Almost as good as Google in search quality but, more importantly, unencumbered by all the legal US BS such as DMCA.
That being said, I wouldn't be surprised if YT has developed a mechanism to detect content that was downloaded through YT-DL and your company is a victim of an automated tool someone at YT has created to make sure those who steal videos from others will make less revenue.
E.g.: - IGN pays for content or gets content exclusively - someone else downloads the IGN video puts their own watermark over the IGN one and publishes the video as their own. IGN and the company ask - YT to take those videos down which requires lots of people to waste their time for something that could be automated
Of course, you better be sure that you are in the right if you're gonna do that though.
The regulator should notice that serving sketchy DMCA notices is a form of denial of service. An consequently, if the DMCA is ruled to be unfounded, there should be heavy pubishment for the issuer as well as the enforcer (Google in this case).
>The DMCA takedown request has resulted in over 300 of our pages being removed from Google Search
Note that google regularly removes millions of pages due to DMCA requests. But I can still easily find kapwing.com in google results, so it's not like they removed the domain.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't be too sure that AT&T would be broken up today as it was back in 1982.
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):
You can always rely on DuckDuckGo to list :D.
What can we say about a totalitarian search engine?
It's the complete opposite of what it was 20 years ago.
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.
The DMCA really seems to fall apart when the host and the copyright owner are the same entity.
No they don't. If Google decides not to sue (which frankly seems likely given the precedent it risks setting), then they have to put the material back up.
> 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”.
This is false. My first result in Firefox is https://www.kapwing.com/tools
Search with bing and the first result is https://www.kapwing.com
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
Part of the issue also applies to kapwing BTW : your app in inherently worse when you have to fight the browser's own limitations - one recent example I have seen : a tool that syncs the sound of two videos that had a live discussion... but then doesn't allow you to put then on separate screens, both fullscreen, because it puts them both in the same browser tab, rather than two separate windows !
YouTube is in such weird spot because they want to maintain free access to content yet limit how people access it without a pay-wall which OTT players like Netflix etc have been doing since long.
I don't think the economics of write-once-run-anywhere are going to change anytime soon. so WASM is a welcome shift closer to the metal, I'd say.
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.
- Google recorded half of the planet with cameras scanning license plates, addresses, faces. You see those blurred in Google Maps, but the license plates, faces, are not blurred in the internal data at Google. I am still to see confirmation of data correlation not occurring.
- They scanned the Wifi MAC addresses associated with physical addresses "by mistake".
- They scanned public records of companies, and associated them publicly and sometimes the private address of the owner, and invite you as the owner to "take ownership" of their google map data...
No, but when Google scraped the Internet, nobody did anything about it.
The value they added by making everything searchable was so great.
Giving content creators platform flexibility is clearly a threat to YouTube.
Double standards are twice as good.
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)
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?
One of the (many) reasons the DMCA is bad is because it makes using your existing rights harder. You've mentioned "fair use" here. But the submitted article is talking about:
> (2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
> (A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
You can't use your right to fair use if the IP holder has implemented an access control, because the DMCA makes circumventing an access control unlawful.
The fact that the IP industry was able to implement a law that interferes with free speech shows how out of control they are.
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.
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.
I'll approximate: Contract violations are okay if they result in no damages. Courts determine damages by harm done. This comes down to a lot of detailed issues, including things like intent. Licenses are more complex, and I'll ignore issues like statutory damages.
A lot of licenses are GPL-compatible because although the terms differ in phrasing, the GPL has provisions which are substantively the same (e.g. attribution versus copyright notice). Courts won't care.
MIT signals one intent, and AGPL signals another. That's a big difference. I have code under AGPL, GPL, and MIT, and in the case of the AGPL code being ripped off by copilot, it undermines a lot of the purpose of having licensed the code as AGPL if others can use it without that license. For the MIT code, a lack of copyright notice+attribution would typically be mild annoyance at best.
A court would pick up on that, and act accordingly.
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".
