I wrote earlier about the code of the youtube-dl project being taken down by the Microsoft-owned code-hosting website Github, in response to a notice by the American music industry’s RIAA.
This is a travesty, and it should have gotten much more coverage in general news channels across the world.
In that blog post I wrote about, and linked to, a few instances of how journalists use the youtube-dl tool. Later, I came across this article that has more detail on this use-case. An example:
Numerous reporters told Freedom of the Press Foundation that they rely on youtube-dl when reporting on extremist or controversial content. Øyvind Bye Skille, a journalist who has used youtube-dl at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and as a fact checker with Faktisk.no, said, “I have also used it to secure a good quality copy of video content from Youtube, Twitter, etc., in case the content gets taken down when we start reporting on it.” Skille pointed to a specific instance of videos connected to the terrorist murder of a Norwegian woman in Morocco. “Downloading the content does not necessarily mean we will re-publish it, but it is often important to secure it for documentation and further internal investigations.”
Central to all of these examples is the fact that journalists can process a local copy in ways that the video hosting platform does not offer. It’s possible to download a high-quality video and audio file from YouTube [1], but the quality at which YouTube streams that same file in your browser depends on the quality of the internet connection, your actual device.
There is a perfectly good reason for YouTube streaming a lower-quality version: you want your viewing experience to be as lag-free as possible. But seeking to remove tools like youtube-dl take away choice in the matter.
Similarly, as the article describes, journalists use downloaded files of protests or events for further video or audio analysis. They may use it to compare video frames, voices and so on. These are not features that YouTube provides – once again, justified.
The appeal of YouTube is its audience, which is why people post videos there in the first place. So YouTube optimises for ease of use and discovery [2] not for analysis. Once again, seeking the destruction of youtube-dl, and presumably others like it, means removing all other capabilities than just passive viewing.
The USA recording industry’s massive overreach to safeguard its narrow – and narrowing domain, and Microsoft/Github’s capitulation, has great implications for access to information world-wide.
[1] Remember that YouTube is only one of the video hosting and streaming sites that the unfortunately-named youtube-dl supports.
[2] There are other issues there with YouTube’s recommendation algorithms often promoting misinformation and indirectly inciting violence, but that is another topic for another day.