Only in the eyes of the law. The RIAA can no more stop people from downloading YouTube videos than the DVD CCA could stop people from cracking CSS. Pirates haven't lost yet, only ever been delayed, and rarely by all that much.
This battle has been going on since audio tape recorders and VCRs became a thing, and at some point various industries will have to accept copying as part of reality, and that it is incumbent on them to have a business model that aligns with reality. A farmer doesn't serve a legal notice to the sun because its setting every day hurts productivity.
No they're winning slowly. Fifteen years back everyone I know could easily download mp3 from various p2p applications. But now the present generation of youngsters seem to think it is Spotify/Amazon or nothing. They haven't even heard of p2p. Similarly Netflix is slowly eating away at torrenting.
The platform owners can and will tighten the noose gradually. End users and hackers have much less power than they like to imagine, especially the latter segment.
Will they keep providing the media like that once the threat from piracy is gone? Even right now most video platforms only offer the lowest quality to people on platforms free from DRM.
I can easily get a 4k h265 video packed in mkv to play on my Linux laptop. I haven't tested lately but a while back Netflix would serve 720p max.
Spotify has been very cool, going as far as delivering a .deb package and Ubuntu repo for their client. However, Rogan podcast doesn't work on Linux because it includes video. Will it before they go exclusive? Maybe, maybe not. I can easily youtube-dl the latest podcast and watch it on Linux.
Not really, because Spotify/Amazon/Netflix aren't giving you media, they only rent it out to you. They can and do retroactively take away access to any piece of content, while keeping the money.
They're not renting media to you, they're selling you an access license to something they may or may not have at any given moment. Literally Nothing-as-a-Service.
Spotify, Netflix, etc., are possible today because the copyright owners created streaming licenses that recognize that ephemeral access to content is a different use case than downloading. (Streaming licenses are cheap compared to download licenses; my old employer streamed millions of hours of music from the Big 3 labels for a total annual cost of less than $2500.)
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.
People stopped torrenting because Netflix and company made it extremely easy and more affordable to consume a wide range of media. Affordable enough that the hassle of torrenting was no longer worth it. If that changes, you'll see a resurgance.
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.
Assuming there's something to go back to. General purpose computing has been limited by the rise of mobile. These devices are both limited by battery and CPU and more constrained in their abilities by tightly controlled operating systems.
And yet surprisingly many young people don't have anything better. Most still have laptops but it's also not a great hardware platform for torrenting.
Internet connections have been moving away from wires to more convenient but less spacious radio. And even wired connections are often degraded by carrier grade NATs.
Now, the very tools for gathering content are under assault. We need to act because a free and open Internet is not one of the laws of physics and corporations are capable opponents.
i feel like we're one streaming service away from people becoming fed up with the whole idea and going back to torrents. having to pay for five subscriptions just to see the one show you want in each every quarter will be too much.
But this boils down to convenience not prevention.
It's so, so easy to get access to a million pieces of media through the accounts your parents or siblings already have. Further those services provide specific family plans to make it even easier again.
As gaben said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
Although I get your point, there is an important difference between those two though. Once you've bought the CD you can listen to it forever, that is not true for subscriptions - _that_ is why they are cheaper.
I kinda use a hybrid - I discover new music on free tier of subscription services, and once I identify songs that I love, I buy them from iTunes DRM-free. I'm just afraid that option won't remain there forever.
These streaming services are approaching the right price (digital media’s marginal cost is $0), but at the expense of user freedom to backup, time shift, collect, and use offline. Is $9/mo streaming better than $20 CDs? Maybe, maybe not. The higher quality product (DRM-free files you can store) is still free and unencumbered by usage rules.
CD's do break, and I'll tire of the music on it. Spotify is cheaper than a CD a month and provides a superior service than radio or music TV ever did.
I have absolutely no need to own a piece of music.
I'd start here about Spotify not paying artists enough. But honestly, the music industry - as a whole - has been screwing over artists for decades, at least, so it is pretty much same thing in a different dress. If I'm going to support musicians more directly, I'll head over to Bandcamp while still giving the artist listens on spotify if they have music there.
Spotify and Netflix offered an easier alternative to piracy. I've heard a few people mentioning there's so many video services to sign up to now that they're back to flying the internet jolly roger having cancelled them all.
