I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites.
Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence.
Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.
I am not in law enforcement myself, but do some online investigations, and like many others in my field we use YouTube-dl to save a copy of video evidence relevant to a case we are working on. It can be instrumental for archiving the evidence if it is ever removed or taken down, can also be used to grab extra info (CC text log is one example) and then manually searched for specific strings. This tool has made ma y investigations pay off in ways they never could have otherwise.
Eek, the thought of that makes me cringe. I guess it would be passable in some circumstances, but I can imagine a bunch of reasons why it would be miserable or useless:
* the quality drop; recompressing, non-matching frame rates, non-matching resolution--all the same goes for audio. You're very likely clipping (losing) data. This is assuming you're doing screen-capture. If you're literally video taping a monitor you will get moiré in the video, room tone in the audio, losing any stereo separation, and other audio/video artifacts.
* performance; must be done in real-time, cannot queue up multiple sources. This is likely the biggest efficiency killer and makes things 100x more labor intensive.
* reliable Internet; if you get a blip or have a slow connection you have to hopefully catch it and start over. With youtube-dl you can pause, resume, confirm even on the slowest, spottiest connections.
* metadata, organizing, indexing; likely hand-typed separately, prone to error, prone to not knowing if you've done that video already.
* Chain of custody; grabbing the original video allows you to prove two identical copies match (using file hashes or other comparisons) screen recording makes that difficult to impossible to confirm--maybe with fancy AI you'd have to run by the courts?
Eek, you are responding to my comment as if it was a freestanding response about archival copy and law enforcement work, when it was specifically in response to someone saying he was using it for neither. It's not surprising it makes you cringe, but please consider in context.
> the quality drop; recompressing, non-matching frame rates, non-matching resolution--all the same goes for audio.
Are you trying to preserve quality or prove something? My response was in context for "gathering evidence" but not police work, and not archival quality. Would such a copy cause your problem to prove libel, copyright infringement, illegitimate disclosure, etc?
> performance; must be done in real-time, cannot queue up multiple sources
Can most definitely queue up multiple sources. Just make a youtube playlist and record it. Yes, it takes "real time latency", you'll take 10 hours to download 10 hours of video in general -- that's not an issue for evidence or gathering in a non law-enforcement context.
> metadata, organizing, indexing; likely hand-typed separately, prone to error, prone to not knowing if you've done that video already.
Again - consider the context of my answer, NOT archival quality anything. The "cc" stream GP mentioned, which can be searchable etc - has also seen many revisions for many files when the Google STT algorithms are revised, and with corrections.
> Chain of custody; grabbing the original video allows you to prove two identical copies match (using file hashes or other comparisons) screen recording makes that difficult to impossible to confirm--maybe with fancy AI you'd have to run by the courts?
You have no chain of custody. You can prove two downloads are the same, but YouTube does not guarantee they keep the file the same (indeed, they've modified files several times, changing formats and even remastering old '80s videos). If a file is later pulled (which is what GP was talking about), what are you going to compare it to?
Chain of custody is law enforcement business. They'll get the files from YouTube directly, with affidavits and statements about it and any modifications, if they need it in court. You are going to civil court, and youtube-dl is not making your evidence more valid than a screen recording.
This, along with screen capture, is known as a form of rebroadcast and it's used to obscure and obfuscate digital alterations, watermarks, deepfake artifacts and the like. When doing media forensics, it's optimal to get as close to the raw source as possible.
Isn't this just due to more compression? What's stopping someone from turning down the bitrate and re-encoding a video into different formats a few times to kill the quality (which will still look fine on a 6 inch phone in portrait orientation)?
That's one of the effects we model in fact, "social media laundering" is the term of art.
Various detectors are more or less thwarted by it. It actually surprised me how strong the artifacts from some GANs are - they can survive several passes of re-encoding, but accuracy does suffer.
But I still need the raw 720/1080 stream for training.
With the appropriate tools, such as gnome-screenshot.
But when I find myself on a locked down computer - e.g. watching a movie on an AppleTV, or when I was shown surveillance video but was refused a copy for some bureaucratic reason (or it required a different license to export, reasons were unconvincing) - I use a mobile device.
Filming the screen, means that in order to fake it, you have to setup something that routes youtube.com to your own fake version of youtube, before filming. To me, that sounds much harder than say "this file was downloaded from here on that date"
"oh nice, a youtube-link from one of my sources, let me get my camera set up to archive it ..."
