Comment by bjt2n3904

3 years ago

The goal of youtube-dl is to download a video off of YouTube for offline storage.

This isn't something YouTube particularly enjoys. They would rather you keep coming back -- every visit is more ad revenue for them. If you have an offline copy, you don't need to visit YouTube anymore.

YouTube has an incentive, therefore, to make it more difficult to download (or "scrape") their content.

I'm not particularly sure of the specific details, but apparently YouTube has added JavaScript (a programming language that executes in the browser) as a hurdle to jump over. A simple python script doesn't have enough brains to execute JavaScript, only enough to realize that it exists. (Clearly, youtube-dl is sophistication enough to have jumped over it.)

These are the conclusions I come to, having written software for about a decade.

1) Once you give information to someone, be it text, pictures, sound, or video -- they will do whatever they want with it, and you have no control. Oh, yes -- it may be illegal. Maybe unethical. But the fact of the matter is you do not have control over information once it leaves your hands.

2) Adding hurdles to make it harder to access the information does little to stop someone who is dedicated to accessing it.

3) Implementing a subset of JavaScript in such an elegant and tiny manner is quite impressive.

How you interpret these facts depends on your worldviews. If you are a media and content creator, you will view these facts differently than a politician, and a teenager.

As an engineer and amateur philosopher, I certainly support the rights of content creators to be paid for their work. And yet, I fear that more and more, content creators want to lease me a right to listen their music, instead of own a copy of it.

I used to own CDs, DVDs, movies, and books. What happens if Amazon or YouTube decides to not serve me anymore? Anything I've "purchased" from them, I lose access to.

Further more, if I create a song, I used to be able to burn copies of CDs and distribute it on the street corners. Now, you have to sign up to stream on Spotify. This is a double edged sword -- I get a wide audience, but Spotify will do whatever they want with me.