If any big exclusive content music services pop up we'll be right back on the pirate bay for everything again
ah, with netflix i believe it _was_ going well... but we're getting to a point (with disney+, etc and moving content) where it's fragmenting again to the point where I don't want to pay $50 for 4-6 different services to watch whatever I want.
I think that'll be the return of either torrenting, or the casual pooling of subscription services between people.
My growing sense is that this is less a straight-line progression and more a set of pendulum swings.
The pop music industry has seen at least three disruptions to its controlling gatekeepers since the 1950s (1956-60, ~2000 with Napster, and presently with Spotify and YouTube), but each time a dominant hegenomy re-emerges. I doubt this time will be different, though the brief renaissance will doubtless be appreciated.
Charles Perrow wrote of this in the mid-1980s:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process”[352] through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.”[353] The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, 1985. pp. 186--187.
The dynamics, actors, and economics remind me strongly of the software / high-tech industry, though with much weaker coupling and different lock-in mechanics.
But if the farmer actually sometimes got money out of legal action, I'd start to fear that the farmer's business model would BE legal action. Or at least the business model of the lawyer that gave the farmer legal advice.
My cousin lives in a place with shitty internet, and regularly creates a list of YT URLs for later downloading when they go in-town. This is going to devastate them. Especially when they need to repair something or do maintenance where a rando’s video is 100x better than the manufacturer’s instructions and they download all the videos.
I do the same thing before a flight or train ride (Canada has $5-$10/gb wireless pricing) so I can catch up with my favourite subs on-the-move.
There Github[0] page is still active so I'm assuming they may have dodged the take downs. I believe they integrated youtube-dl into the application, but because they don't outright mention it on the page they may have dodged attention from the RIAA. This is just a wild guess from me.
While I do appreciate that feature, it's also very spotty. More than once I downloaded something only to later find that it won't play when I'm offline on a plane. Also, whenever Youtube decides to ban or suspend a video, it automatically disappears from the downloads area as well. Plus, this requires a mobile device, which is not necessarily where you may want to watch these things.
The war on general purpose computing is strong. The RIAA has been at the forefront of restricting & preventing user freedoms since time immemorial.
Only this time, unlike with Betamax[1], they are winning. Backed by anti-circumvention laws like the DMCA section 1201, which makes any lock, no matter how poorly built, a criminal violation to break or even to build or discuss ways of breaking.
Hint: if on Android, Firefox will allow you to do that anyway, even allowing you to do other things on your phone with YT playing in the background. And with uBlock, you won't even get ads.
Periodically the downloaded videos become unavailable offline if you don't have an internet connection to refresh them. Maybe once a month or something. Which means you can't hold on to a video through their service indefinitely.
The downloaded videos likely have time constraint applied to them that can be updated when the app connects to the Internet. I don't think the downloaded videos can be played outside of the app.
Oh, it’s app only? That would already be a pain. I think they got into a good groove of saving URLs for later downloading. Needing to load each one on a tablet is ruining the automation of them visiting a friend or sitting in a cafe, socializing and downing a few dozen gb via youtube-dl just hitting a list of URLs in the bg.
There are no exceptions except for things like paid TV shows (not clips, actual TV shows and movies you can pay for[0]) - you can download any video and, as said in the sibling comment, it only expires after 30 days of being offline.
The "normal" app yes, but there is another one called Youtube Go, which you can download and save the video on your phone, IDK if it´s avaliable worldwide.
Well, if you are counting overage charges I guess.
My (national) provider has an all-in, bring-your-own-device plan with 9GB of data (recently with a 2GB bonus, for a total of 11GB) for under $60/month. I'm sure the competitors are similar. So, while not perfect, it's not as onerous as you describe.
Even ignoring the fact that your plan as described falls within the specified range ($60/month/11 GB = $5.45/month/GB), I have never heard of plans or overage charges this cheap from any of the three major Canadian wireless providers. Last year, the three major providers simultaneously increased the price of the well-publicized $60/10 GB offer by at least $5/month. I'm not aware of any standard plans offering more for less, although you may be able to bargain for less. You may also be able to find slightly cheaper rates with a smaller provider, but despite offering nominally nation-wide coverage, the practical coverage usually ends up being substantially poorer.
