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by chongli 2047 days ago
I was under the impression that those obfuscation methods were exclusive to certain YouTube partners, including the RIAA members. If youtube-dl stopped supporting that method, it would still be a useful tool for the bulk of its use cases and the RIAA would no longer have any leg to stand on since it'd no longer be able to download their members' videos.
3 comments
tantalor 2047 days ago
There's no need to keep that code in the main yt-dl codebase if it is for special cases.

You could imagine a siloed yt-dl plugin called crack-riaa with separate tests, hosting, etc.

If yt-dl detects the obfuscation, it could fail with an error message point to the plugin's documentation.

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remram 2047 days ago
That would only move the problem. That plugin would still need a Git repository, an issue tracker, tests, and an update mechanism. Or are you trying to say you don't care if this specific part of yt-dl gets deleted from the internet by RIAA?
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tantalor 2047 days ago
It decouples the thorny part of yt-dl from the mainline and reduces risk of complaints in the future.

I do care if this part gets deleted, that's why I think it should be hosted somewhere more reliable than GitHub. There are other options which aren't as polished, but may be better for hosting risky code like this, including self hosting.

This code needs to be underground.

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userbinator 2047 days ago
In my experience many videos have it, not necessarily ones associated with the RIAA (or perhaps the overzealous[1] content detector just thinks there's some of their content in there), so it's definitely necessary to decode the algorithm for youtube-dl to work on not just RIAA content videos.

IMHO giving the client both the key and the algorithm to decode the content should not count as any form of protection, but the lawyers don't care...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325

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R0b0t1 2047 days ago
Breaking copy protection is only illegal if you do not have a license to the work. Removing the protection breaking code isn't necessary, and everyone needs to stop pretending that it is.

This same clause of the DMCA is the suspected reason for py-kms's reinstatement after a takedown: it's perfectly legal to break the Windows license scheme if you already own a license to Windows.

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