I kind of expect a serious investigator to archive these materials just for the sake of it. I don't expect them to make it harder on themselves for no good reason.
So - if the issue is really the marketing around youtube-dl, does this mean someone can create a fork named something else, use different marketing, and carry on?
Well, sure, but google/YouTube search does find in it. The GP was talking about their work collecting evidence - they can find it just as well, and record a copy for posterity just as well.
I am not saying it’s as convenient (more options >> less options except for analysis-paralysis). But I don’t understand how it tips the scale to making any archiving or evidence gathering unusable or uneconomical. (I am not saying GP is wrong - just want more explanation so I can understand)
Law enforcement already has an anti-circ exemption under 17 USC 1201(e), though a finding against youtube-dl would limit it's (or similar tools') availability and/or functionality.
Honest question: How is Section 1201 anything other than incoherent?
Suppose there is some legitimate non-infringing use of some material. Interoperability, law enforcement use, fair use, accessing public domain material which is distributed using the same technological measures, whatever.
You create and distribute a piece of software to interface with the material for those purposes.
It's the same piece of software as one designed for any other purposes, because the software has no knowledge of your intent and your intent has no technical effect on its operation.
If that is allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a dead letter? If you make the tool available for non-infringing uses, the tool is available.
But if that isn't allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a contemptible offense against all of those important interests? And possibly unconstitutional as a result?
Section 1201 requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for infringing purposes. Which means that it being able to infringe alone isn't enough for it to violate 1201, but also that because it can be used for non-infringing purposes doesn't mean it doesn't violate 1201. As with many many laws intent matters and deciding intent is why we have judges and juries.
That sounds a lot like saying that it is, indeed, incoherent, but don't worry because we can get a judge to decide whether or not you're going to jail ex post facto, at a cost to you of more than you paid for your house (win or lose).
Computer people probably see the nondeterministic behavior in words like “primarily” as evidence of a bug. To the law school graduates who write the laws, it’s a feature and not a bug that these decisions are made by a judge in a courtroom.
It helps to realize that "human reality" is nondeterministic in the sense that we lack sufficient computing power and modelling capability to work with it. It's not random, it's AI-complete. We literally can't handle it formally, and that's why we need to defer to the only "general AI" we have - or as its ordinarily called, human judgement. And human judgement is not random - it's taking into account vast amounts of data, like ethics/morality and social context, which for now escape our attempts at formalizing them.
I don't see where you're getting that. GP rightly pointed out that 1201 prohibits tools "primarily" designed for prohibited circumvention. That's a perfectly coherent thing to prohibit, and that has the perfectly clear, logical implications that GP described.
Now, if what you really mean is that is is vague, then I agree. But I don't see any case for it being incoherent.
> GP rightly pointed out that 1201 prohibits tools "primarily" designed for prohibited circumvention. That's a perfectly coherent thing to prohibit, and that has the perfectly clear, logical implications that GP described.
Except that it isn't, as already discussed, because the code doesn't change based on the design intent. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's used for interoperability or fair use or to rip songs for The Pirate Bay. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's produced by a university researcher or the developer of a media player app or a literal sea-faring pirate with a parrot and a peg leg who is the founder of a political movement to abolish copyright and promote civil disobedience.
But prohibiting a specific person (who may have had a particular intent) from distributing it is incoherent (or at least futile) if it means you can just get some other person with some other intent to distribute the exact same thing. And it's also incoherent to say that the other person can't distribute it even if they genuinely do have a different intent, if the intent is supposed to be what matters.
None of which depends on what you judge a give person's intent to be after the fact, because it's a defect in the legislation, not the judgment in any particular case.
>Section 1201 requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for infringing purposes
It requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for circumventing technical measures in place to prevent infringement. Just infringing copyright isn't a violation of the section.
The tool itself is not inherently illegal. Intent and marketing is the only important factor.
A tool designed to be used by police and marketed towards police is legal, as its intended purpose is not infringement. A tool advertised as "hey, kids, use this to infringe those copyrights" is totally different, even if it's literally the same tool.
But then most of the defenses of the RIAA's actions here don't make any sense. When the purpose of youtube-dl is to enable the likes of mpv interoperating with YouTube then having RIAA music in the unit tests would be apropos of nothing because it would be completely valid to want to test the interoperability with RIAA music from YouTube.
Moreover, that would save the law from being a dead letter in the sense that there would be circumstances when it could theoretically be enforced (i.e. when someone is overtly marketing it as a tool for infringement), but wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that? It's still exactly the same tool. And then what does the tool have to do with anything anyway, when what you really have is a law against speech promoting copyright infringement?