Regarding overage charges, I would be genuinely shocked if anybody, including a minor provider, has overage under $10/GB, seeing as by your own admission, even your standard rate exceeds $5/GB. Rogers overages are $70/GB, Bell is $110-120/GB, Telus is a whopping $130/GB. If overage charges are under the normal rate, then that's not an overage, that's pay-as-you-go.
>Even ignoring the fact that your plan as described falls within the specified range ($60/month/11 GB = $5.45/month/GB)
Are you talking about data only, or full phone service? Perhaps our calculations look different.
These plans includes: unlimited voice calling, texting, long distance, voicemail, call display, 5 hours of unlimited data per month (great for using a hotspot) and that amount of data.
The basic phone plan is about $30, so you're actually paying about $3 per GB. Overage is an admittedly ridiculous $15/GB.
This is Fido, owned by Rogers, obviously a major carrier. The standard plans aren't quite as good ($75 for 10GB), but there's always some kind of promotion going on. It's not wonderful when you see what some other countries are paying, but we're in a far better place than even a few years ago.
Yeah, in France a basic SIM phone plan with 50mb data is something thrown in for free as a part of their internet/cable/DVRs which is $30/mo (incl tax) for the first year and then $65, but it’s so competitive that you just need to call in or switch.
Text/calls are increasingly over data. You’re getting terrible value for $30 for what is 100mb.
Yeah, Canada is definitely behind the times. Some of that can be attributed to our vast land area making infrastructure buildout expensive, but some of it is also due to our telecoms having a government supported monopoly. It's getting better though, at least in my opinion. I'm paying less today than I was just a few years ago, for far more data.
Starlink might solve the issue of providing internet to far-flung places, which is great. But I'm skeptical they'll be able to massively undercut all of the telecom providers. Building, launching and maintaining a satellite constellation isn't cheap; it's still a question as to whether the economics will work at all.
If it can offer anything near the speeds advertised without the BS of incumbents, I could see a massive amount of demand.
I figure 5% of consumers « served » by both cable and xDSL can’t get good service, and then they have virtually every rural customer that’s anything more than a low-data user. And I’d expect them to capture that one day with a « light » plan. It’s a massive market.
When you said undercut their competitors I assumed you meant undercutting the price consumers pay so I told you the price they are currently offering. I do not know that their costs are and since SpaceX is a private company I don't think we know how much it is costing them to provide it.
There is invidious which is an alternative front end for YouTube. It doesn't use the YouTube API or require a Google account. You can host your own instance or use one of the public ones[0]. It seems like the download button is broken but I was able to right click save a video.
I'm not aware of any, and any such platform that is comparably featured would be susceptible to the same problem. This isn't a platform problem, it's a law problem.
There's a few that are used, but Google's shrewd marketing combined with natural selection have done a very good job marking those as the "terrorists and crackpots" youtubes.
And like all self-fulfilling prophecies, those claims are now largely true.
Peertube comes to mind for discoverability. For ensuring content creators revenue, the best way would probably be to host their own website and put videos behind paywall or accept donations, as they see fit.
Indeed. Or even make sure to integrate Patreon (or other donation applications) to any privacy-friendly video application.
I have a Twitch account just to have a paid subscription for the Critical Role channel, despite the fact that I never open Twitch and download their videos from Youtube using youtube-dl. It kind of feels ridiculous (especially knowing Twitch will put me in metrics of "their users").
I would be very funny to discover they lose their source code :)
A more serious reason I could think of : maybe pine64 is trying to convince them to do just that, and this contest is to show them there is public interest (pure speculation from me, of course).
This is also very efficient guerrilla marketing. Instead of asking users to tell their friends about your brand, you can make a lottery making them win t-shirts with your logo on it. They will be so happy to have won something they will wear it.
In this link's case, if pine64 want to get people excited about that EVB and start hacking with it, it sounds like an efficient strategy. Whatever the real value of the commits are, it's the users who are committed :)
At least, in this case, they ask for contributions on a repos they own.
It's only a cosmetic change from a tech point of view of course, but from non-tech point of view, maybe it would be safer to say it's a youtube offline player than a youtube video downloader.
It would require to pipe downloaded video to vlc or something by default for this to be true, of course.
