this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Most people have extremely weird ideas of what's considered piracy and what isn't. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that's somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not piracy either. Torrenting an album is piracy, but listening to a bootleg on YouTube isn't.

YouTube noticed this at some point and is now happy to let everyone know how much pirated music is available on their site. One of their main points for shilling YouTube premium is how their music catalogue is way better than Spotify. Of course the piracy site has more. That's always how it works. Spotify actually has to license the music on their platform and is subject to copyright law. They can't just get the Neil Young discography from soulseek one day and wait until his estate notices, facing no repercussions whatsoever aside from agreeing to a takedown request. Imagine if Pirate Bay or Napster were considered completely above-board businesses just because they took down torrents if explicitly requested by the copyright holders.

Not that I'm complaining especially when a lot of the music on youtube isn't publicly accessible anywhere else. It's just been extremely strange to see this go from an "open secret" to something they're shouting from the rooftops and face no repercussions for. In the future I want everything to be like that and I'd rather keep youtube how it is than see them get the punishment that by all rights they should be getting. It's just so strange that this is the position things have ended up in.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The music on YouTube isn't any more piracy than unblocked Spotify. YouTube's "official" music uploads (these that are a square with a blurred background behind the square) are acquired by paying DistroKid or record labels. Unofficial uploaders usually aren't monetized, either bc they didn't enable it、are niche、or got ContentID'd by YouTube. Those few that are monetized(e.g. Si𝚕vaGunner and Gi𝚕vaSunner (i.e. not Si𝙸vaGunner or Gi𝙸vaSunner)) usually get DMCA'd eventually.

Downloading from YouTube is piracy though, though like OP says some don't think so for some reason.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And many non-official uploads are let stay because somebody sent them a dmca and they chose to keep the video up but let monetization pay out to the org that copyright claimed the content. So the ancient "song name (hd)" video from cheeselicker9000 isn't official but the record label likely gets paid for any ad revenue they make from it. Most labels just strike the non official stuff and upload their own nowadays though. I know when I did some youtube that was one of the options for a response, just letting the claimant take ad revenue and manage monetization.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's what I meant by "got ContentID'd".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Ah gotcha, I didn't know the term for that :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Why are you using Chinese enumeration commas?

i.e. "、" instead of ","

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

to separate the list from the regular comma

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

how is the hyphen for that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Downloading from youtube is piracy? How? If it was like a Youtube Red show, sure, but the normal videos everyone can see for free?

For me piracy begins with aquiring things or features which usually cost money to get whilst also taking into account if its obvious a thing should cost money in such an environment (thats also how our piracy laws are worded here).

So our piracy laws also classify things as piracy if it was obvious the deal was too good to be true like Windows for 2$ on eBay or chinese ROM cards for 5$ with hundreds of games.

Videos on youtube, including music, are a normal occurrence. A full blockbuster movie is usually not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

acquiring things or features which usually cost money

YouTube's and Spotify's download features usually cost money

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If it would be hard to do and having to bypass DRM yes, but its actually similar to what the player already does.

A court already ruled here that downloading youtube videos does not break the piracy laws by providing own means of downloading and saving the unprotected data.

Of course that does not include allowing the download feature of the client itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
  1. It is actually a bit hard to do. yt-dlp had to bypass some anti-downloading speed limits or something, which is also why youtube-dl is so slow
  2. I'm not sure if that extends to official YouTube music uploads, since they are copyright protected. I also can't find the case you mentioned.