← Back to context

Comment by codedokode

2 months ago

There could be valid reasons for fighting downloaders, for example:

- AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has.

- YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT" to promote bloggers migration.

>AI companies

Like Google?

>scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data

Like Google has been doing to the entire internet, including people’s movement, conversations, and habits… for decades?

  • > Like Google?

    Like Google competitors obviously.

    > Like Google has been doing to the entire internet, including people’s movement, conversations, and habits… for decades?

    Yes, but if you allowed to index your site (companies even spent money to make site better indexable), Google used to bring customers and AI companies bring back nothing. They are just freeloaders.

- Enforce views of ads

(not debating the validity of this reason, but this is the entire reason Youtube exists, to sell and push ads)

Then they should allow a download API for paying customers.

Why is this being downvoted? Are people really gonna shoot the messenger and fail to why a company may be willing to protect their competitive position?