Agree with other comments here, as well : youtube-dl reference should probably be removed. It will be added back by those who link to the project.
After 9 years of ruby, I finally switched to Go as my professional language 3 years ago, after a couple years of side projects with it.
My feelings after building for that long : safety and productivity.
I initially thought it was because of moving to compiler and type checking, but then I learned C for my personal use (an other thing passing through Go allowed for me), and was surprised to realize my C compiler was not allowing me close to the same peace of mind than my Go one. Go is just a well-designed language that makes everything straightforward.
The main reason I started learning and building with C is that I'm not confident the code I write in Go will age well. The discussions around Go-2 make me extremely nervous (it has something that reminds me of angular-2, python-3, symfony-2, bootstrap-3, and others major redesigns who left developers in a lot of troubles, I hope time will prove me incorrect).
So basically, I'm enjoying it, but I worry if it will last. I guess that means I really love it.
Re. Go 2. The Go Team people have repeatedly said that they
want to avoid the Python 3 situation, so even if there will
be a real, compatibility breaking Go 2, it won't be anywhere
near that level of incompatibility. They'll probably just
fix a few nits like string(int).
Re. C. You really should use at least one static analyser
when programming in C. Clang-tidy has been my go-to tool
for that, and it's been working pretty good.
Can't say for the rest, but Symfony 2 was a resounding success. Current Symfony 5 is very similar to Symfony 2, with just a ton of refinements and facelifts.
Oh yes, I'm not saying those are bad projects. What they have in common is that migrating from previous version to them was especially difficult and painful.
The few symfony developers I know indeed loved symfony-2 very much. But migrating their projects from symfony-1 to symfony-2 was felt basically as a rewrite.
You're right, Symfony 1 -> Symfony 2 was definitely a rewrite, but from then on, the general design was kept almost intact (again, not counting the evolution and streamlining of the framework).
I guess the first attempt is always tricky, let's see if Go 2 can find a smooth upgrade path.
X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want it to do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change?
I have many programs I wrote years ago that I don't change and I use every day. Constant changes are not a measure of utility.
But again and again, you'll find users looking at repositories and deciding that something is "dead" because there isn't any recent commit, often blaming developers for not doing more free work for them. This is a toxic attitude. When we have a software that works well and solves our problems, we should celebrate it, not complain it doesn't find new problems to solve.
> X works perfectly for me, and there is nothing I would want it to do that it doesn't do now. Why should it change?
I'm not sure whether a program that works for you is a good indication that it no longer needs to change.
> When we have a software that works well and solves our problems, we should celebrate it, not complain it doesn't find new problems to solve.
I think anyone can agree that, at the very least, screen tearing and proper support for mixed DPI setups are problems that fall squarely in the responsibilities of X and yet it still didn't manage to solve them after so many years.
So it's hardly the case that X is just so good that users nowadays have to try really hard to find new problems for it to solve.
We do need some form of signal that indicates a project has a maintainer though. It doesn’t matter that he has been inactive for 4 years (on that project), but if I submit a PR, it’s nice if there’s someone at the end of the line.
Repos could really have exactly that. A dead man's switch that asks you every, I don't know, three.to six months - via email even - "you good for this repo still?". You answer with a click "yup" and that's it - a signal on a repo on github or whatever that says "still alive". Otherwise "uh oh - we need help" and then a mechanism there to immediately offer alternative forks with a good enough signal "strength". It's like a pinky promise instead of actual repo activity.
You wouldn’t even necessarily need git/github to implement a new system! Agree on a standard file name like .githeartbeat containing a timestamp. Every few months (or w/e), active maintainers could push a commit to update the timestamp.
It sounds like a good idea, but I'm afraid it may be a nightmare for packagers (like the ones providing packages on GNU/linux distros), as they see updates to upstream only to realize they are just pings and don't need to be repackaged.
It wouldn't be that often, though. And maybe they would actually love to have such heartbeat. I would love to hear a packager on that.
Personally I'm a fan of zero touch where I as a developer submit my code repo to app store like play store, apple app store, flathub or something and they just build it using a standard definition that the store defines and make it available on the store. Kind of feels like a lot of effort for every distro to look at every change in every application...
