Author: Admin

Monday, October 26, 2020

On Friday, code hosting and sharing website GitHub blocked the public access to youtube-dl, a software which can download videos from the internet via the command-line. The blockade came after GitHub received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). After stripping the metadata from the notice, GitHub published the take-down notice on their site.

Initially started in July 2008 by Ricardo Garcia, youtube-dl is a script written in Python which can download videos from multiple websites including YouTube, LiveLeak and Vimeo. youtube-dl is a FLOSS software and is under public domain. Currently, the repository on GitHub is locked for viewers other than maintainers of the project.

RIAA’s DMCA notice alleged the script’s purpose of existence was to “circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube” and “reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use”.

youtube-dl has multiple unit tests in its source code, which test whether the software works in different circumstances or not. Some of the tests include checking if the script can download Creative Commons licensed videos, videos which did not have square pixels, videos with no age restriction, “offensive to some audiences” per YouTube community and age-restricted videos. One of the tests included the URL of some copyrighted songs. Citing this test, RIAA’s take-down notice claimed “comments in the youtube-dl source code make clear that the source code was designed and is marketed for the purpose of circumventing YouTube’s technological measures”.

RIAA’s notice published by GitHub alleged violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems which says “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”. RIAA listed a number of forks of youtube-dl and requested GitHub via the notice they all be made inaccessible.

The notice did not list any incident of anyone using youtube-dl to download or share copyrighted material, nor mention any damages that actually occurred. Unremarked by the notice, YouTube allows videos to be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. When a copyright holder chooses to release their work, be it a photograph, a video, or audio, under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, they allow everyone to freely own, share or modify the work as long as the reusers properly attribute the author of the work. YouTube also hosts many audio and video recordings in the public domain which can be used for any purpose without any restrictions.

youtube-dl is used by thousands of people around the world. Multiple Creative Commons-licensed and public domain videos on Wikimedia Commons are uploaded via a tool called video2commons, which relies on youtube-dl to download media. youtube-dl also lets users download videos from LiveLeak — a video-sharing platform for citizen journalism. Videos downloaded using youtube-dl are also used for the purpose of fair use, or for evidence.

youtube-dl comes with a small JavaScript interpreter where it acts as a web-browser would behave while receiving video data from the server. The script has “extractors” for various websites to handle videos from different sources. Whenever something is displayed on the user’s screen, the device has a copy of that content. Web browsers “download” data while surfing the web, though most of it is not persistent on the device. It is possible to download copyrighted photos by using a web-browser. The way the world wide web works, there are no technological prevention measures to prevent recording and sharing of content such as RIAA talks about in the notice. Photos and texts can be downloaded by taking screenshots, videos by screen recording tools, and audio by recording on a tape if not an audio recording software.

Multiple users expressed their disappointment on Twitter and Internet Relay Chat. One of the users said “this is yet another example of why we should use git as it was intended, as a distributed network, rather than rely on one single proprietary server”. Git is decentralised version-tracking software which is used by a large number of software companies and projects. It is possible to host one’s own git server for software development. While Microsoft’s GitHub is a centralised git server, development of software using git does not require a GitHub account.

Soon after the public access to the repository was locked, multiple users started sharing the source code via self-hosted git servers, Tor sites and via the Torrent protocol leading to a Streisand effect. Streisand effect is when a measure to censor information causes further spread of that information. The binary files of the software are still available on its website for users to download. Some people came up with esoteric ways to share the source code, by converting the compressed code into photographs and providing shell commands to convert to the source code.

GitHub’s DMCA repository, where the takedown notice was published for public viewing, was subject to contant vandalism from multiple GitHub users. One user submitted a pull request, merging the source code of youtube-dl along with the DMCA repository. This enabled users to view youtube-dl’s source code from within the DMCA repository, provided they know the commit id.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said on Twitter “Youtube-dl is a legitimate tool with a world of a lawful uses. Demanding its removal from Github is a disappointing and counterproductive move by the RIAA.” Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been highly critical of DRM (digital rights management, the subject of the DMCA) for many years now.

Wikinews reached out to Sergey M?, one of the maintainers of youtube-dl script, however Sergey said he “won’t give any comments at this time”. Later, he shared an update on the IRC channel. Sergey said, “they require complete removal of so called YouTube’s rolling cipher implementation […] GitHub requires in order to reinstate the repo […] under this conditions I could reinstate it in Saturday/Sunday already but this is an unsatisfactory outcome”. He also said, “I can’t guarantee whether [or] not we will bend over them considering the situation with @phihag [Philipp Hagemeister] but we’ll see soon what we can do in order to keep the max we have and mitigate potential legal issues at the same time”.

EFF is yet to respond to Wikinews queries. Wikinews also reached out to Philipp Hagemeister, a former maintainer and contributor of the youtube-dl project to discuss this takedown.

When did you get to know about the takedown notice and what were your initial reactions?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) I saw the takedown notice along with anyone else, on reddit. Since I am no longer involved with the youtube-dl project (except for occasional contributions, my maintainership ended in 2016), I don’t know any details.

((RS)) Does YouTube implement DRM for videos not under Creative Commons license, and if so, how does youtube-dl bypass it? Could you please elaborate the procedure?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) YouTube implements DRM for YouTube Movies. youtube-dl does not support those.

YouTube has multiple non-DRM video delivery protocols. I’m not up to date about specifics; my last dabbling in this was in 2015.