> most of the defenses of the RIAA's actions here don't make any sense.
HN is not a court of law, most people here are not lawyers, let alone well-paid and competent lawyers like the ones the RIAA can afford.
> wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that?
Sure - which is why you're not seeing many ads for tools to steal cars or pick locks. But it's not only about the way the material is promoted, it's also about how it's obtained, whether the seller could reasonably know what it would be used for, and a bunch of other stuff.
You can't look at this from a binary perspective; despite depictions in popular media, the law is typically not about "aha" moments, but rather about putting a number of coherent pieces together to paint a certain picture.
As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (i.e. that has been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion to youtube-dl.
A note on the service that they don't host the infringing content, but just link to those who do, is evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. The same goes for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization.
Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the legitimate purchase of content.
* youtube-dl is not just for Youtube (ie. google). It supports heaps of sites, and youtube is probably less likely to have the sort of content I'm referring to than twitter, pornhub, liveleak, who knows.
* I am in Australia, so for a subpoena (or similar) my friends would need to issue an MLAT request, which would indeed take a very long time. In fact, this often does happen, but in the meantime a formal preservation request (to the service provider) and a local copy (via something like youtube-dl) are important steps.
* Many investigations don't go to court, for a litany of reasons (that's a pun I guess). In such cases, a subpoena isn't in context: law enforcement have to investigate what has happened, to figure out if it needs to go to court.
* Some investigations are important but do not meet the 'serious crime' threshold for forcing companies or parties to provide information. If you can imagine being the victim of a minor crime, that someone filmed and put on twitter, I'm sure you can imagine the local police may want a copy of the video before the tweet gets deleted - but also know that there will never be an international cooperative justice process. It's just a local issue.
* Publically posted video is very common and often important, and it is not surprising that the police need a tool to download it. There are so many sites and web browser technologies, and the cops are not efficient spending their time coding youtube-dl equivalents.
I feel quite strongly about youtube-dl being taken down for copyright infringement by the RIAA, but have tried to answer in an informative way. Sorry if it comes across harsh - no ill will intended :)
The process for a subpoena takes forever and isn't guaranteed.
If I have a subject who has relevant video on a service like YouTube, and I decide to go the subpoena route, here's the process:
- Find the exact video, document the URL, Content creator's account name, and video upload date.
- Submit a preservation letter to Google to ensure the video will still be accessible when the subpoena is auctioned.
- go to my prosecutor/legal team to determine what jurisdiction the subpoena has to go through. It could be the county I'm in, the county the subject lives in, the county the video was uploaded in (unlikely), or the county where Google hosts the video.
- draft the subpoena and get it reviewed by whichever judge/magistrate applies.
- wait who knows how long for the subpoena response, hopefully it comes back with the real video and important content.
- face defense arguments in court that my subpoena was improperly obtained/submitted
In this thread we're talking about publicly available data.
The fact that the path that works for non-public data is burdensome is good because it reduces abuse. Demanding that it be used for public data too just creates more pressure to undermine the (already insufficient, IMO) protections that exist for private data.
I think that using youtube-dl to download a video that a suspect has uploaded to YouTube, and presenting it in court is an example of doing policing right.
If you don't want your videos to be used against you in court, I would recommend not publicly broadcasting them to the entire world.
you mean "because they could just use youtube-dl to download it?" I think that's why we are arguing that ytdl is a tool with legal and moral purposes and should remain accessible.
What if this tool remains public in a different part of the world? Are you going to wall off from the rest of the world so you can no longer see the tool and pretend it doesn't exist?
Why was my first though here "I bet Palantir have their own fork of youtube-dl which they rent out to cops in a SaaS thing for the low low price of $ASTRONOMICAL-SUM-COMPARED-TO-ALL-THE-DONATIONS-THE-PROJECT-HAS-EVER-RECIEVED ???:
Well the RIAA will most likely create the opposite outcome by removing YTDL. Now boat loads of people who did not know about this tool will find it. Am I mistaken in thinking this source code only existed on one website .. Now owned by m$ ?
Imagine if source code was posted on some type of blockchain like ETH2.. Or a decentralized file sharing service, like IPFS. I wonder if websites or self hosted interpreters using some kind of services like those would make serving a take down request nearly impossible.
Well for now we can pay m$ to host code in ways people rely on for the long term. Until, they don't and the codes all taken down in something analogous to modern book burning.
Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence.
Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.