Uh, put down the pitchforks. This is not Google taking it down because of not liking the tool. According to the screenshot it's a DMCA request from "BPI", "a UK record label association".
Actually, we should keep up the pitchforks, but redirect them towards the legal frameworks that give private, unaccountable entities the power to unilaterally disrupt infrastructure with almost zero legal recourse.
I still don't see how they can pretend these anti-circumvention takedown requests are legal. The DMCA clearly lays out the path to challenge an alleged circumvention, and it involves a court order barring distribution of the product. Takedown notices are only for violations of copyright.
Obviously, this tool does circumvent YouTube's mechanisms to download and edit a video. The user kinda accepts the risk (how many of them even read that privacy policy?) but there is no verification that they have any rights to the video. Which is imho as it should be.
It's neither wrong nor illegal to download someone's video and edit it. It's explicitly allowed in many jurisdictions under fair use. However, OP seems to accept complaint's framing.
Speaking of youtube-dl, there's an excellent fork, yt-dlp[1], which circumvents the newer speed limiting features YouTube implemented. (From what I gather, they use APIs for older devices.)
Yeah, AFAIK in many jurisdictions, this would be thrown out of court, because you (YouTube) cannot go around and complain about people downloading your videos after you put them on direct access on the Internet ! (Your profits being reliant on separately shown ads aren't an excuse because you could splice them directly in the video and the analog hole still exists anyway.)
In practice though, this has resulted in several (replay) video broadcasters hiding their videos behind mandatory account creation - IIRC a legal battle is still ongoing because doing something like this might violate the obligations they took when they rented the public EM spectrum.
Does yt-dlp circumvent the age check for videos classified as not suitable for minors as well? From what I've seen the loopholes for that type of video seem to have gotten closed this year.
The case is more nuanced than it looks from the outset. In this case YTDL is executed on the provider's premise not on the users machines. So you are not distributing a tool, you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
I still think that a DMCA takedown should not apply (and the regulation is BS) but this looks to be a different case. E.g. I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
> you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
...
> I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product
So, when Google scraped the internet to provide search engine, that was okay, but when some other site scrapes something, it is not?
If they are doing something illegal, by all means sue or report them.
But Google acting as police, judge, jury and executioner here shows why it's a problem to have a single unregulated company with so much power.
I agree with this, but I also feel Google should sue them for this feature, instead of removing them from Google Search. I feel like the second is an abuse of their massive power on the internet.
> I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
yeah I can understand this too, but it looks to me like Google is using its monopoly power in industry (search) to protect its monopoly power in another industry (video streaming)
Hum, isn't copyright about publication? The mere act of downloading doesn't necessarily imply this, and there's still legitimate cause for publication as in fair use. Also, wouldn't a DCMA complaint have to concern specific material? (To me, this doesn't make much sense.)
> The case is more nuanced than it looks from the outset. In this case YTDL is executed on the provider's premise not on the users machines. So you are not distributing a tool, you are providing a service that scrapes videos from YouTube.
So the rule is that you can't (as a user of Kapwing) use a computer you don't own (and are just renting in some capacity) to download your own videos? Or to download videos for "fair use" use cases?
I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
But if Google would actually act on that desire, they're so far into antitrust territory they'll never find their way out on their own. We can only hope that some of those teeth might have grown back.
This is why everybody should stop using Google as their primary search engine, and either use DuckDuckGo/Startpage/Brave or (even better) self-hosted meta-search engines like SearX/SearxNG.
I personally opted for the SearxNG option and I haven't looked back at Google for a single search for months.
Google decides to remove a website from their engine because of their bullshit reasons? And who cares? Google is only one among ten different sources that contribute to my SearxNG results. Other search engines will probably keep including that website.
The best way to stop Google's arrogant monopoly is to ensure that they become just another source among many, and that nobody cares of their search results more than they care about Brave, Ecosia or DDG. Remember that the only reason why Google has so much power over users and businesses is that too many people use it as their sole source of truth.
To repeat what I keep saying in these cases: there’s nothing special about the particular license you use, if it still has pretty much any condition. If Copilot is subject to copyright restrictions, MIT-licensed code is affected just as much as AGPL-licensed code: Copilot is still not meeting (and cannot meet) the condition of the license, attribution. Copilot depends entirely upon exemption from copyright restrictions under “fair use” exceptions.
But still, you’re quite welcome to issue takedown notices, though I don’t know if the regular process is actually appropriate (given that it’s a GitHub project rather than a project hosted on the GitHub platform). Their reaction might be interesting, though I expect they will just declare the notice invalid because of fair use exemptions and ignore it.
It's interesting to see this statement. When it comes to Copilot, many HNers share the sentiment that it has copied code from open-source projects without their permission.
However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, the same people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
You should. What’s the point of licenses if big companies ignore them?
Personally I’ve only ever released source as MIT, knowing it could be resold or used for nefarious things, or kept source private. I don’t trust ransoms on the internet to respect posted licenses, so anything I post publicly I post with as much permission as possible.
Mistakenly googling kawping even auto-corrected to kapwing so I'm guessing they've since been fully reinstated ... (Tinfoil hat) if they were ever even taken down.
