On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 11:15:34PM +0100, Dominik George wrote: > The RIAA seems to be targeting the most vulnerable and leat likely to > defend themselves, otherweise they would be targeting those who upload > content violating copyright laws instead on free software maintainers. > > (Also, there is YouTube Premium which allows for downloading any video > ypu like, so in the view of the RIAA, why is that acceptable?).
I think that the issue is *not* about content uploaded to youtube without permission. Youtube has licensed music, for example try to search for any famous song, like Bohemian Rhapsody. There are official music videos and many unofficial ones uploaded by personal accounts, both of them are legally permitted because the music is licensed by YouTube. You can see that the unofficial videos also contain a notice in the description that says "Licensed to YouTube by ..." and a list of music publishers and copyright holders. YouTube is paying for those permissions, and the money comes from 1) ads on normal YouTube or 2) subscriptions on YouTube Premium. YouTube Premium users have permission to download the music as well (for their personal offline use) because they are paying to the music rights societies, in a similar way that other companies like Spotify are doing. RIAA sees youtube-dl as a software that allows people to access their licensed content with the same privileges as their paying users, but without paying. And that's why the DMCA enters here, because youtube-dl is seen as a software that allows "circumvention of technological barriers for using a digital good in certain ways which the rightsholders do not wish to allow" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention I personally was very upset about the takedown of youtube-dl, I just want to clarify a bit what is this issue about.
