Hosting provider Uberspace has suffered another setback in a German court. The court of appeal ruled against youtube-dl’s former hosting provider, holding it liable for alleged violations of YouTube’s copyright protection measures. The owner of the company is currently considering further appeal options. Meanwhile, youtube-dl remains available on GitHub.
Seems like the courts haven’t caught on, but most people migrated to yt-dlp.
I do wish they rebranded the project to get rid of YouTube from the name. It can do so much more and is insanely powerful. It should be advertised as a generic video extractor. Don’t know if it’d help legal issues though, despite them not actually breaking laws.
The courts don’t care what software is being used now, they care what lawsuit has been brought to them. They don’t actively pursue infringements by themselves.
Hamburg court. Notorious court for such digital rights cases.
by their logic, right clicking an image and clicking save is illegal.
You say that but they literally went to court against a journalist claiming they “hacked” them because the journalist simply referenced their html code that is visible from pressing F12.
Luckily I think the case was dismissed but it was really close and was extremely problematic to begin with.
ngl making a troll “hacker” account that just publishes the f12 screen and simple inspect element edits would be gold. “Today we hacked Elon and made him pro BlueSky!”
Give it a few more years and it will probably be over there. I don’t know whether it’s an ongoing thing or what since I haven’t kept up with it, but there is/was(?) a case of some Springer Verlag trying to say that an ad blocker violates copyright law, going after Eyeo/Adblocker Plus.
To be fair, Eyeo/ABP deserved everything they had coming at them. They not only blocked ads, but there was code found to replace Amazon affiliate links with an affiliate id from them. (German report here - look for the part about typoRules.js.)
Fair enough.
I mean, that was Getty Image’s whole case against Google’s “view image” button. And Getty won that legal battle, so clearly they have some legal ground to stand on, even though most people would think it’s bullshit.
What logic do you mean?
Images are typically not encrypted with protection measures [in transit].
What are you talking about? 95% of the web uses SSL. 100% of the top-100 sites use SSL.
Just about every single image, video, and line of text you’ve ever seen online was encrypted in transit.
I don’t think that qualifies as “protection” of copyrighted content before law?
Some YouTube videos are protected like that, others not. The lawsuit is about those being circumvented. It is NOT about SSL or circumventing SSL.
An equivalent would be a copyright protection on images. Not SSL.
Forgive me if I am lacking the correct term for it.
I don’t care about the intent of the encryption. I outright reject any argument that criminalizes the use of decryption.
The Hamburg Regional Court ruled that youtube-dl violates the law as it bypasses YouTube’s anti-circumvention measures.
Many Hamburg court not know shit on technology and listen to big company instead.
While Uberspace hoped to overturn the lower court’s judgment, the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg decided to reject the appeal in full.
And appeal rejected by same shit people. Wait until arrive at proper court.
lower and higher court are different people
yes. different people, same shit people.
same shit translated from “gleicher Scheiss”, meaning they do same shit
In English we have an idiom, “same shit, different day,” which means dealing with the same sort of unpleasant task until it’s routine. Do you have something similar?
This Hamburg court thing sounds like something I’d call “same shit, different pay,” which would be like when you have an issue with your boss so you appeal to their boss, and find out that they’re just as bad except they’re higher in the organization.
Yeah, OLG Hamburg is known for making bad judgements. There’s a reason many companies choose to file a lawsuit at this court.
This seems like a good time to remind people to update to yt-dlp 2024.11.18, if they haven’t already.
why? for me it shows some warnings but still works
You can click on that link and view the changelog if you want. There didn’t seem to be a whole ton related to YouTube specifically, although that version does remove oauth support for YouTube as it’s irrevocably broken by Google apparently.
What a shitshow. And there is a lot of harm done to everyone if this comes true.
Were they hosting the youtube-dl source?
Even then, are shops selling kitchen knives (mind you, despite the name, youtube-dl can be used to download videos from various sources) held liable for people doing murders with them?
EDIT: On a sidenote, the Hamburg courts are renowned to know jack shit about technology and often produce rulings against any common sense.
The lawsuit is not about downloading, but about enabling circumventing protections.
By your analogy, it’s not about the shops selling kitchen knives, but hosting a side door to a protected weapons/knifes shop.
(I hate analogies. In general. But wtf is that analogy now that we included more context?)
Nah,
youtube-dlsupports a plethora of sites. And you can download from almost all of them without breaking any laws. Like kitchen knives have 100s of uses that are totally fine and don’t hurt anyone. I stand by my analogy.
“GitHub initially complied but later changed course. After consulting legal experts, including those at the EFF, it restored the youtube-dl repository. GitHub also launched a million-dollar defense fund to assist developers in similar disputes.”
Why is Github protecting them? They removed bypass paywalls, no?