One of these protocols is described here. YouTube uses JavaScript to compute parts of the URLs. youtube-dl executes this JavaScript, just like a web browser.

((WN)) Could you also explain in brief how youtube-dl functions, and how the maintainers had intended it to be used?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) youtube-dl downloads and plays videos and music, just like any other web browser, from over 1000 different services. Its uses are varied: It enables video playback on many devices (e.g. Raspberry Pi) where the video services don’t work properly, it makes high-quality video playable for people with a bad or no Internet connection, it enables disabled users to use tools to play videos, and it is used for archival and research.

((WN)) What do you think of the DMCA notice?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) I think it is not warranted because youtube-dl is entirely legal. As the DMCA notice has no effect for me personally, I’m not really the right person to address it.

((WN)) Why were the copyrighted tests in the source code? Could they be replaced?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) I’m not sure why, but my guess is that users requested support for these videos and thus they were added as test cases. They can be removed trivially, without losing any function of youtube-dl.

((WN)) Are you aware Electronic Frontier Foundation said it was a “disappointing and counterproductive move”? What do you think should be the next steps?

((Philipp Hagemeister)) Yes, and I concur. I’m no longer involved in the project. If I were, I would probably just remove the test cases, block these music videos (RIAA is not worth the trouble for me, that can be done by other projects), and get the project back online.I understand people who think differently.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Sunday, a fire rushed through seven businesses at the Whitestone Shopping Center in Whitestone, Queens, New York, near the Cross Island Parkway in New York City.

The fire started at around 1:00 AM EST (UTC-5) on November 2, 2008 in a diner known as Lollipops. According to local sources, Lollipops was a popular restaurant in the area. The fire spread through the stores, up an awning and continued all the way to a corner of the shopping center. In the end, seven businesses were destroyed, including two banks, two restaurants and a GNC Nutrition Center. It took dozens of firefighters to put out the large blaze.

According to WCBS-TV, with his diner Lollipops destroyed, the owner was too upset to comment.

Nearby Chinese restaurant, King’s Chef, was also damaged. “I cannot open because of whatever rules – tomorrow’s Monday, Tuesday is a holiday,” the owner, Patrick Chan, told WCBS-TV. “If I cannot get them to come tomorrow, I am going to lose big time.”

Nearby residents reacted to the situation. Several residents have reported that it is a major loss to the community as they considered Lollipops to be a landmark. Several residents have reported knowing members of either the victim stores or others in the strip mall.

State Senator Frank Padavan commented on the loss of the shopping center.

“This is a calamity for many of these small businesses to be out of business, particularly in this economy,” he said.

The next day, investigators were boarding up the windows of the damaged stores. No one was hurt because all the stores were closed at the time of the blaze.

Friday, January 25, 2008

B2B Trade Area of Taipei Game Show, criticized by trade buyers last year, but accompanied with 2008 Taiwan Digital Content Forum, moved to the second floor at Taipei World Trade Center for world-wide participants with a better exchange atmosphere this year.

Not only local OBMs (Softstar Entertainment, Soft-World International Corp., International Games System Corp., …, etc.) but also companies from New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea showcased different specialists with multiple styles. Especially on South Korea, participated members from G? Trade Show (Game Show & Trade, All-Round, aka Gstar) showcased gaming industry of South Korea and the G? upcoming at this November with brochures.

In the 2-days Digital Content Forum, world-class experts not only shared industry experiences, members from Taiwan Gaming Industry Association also discussed and forecasted marketing models for gaming industry. With participations from governmental, industrial, and academical executives world-wide, this forum helps them gained precious experiences of digital content industry from several countries.

According to the Taipei Computer Association, the show and forum organizer, the digital content industry in Taiwan was apparently grown up recent years as Minister of Economic Affairs of the Republic of China Steve Ruey-long Chen said at Opening Ceremony yesterday. Without R&Ds from cyber-gaming, and basic conceptions from policies and copyright issues, this (digital content) industry will be fallen down in Taiwan. If this industry wanted to be grown up in sustainability, gaming OBMs in Taiwan should independently produce different and unique games and change market style to market brands and games to the world.

Thursday, August 17, 2006

David Witt, father-in-law of Floyd Landis, the winner of the 2006 Tour De France, has died. Witt was found dead in his car in a parking garage on August 16. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, San Diego Police said. He was 57.

Witt who was married to Rose, the mother of Amber, Floyd Landis’ wife, introduced Amber to Landis. Witt was an amateur cyclist who became friends with Landis after having the same coach. At one time, they were even roommates.

Witt and his wife co-own the “Hawthorn’s” restaurant in San Diego and it is adorned with Landis memorabilia, including his jerseys and magazine covers. The two had also attended the Tour de France where they witnessed Floyd’s victory.

Floyd Landis did win the 2006 Tour de France, but the result is contested after he tested positive in a doping test. He is widely expected to be stripped of the title.

Friday, June 19, 2020

The following is the first edition of a monthly series chronicling the 2020 United States presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

This month’s spotlight on the campaign trail includes interviews with the vice presidential nominees of the Constitution and Libertarian parties as well as the chosen running mate of the leading Green Party presidential candidate.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Wikinews interviewed author Amy Scobee about her book Scientology – Abuse at the Top, and asked her about her experiences working as an executive within the organization. Scobee joined the organization at age 14, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005. She served as a Scientology executive in multiple high-ranking positions, working out of the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base”, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California.