On 07/02/2018 05:22 PM, Tom Callaway wrote:
On 07/02/2018 10:40 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
I was wondering about quvi/libquvi-scripts and youtube-dl.
The URLs in libquvi-scripts are hard-coded, and the test suite attempts to connect to youtube.com (for example). The Totem integration does not prompt for a URL, either. All this suggests to me that the expectation is that the software can only be used to access those video sites, and not testing your own video streaming service.
Keeping in mind that IANAL, and this is not legal advice, looking at the ruling of the Ninth Circuit in Oracle v Rimini (Filed Jan 8, 2018), the panel held that:
"... taking data from a website, using a method prohibited by the applicable terms of use, when the taking itself generally is permitted, does not violate the CDAFA or the NCCL."
(CDAFA is the California Comprehensive Data Access and Fraud Act, NCCL is the Nevada Computer Crimes Law.)
The Ninth Circuit also ruled back in 2012 (USA v David Nosal) that merely violating a website's terms of use is not a crime under the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), 18 U.S.C. § 1030.
But is distribution a tort?
What about the “Save video as …” option in Totem, which Firefox automatically disables to honor the wishes of the web site operator?
(And Fedora aims to be relevant in more than just one jurisdiction.)
In the specific case of these tools, they are accessing the publicly available youtube website. If these tools were hacking into the youtube website and pulling out content that was not being made publicly available, that would potentially be a different story, but this is not the case.
I have not checked if you can use these tools to avoid geo-blocking (because the tools bypass the regular web front end).
Thanks, Florian