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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  • Nyfure@kbin.social
    52·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • Aatube@kbin.social
      2·
      7 months ago

      acquiring things or features which usually cost money

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

      • Nyfure@kbin.social
        1·
        7 months ago

        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.

        • Aatube@kbin.social
          2·
          7 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.