[This is Julia, Eric’s cofounder] 317 Kapwing webpages were taken down, but we still have others (including this blog post) that show up on Google Search. As the article explains, our home page, blog, and EDU page are among those that are de-listed
I still kapwing and this post on Google search. I did look at one of the blog posts the author mentioned and tried googling random strings from that blog post and found it did not show up in a google search (though was the first result on Brave search).
I'm not justifying Google here as I am a fan of youtube-dl and the variants, but if you are creating a product or business that relies on Google servers and uses software that could be considered abuse (especially for commercial purposes) then I'm not completely surprised. You could have got an API key which is probably the correct route to go once you want to commercialize something like this.
This is what struck me as well. Giphy doesn't exist to scrape full videos from YouTube. Kapwing offers to scrape full videos from YouTube and then reupload them to other platforms. That not only likely violates YouTube's terms of service but also directly contradicts YouTube's business interests.
I'm not sure the DMCA claim is legitimate (and Google seems to have walked back on it, which seems odd) but this feels more like a ToS violation that would justify an IP ban or strongly worded legal letter than an obvious DMCA case.
Okay so their top organic pages were specifically about how to download Youtube videos. I'm assuming this is against Youtube's Terms of Service and considering Youtube is owned by Google this doesn't seem like they were really trying too hard to stay on Google's good side which you need to do when you get millions of monthly organic traffic and want to keep it that way.
But anyways according to Ahrefs I'm not seeing any traffic loss (not sure what happened with that big spike but there was a Google update at that time):
And I wondered why we suddenly moved to the first page on google for some queries for our app that we posted on Show HN some time ago that competes with kapwing in a small niche (SavvyCut: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28950702). It seems that someone made some room for us.
I guess if you rely on googles monopoly to run your business you should not be surprised if they can remove you at will.
For us, a lot traffic originates from competing search engines that show us on their first page even without creating any SEO spam.
It's depressing how shit the internet is now. Youtube has a virtual monopoly on video, effectively making them the public square for rich media. But you're limited in what you can post there, they can remove or deboost or quarantine whatever they want, and they actively prevent you from integrating with them. This is pretty much what every major platform turns into over time.
It's the complete opposite of what it was 20 years ago.
Although generally I totally agree and I think that with the size and relevance of YouTube Google has to allow access to the content with tools like yt-dl (even for businesses), I still wonder why they do not mention the official YT api with one word? Is it to expensive? Why wouldn't they use it?
Well, obviously, APIs provided by Google can allow app creators to do many things, but not things that are useful. Only Google apps can do useful things, per Google policy.
"Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so their API's will not support that."
Downloading videos for streaming services makes them cry, Not only Google, Netflix also hates people who go off the grid too. You should be online at all times and feed them data and money, and save your credit card details in-app, ready for compulsive buying. One day you'll be able to buy things while you sleep.
> This post is a cry for help to Google to stand up for smaller web developers
You perceive Google removing you from their Search service as being essentially erased from the internet, which means you understand they're effectively a monopoly.
And when they use that monopoly power against you, your response is to… beg them for mercy?
Not even a little questioning their monopoly status, as a treat?
It's fair enough to argue your case that you didn't break the rules. It just seems weirdly sinister to not even mention that your fundamental problem here is that the rules are capriciously enforced by what authors in the 1990s would have considered “a bit farfetched even for a hypercapitalist dystopia”.
When I search for "Kapwing" it appears in my searches (the post says it doesn't).
Does this mean that after a mere 3 hours Google reacted already?
This would again point to the highly asymmetrical balance of power where those that succeed in making themselves heard publicly (e.g. by hitting HN front page - not so easy, see my own submissions) get their problems fixes by the internet big ones, while those that don't are left to rot in obscurity. #regulateSiliconValley
[+] [-] jsnell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weird-eye-issue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jquery|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blfr|3 years ago|reply
It's neither wrong nor illegal to download someone's video and edit it. It's explicitly allowed in many jurisdictions under fair use. However, OP seems to accept complaint's framing.
Speaking of youtube-dl, there's an excellent fork, yt-dlp[1], which circumvents the newer speed limiting features YouTube implemented. (From what I gather, they use APIs for older devices.)
[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
In practice though, this has resulted in several (replay) video broadcasters hiding their videos behind mandatory account creation - IIRC a legal battle is still ongoing because doing something like this might violate the obligations they took when they rented the public EM spectrum.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heinrichhartman|3 years ago|reply
I still think that a DMCA takedown should not apply (and the regulation is BS) but this looks to be a different case. E.g. I could completely understand why Google would not want such a feature in your product for Business reasons.
[+] [-] senko|3 years ago|reply
So, when Google scraped the internet to provide search engine, that was okay, but when some other site scrapes something, it is not?
If they are doing something illegal, by all means sue or report them.
But Google acting as police, judge, jury and executioner here shows why it's a problem to have a single unregulated company with so much power.