- Purpose and character of the use
- Nature of the copyrighted work
- Amount and substantiality
- Effect upon work's value
I feel like that provides a valid ethical framework in both cases.
For example, if my AGPL code is taken and ends up in another open-source project, just without attribution, I'm okay with it. If it's used for a father-son duo making an awesome thing for Burning Man, unaware of where it came from, I'm fine with that too. If it's used by a large commercial organization to compete with my open0source project, I'm not okay.
I don't feel bad using SD at home for personal use. It's a lot of fun. I would feel bad, for example, using it to make advertisements or Hollywood films. I don't feel bad about most non-commercial and educational settings.
Your line might be a different place, but there's a line somewhere, and it's not all-or-none.
I, for example, have some views about Copilot, and think that there's a case for saying that it violates copyleft code licenses. I...do not have a view about art, mainly because I literally have no idea how copyright works in the art world, or if there's something similar to copyleft; so I usually don't comment on the AI-generated art stuff that seems to be popping up left and right.
However, when it comes to a different group such as artists, also many 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".
[citation needed]
People on $internet_site doing A and people on $internet_site doing B does not mean that the same people are doing A and B.
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.
(Of course the DMCA is still problematic for grey areas and spurious claims, like here.)
The problem is, in the worst case Joe Random has to go to court over a snippet of music that randomly blasted from a passing car in a youtube video and risk going to battle with, say, Sony Music - a conglomerate with eight billion dollars yearly revenue. Many cannot take on that level of financial risk, not just the risk from the court verdict itself (punitive/damages) but also the cost of all the lawyers involved.
And at that point, we're in kangaroo court territory - when people have the theoretical right to due process but practically cannot use that right due to the risk involved, it's nothing short of the foundation of democracy being undermined. We need a cap on lawyer costs and damage awards so that the 99% can have their fair day in court against the 1% again without having to fear going bankrupt. At the moment, the only resource the 99% have is to go to the media and raise a stink, but the success chance for that route is probably on the same order as a lottery win.
After a few days, they got back to us saying actually we needed to file a counter notice form, which involves pasting the URLs one by one into a web form with an explanation for why the page did not violate copyright. So Eric and I split up the URLs and did that, one by one, for 317 URLs
We filed the counter-notice on Thursday. As of the time of this comment (Monday afternoon), we have not heard back, and our pages have not been reinstated
Looks like scraping is allowed then, if your robot is named "Mediapartners-Google*" And you can name your robot whatever you like (there's no legally enforced nor defacto registry), so my robot:
"Mediapartners-Google-im-cleary-not-a-member-of/1.0"
Can legally scrape anything on google's youtube. Perfect.
Apparently http clients are not banned by this law even though they are necessarily "part of a product" that is designed to circumvent protection,... And they are the main thing doing the actual copying. This law is still not achieving it's full potential. :D
In the same vein, there's conflict between exceptions offered by one law (fair use), and bans by this same law (software to exercise this right).
I guess the courts decide, but in practice courts don't run around looking for conflicts in laws to decide on their own, to make laws more followable by normal people, but they just decide cases brought forward by seomeone. And that someone is usually someone who benefits the most out of some particular outcome, and is thus able to pay for the case.
The whole system seems a bit prejudiced in how it works.
I agree that CORS is a pain and a mess but it had very clear and non-nefarious benefits when it was introduced. Maybe when all browsers only support origin-isolated cookie jars it can be obsoleted but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Now create a new Google account. What Google will ask you seems to be region dependent, but here in the Netherlands I get just two options: make a dummy payment using a credit card, or send in a copy of your ID.
This year I closed my age old Google account, and moved from Gmail to Fastmail. I did have to create a new Google account recently for use with the Play Store. It's not tied to anything that costs money, so that's fine, but it won't work on Youtube for age gated videos. I get the question outlined above now.
Altavista, yahoo
Also, the issue here is not that Google banned their tool from accessing YouTube because the tool didn't obey robots.txt. The issue is that Google, the search engine, nuked their site, because they didn't like its content.
