The record companies Sony Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music have filed a lawsuit in Germany against the provider Uberspace, which hosts the official website of the youtube-dl project. In response to a previous out-of-court request to block youtube-dl, Uberspace refused to take the site down and expressed disagreement with the claims made. The plaintiffs insist that youtube-dl is a tool for copyright infringement and are attempting to present Uberspace's actions as complicity in the distribution of illegal software.
The head of Uberspace believes that the lawsuit has no legal basis, as youtube-dl does not contain capabilities to bypass protection mechanisms and merely provides access to publicly available content on YouTube. DRM is used to restrict access to licensed content on YouTube, but youtube-dl does not provide means to decrypt video streams encoded using this technology. Functionally, youtube-dl resembles a specialized browser, yet no one is trying to ban, for example, Firefox, because it allows access to videos with music on YouTube.
The plaintiffs argue that the conversion of licensed streaming content from YouTube into unauthorized downloadable files performed by the youtube-dl program violates the law, as it allows bypassing the technical mechanisms for access control employed by YouTube. In particular, mention is made of bypassing the 'cipher signature' technology (rolling cipher), which the plaintiffs believe, in accordance with a ruling from a similar case by the Hamburg Regional Court, may be considered a measure of technological protection.
Opponents believe that the specified technology is not related to copy protection mechanisms, encryption, or access restrictions on protected content, as it is merely a visible signature of the video on YouTube, which is readable in the page code and only identifies the video (in any browser, this identifier can be viewed in the page code to obtain a download link).
Among the previously filed complaints, the use of links to individual tracks in Youtube-dl and attempts to download them from YouTube can also be mentioned. However, this feature cannot be seen as a violation of copyright, as the links are stated in internal unit tests that are not visible to end users and do not download or distribute the entire content upon execution, but only load the first few seconds for functionality testing.
According to lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Youtube-dl project does not violate the law because YouTube's encrypted signature is not a mechanism against copying, and the test downloads fall under fair use. Previously, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to achieve the blocking of Youtube-dl on GitHub, but supporters of the project were able to contest the blocking and restore access to the repository.
In the opinion of a lawyer at Uberspace, the initiated lawsuit is an attempt to create a precedent or fundamental judgment that could be used to pressure other companies in similar situations in the future. On one hand, the terms of service in YouTube prohibit downloading copies to local systems, but on the other hand, in Germany, where the proceedings are taking place, there is a law that provides users the ability to make copies for personal use.
Moreover, the YouTube service pays licensing fees for music, and users pay royalties to copyright societies to compensate for losses due to the right to make copies (such fees are included for consumers in the cost of smartphones and storage devices). At the same time, recording companies, despite the double payment, are trying to prevent users from exercising the right to save videos from YouTube to their devices.
Source: opennet.ru