[+] [-] boredpudding|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|3 years ago|reply
yeah I can understand this too, but it looks to me like Google is using its monopoly power in industry (search) to protect its monopoly power in another industry (video streaming)
[+] [-] masswerk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danbulant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megous|3 years ago|reply
So the rule is that you can't (as a user of Kapwing) use a computer you don't own (and are just renting in some capacity) to download your own videos? Or to download videos for "fair use" use cases?
I mean who cares where the software runs?
[+] [-] tremon|3 years ago|reply
But if Google would actually act on that desire, they're so far into antitrust territory they'll never find their way out on their own. We can only hope that some of those teeth might have grown back.
[+] [-] johnebgd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacklight|3 years ago|reply
I personally opted for the SearxNG option and I haven't looked back at Google for a single search for months.
Google decides to remove a website from their engine because of their bullshit reasons? And who cares? Google is only one among ten different sources that contribute to my SearxNG results. Other search engines will probably keep including that website.
The best way to stop Google's arrogant monopoly is to ensure that they become just another source among many, and that nobody cares of their search results more than they care about Brave, Ecosia or DDG. Remember that the only reason why Google has so much power over users and businesses is that too many people use it as their sole source of truth.
[+] [-] frognumber|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrismorgan|3 years ago|reply
To repeat what I keep saying in these cases: there’s nothing special about the particular license you use, if it still has pretty much any condition. If Copilot is subject to copyright restrictions, MIT-licensed code is affected just as much as AGPL-licensed code: Copilot is still not meeting (and cannot meet) the condition of the license, attribution. Copilot depends entirely upon exemption from copyright restrictions under “fair use” exceptions.
But still, you’re quite welcome to issue takedown notices, though I don’t know if the regular process is actually appropriate (given that it’s a GitHub project rather than a project hosted on the GitHub platform). Their reaction might be interesting, though I expect they will just declare the notice invalid because of fair use exemptions and ignore it.
[+] [-] stevewatson301|3 years ago|reply
However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, the same people seem to believe stable diffusion/DALLE-2/midjourney et al. are "just weights in a neural network and the neural network is generating art based on its understanding of text and style".
[+] [-] geraldwhen|3 years ago|reply
Personally I’ve only ever released source as MIT, knowing it could be resold or used for nefarious things, or kept source private. I don’t trust ransoms on the internet to respect posted licenses, so anything I post publicly I post with as much permission as possible.
[+] [-] dchest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjeetgill|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenthoven|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ALittleLight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|3 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be too sure that AT&T would be broken up today as it was back in 1982.
[+] [-] encryptluks2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encryptluks2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbad|3 years ago|reply
I'm not sure the DMCA claim is legitimate (and Google seems to have walked back on it, which seems odd) but this feels more like a ToS violation that would justify an IP ban or strongly worded legal letter than an obvious DMCA case.
[+] [-] account42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weird-eye-issue|3 years ago|reply
Okay so their top organic pages were specifically about how to download Youtube videos. I'm assuming this is against Youtube's Terms of Service and considering Youtube is owned by Google this doesn't seem like they were really trying too hard to stay on Google's good side which you need to do when you get millions of monthly organic traffic and want to keep it that way.
But anyways according to Ahrefs I'm not seeing any traffic loss (not sure what happened with that big spike but there was a Google update at that time):
https://i.imgur.com/r9naQne.png
[+] [-] Hitton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] behel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megamix|3 years ago|reply
You can always rely on DuckDuckGo to list :D.
What can we say about a totalitarian search engine?
[+] [-] unconed|3 years ago|reply
It's the complete opposite of what it was 20 years ago.
[+] [-] emaro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpigab|3 years ago|reply
See this SO answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/8081778/12405367
"Downloading Youtube videos is against their Terms of Service, so their API's will not support that."
Downloading videos for streaming services makes them cry, Not only Google, Netflix also hates people who go off the grid too. You should be online at all times and feed them data and money, and save your credit card details in-app, ready for compulsive buying. One day you'll be able to buy things while you sleep.
[+] [-] IshKebab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grey_earthling|3 years ago|reply
> This post is a cry for help to Google to stand up for smaller web developers
You perceive Google removing you from their Search service as being essentially erased from the internet, which means you understand they're effectively a monopoly.
And when they use that monopoly power against you, your response is to… beg them for mercy?
Not even a little questioning their monopoly status, as a treat?
It's fair enough to argue your case that you didn't break the rules. It just seems weirdly sinister to not even mention that your fundamental problem here is that the rules are capriciously enforced by what authors in the 1990s would have considered “a bit farfetched even for a hypercapitalist dystopia”.
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|3 years ago|reply
This is false. My first result in Firefox is https://www.kapwing.com/tools
[+] [-] croes|3 years ago|reply
Search with bing and the first result is https://www.kapwing.com
[+] [-] pommersche92|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] data_maan|3 years ago|reply
Does this mean that after a mere 3 hours Google reacted already?
This would again point to the highly asymmetrical balance of power where those that succeed in making themselves heard publicly (e.g. by hitting HN front page - not so easy, see my own submissions) get their problems fixes by the internet big ones, while those that don't are left to rot in obscurity. #regulateSiliconValley
[+] [-] maven29|3 years ago|reply