Repos could also have a notice like "It's been X days since last interaction" which would track the last commit, merge or even just comment in the issue tracker made by the maintainers.
On github? I can't do that. Process has to be as frictionless as possible - hence not in a repo in files itself. A simple email with a button, not to bother maintainers too much / at all.
If somebody discovers a security bug, what are the chances that somebody can cut a high-quality release with the fix in it, if it hasn't been done for two years?
While not wrong, ignores that this isn't the norm.
I think we could use the terms releasing and maintaining. Constant releases is not the same as constant maintenance. And it is hard to agree that our industry sees that.
By way of analogy, we seem to think we can improve the roads by building new bridges every year.
I'm lost browsing the radicle website and all its links. Ultimately, I found https://github.com/radicle-dev/radicle-link , following the link "browse the protocol", which mentions: "WORK IN PROGRESS - In fact, there is nothing substantial to see here yet". Is it a yet unreleased software? (that would explain why I can't find a way to try it out).
If it's the case and if anyone from the project is reading this, it would be helpful to mention it on top of landing page.
Also, the landing page is mentioning ssb, is this related to git-ssb?
> how do you handle issue/comment spammers?
I love how ssb is handling that : it's not a problem because you create a "web of trust" and only content from people you trust and people they trust reaches you - and trust can be revoked in case of problem. Obviously, it creates an other problem, though : how a benevolent total stranger can reach you?
By the way, yet an other alternative is hypergit ( https://github.com/noffle/hypergit ). It uses hyperdb/dat. I used it a few times to share code with friends, I loved it because it was the most straightforward for them to install and use.
It frustrates me that they use the relation "on top" backwards, but otherwise it's a good read.
Radicle provides a network overlay and gossip protocol, on top of which they run the git smart protocol (they describe it the other way around, which makes no sense).
But web of trust hasn't been very successful in practice. It's the usual reason quoted [citation needed] for the failure of PGP/GPG to become a mainstream success.
Keybase's approach is more scalable, but it's still centralized.
PGP’s web of trust hasn’t been a mainstream success because (and I say this as a dedicated GPG user) the UX is awful. I don’t think it has anything to do with the web of trust though; in fact GPG doesn’t really expose the web of trust ideas much to the user.
I can easily imagine a web of trust system with UX more similar to Facebook’s (and in fact this is basically what SSB’s clients are).
It contains hundreds of thousands of public domain books that you can read online or download. You can even download the whole collection as a zimfile [2], readable with kiwix [3]. Obviously all without DRM/phone home spywares/forced updates/remote control.
I entirely stopped using streaming services and now buy and download my music from Bandcamp, using webradios to discover new titles (my personal favorite is the webradio Nordic Lodge Copenhagen, SomaFM also has a lot of good thematic radios).
I don't have any trouble listening to my collection when internet gets spotty, I can have real full shuffle on my collection without hearing always the same titles coming again and again, and I'm guaranteed I own my music, with no-one able to take it from me. It feels like the future :)
I've done the same but my problem is that a lot of artists (labels?) only made their songs available to purchase on itunes and google music. Now there's only itunes which of course only works with the native app and doesn't have Linux support.
Well, as far as I'm concern, if they only provide content with DRM, then piracy is fair game. I pondered for a time if I should buy the content on abusive platforms and then download it illegally without DRMs, but I decided that respect must go both way. Just to be clear, I pay for a lot of music every week and I even give a lot every months to charities, this is not about money and my difficulty to part with it. Ultimately, I very rarely use piracy anyway because when I have to, I lose respect for artists and don't want to listen to them anymore (it's not me making it political, it's just a feeling that happens when I realize the artist will force spyware on me). The only content I download through piracy is from long dead artists, mostly (they didn't chose to only be available with DRM).
That being said, I've been surprised how common it is to find albums on Bandcamp or bands' own sites. It may be the music I listen to (I try to never limit me to a few "genres", but I very commonly listen to music with small audience). I guess fees asked by platforms have something to do with it too.
Stripe actually did invest in Stellar [1], so they seem to be interested in cryptocurrencies. This blog post is from 2014, though. It would still be interesting to hear their up to date opinion.
Well, I guess it's a good thing : now we'll have to campaign to let content creators know how terrible their choice of platform is.