Record companies Sony Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music have filed a lawsuit in Germany against the provider Uberspace, which hosts the project's official website youtube-dl. In response to an earlier out-of-court request to block youtube-dl, Uberspace did not agree to take the site down and disagreed with the claims. The plaintiffs insist that youtube-dl is a tool for copyright infringement and are trying to portray Uberspace's actions as complicity in the distribution of illegal software.
The head of Uberspace believes that the lawsuit has no legal basis, since youtube-dl does not contain the ability to bypass protection mechanisms and only provides access to public content already available on YouTube. YouTube uses DRM to restrict access to licensed content, but youtube-dl does not provide a means to decrypt video streams encoded using this technology. In its functionality, youtube-dl is similar to a specialized browser, but no one is trying to ban, for example, Firefox, because it allows you to access videos with music on YouTube.
Plaintiffs allege that Youtube-dl's conversion of licensed YouTube streaming content into unlicensed downloads violates the law by circumventing YouTube's technical access mechanisms. In particular, the circumvention of the βcipher signatureβ (rolling cipher) technology is mentioned, which, according to the plaintiffs and in accordance with the decision in a similar case of the Hamburg Regional Court, can be considered a measure of technological protection.
Opponents believe that this technology is not related to copy protection mechanisms, encryption and restriction of access to protected content, as it is only a visible YouTube video signature that is readable in the page code and only identifies the video (in any browser you can view this identifier in the page code and get a download link).
From the earlier claims, one can also mention the use in Youtube-dl of links to individual compositions and attempts to download them from YouTube, but this feature cannot be considered as a copyright infringement, since the links are indicated in internal unit tests that are not visible to end users, and at startup, they do not download and distribute all the content, but only download the first few seconds in order to check the functionality.
According to the lawyers of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Youtube-dl project does not violate the law, since YouTube's encrypted signature is not an anti-copy mechanism, and test downloads are considered fair use. Previously, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) already tried to block Youtube-dl on GitHub, but the project's supporters managed to challenge the block and return access to the repository.
According to Uberspace's lawyer, the unleashed lawsuit is an attempt to create a precedent or a fundamental decision (fundamental judgment) that can later be used to put pressure on other companies in similar situations. On the one hand, the rules for providing the service on YouTube indicate a ban on downloading copies to local systems, but, on the other hand, in Germany, where the proceedings are ongoing, there is a law that provides users with the opportunity to create copies for personal use.
In addition, YouTube pays royalties for music, and users pay royalties to copyright societies to compensate for losses due to the right to create copies (such royalties are included for consumers in the cost of smartphones and storage devices). At the same time, record companies, despite the double payment, are trying to prevent users from exercising the right to save YouTube videos on their disks.
Source: opennet.ru