And Figma could be a 20B buyout without WASM. I don't see any relevancy about valuation and a specific tech choice. Figma's editor is a very good use case for WASM -especially since they have the right people in the team- but there are other ways to achieve the same thing (even just by using JS).
From a security/privacy perspective electron-esque apps are no different from native apps, and divorced from the browser UX, PWAs only inherit the trust they cultivated while running in the browser. They are just webapps with some quality-of-life sprinkled on top, after all.
With WASM, it is like machine code for the browser meant to obscure what is even happening and you are supposed to just trust it and I don't. I don't trust it to not be abused to push more privacy violations and I don't trust most web developers enough to not just pull in a huge framework with no clue what they are doing and to make accessible fast sites using it.
No, not at all. It means users can run whatever software they want on their machine.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...
German request for data audit reveals the web giant 'accidentally' stored payload information from open networksnot to be a google apologist, but they only ever record public areas. Do you hold tourists that take photos to the same standard?
> are not blurred in the internal data at Google.
whatever is in internal google is irrelevant, since the data is not exposed publicly. Do you expect that a tourist that took the same photo with a license plate to blur out their photo in their own private album? I would expect that the tourist that publishes the photo (say, on facebook) blur out the license plate, but not when it's in their own private album.
> sometimes the private address of the owner
how did google get the private address of the owner of a public business? I don't quite understand the claim to the wrong doing.
I mean, that was a plot point in a Batman movie not too long ago. And even Batman doesn’t deserve that kind of power.
The data may not be exposed publicly but can still be sold or used against you.
If those tourists are creating a massive database of everybody, then yes.
The issue isn't really the recording itself. The issue is what is done with the data afterwards.
Tourist don't do the same thing. Why do you think there is almost no Google Street View in Germany?
> whatever is in internal google is irrelevant, since the data is not exposed publicly...
GDPR -> "What information must be given to individuals whose data is collected?"
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
> how did google get the private address of the owner of a public business? I don't quite understand the claim to the wrong doing.
Google got it because some owners have their company registered to their own private address. It's the extra step of publicly exposing that info and pressuring you to take ownership of it otherwise it will be shown on Google Map an offer that currently is 98% of the market. Why do you think you have the option of blurring the view of your house in Google Maps?
Scale, intent and usage matters in law.
They tried to get around that with Pokemon Go with some success. I don't know if all that content they scraped is publicly available however.
If I go to Google Street view I can see a lot of details from inside my house, same with the houses of my neighbors.
If you stop and stare inside someone's window in public, people will notice and wonder what the hell you're doing. Nothing's stopping anyone from staring through people's windows through Google Street view though.
So you can wonder what the hell they're doing as much as you want, because what you're suggesting is perfectly legal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZcUAPRRac
I can't even tell why this one specifically is age-gated, but something as explicit as their Deutschland video isn't. I guess there must be a boob in this one somewhere.
» yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=StZcUAPRRac
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading webpage
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading android player API JSON
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading tv embedded player API JSON
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading web embedded client config
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading player a97e97de
[youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading web embedded player API JSON
[info] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading 1 format(s): 248+251
[download] Destination: Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f248.webm
[download] 100% of 37.25MiB in 00:01 at 28.46MiB/s
[download] Destination: Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f251.webm
[download] 100% of 3.68MiB in 00:00 at 18.70MiB/s
[Merger] Merging formats into "Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].webm"
Deleting original file Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f251.webm (pass -k to keep)
Deleting original file Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f248.webm (pass -k to keep)Edit: ah, bath scene at 02:40. There are like 4 pixels what could be interpreted as an areola.
Native apps are objectively worse than WASM in terms of security/privacy risks as they have access to all userspace syscalls. It's not like WASM bytecode can link against system libraries. Everything has to go through the browser/runtime sandbox. The only real risk here is side-channel attacks like Meltdown.
Surprisingly, because just about all the other methods and proxy-sites mentioned in various click-baity articles a search yields have stopped working.