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.
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?