natural selection have done a very good job marking those as the "terrorists and crackpots" youtubes.
And like all self-fulfilling prophecies, those claims are now largely true.
Peertube comes to mind for discoverability. For ensuring content creators revenue, the best way would probably be to host their own website and put videos behind paywall or accept donations, as they see fit.
Indeed. Or even make sure to integrate Patreon (or other donation applications) to any privacy-friendly video application.
I have a Twitch account just to have a paid subscription for the Critical Role channel, despite the fact that I never open Twitch and download their videos from Youtube using youtube-dl. It kind of feels ridiculous (especially knowing Twitch will put me in metrics of "their users").
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.