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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/viewing-website-html-code-is-not-illegal-or-hacking-prof-tells-missouri-gov/
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.