To play devil's advocate, I wonder if it can really be said that when you watch a youtube video you have been
> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge
when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.
I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.
> To play devil's advocate, I wonder if it can really be said that when you watch a youtube video you have been
>> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge
> when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.
The problem with this idea is that you're quoting a case about recording televised broadcasts. The quote you pulled your quote from begins "when one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work".
Televised works were shown with embedded advertising a lot more intrusive than what can appear on a YouTube video. There is no way for the presence of advertisements to affect how this argument applies to YouTube, when it was originally cast in terms of television.
Gets complicated, but watching ads to watch a video is a separate issue from the underlying copyright for the content.
The content holder licensed the content to Youtube (or Vimeo, etc), but does not necessarily control the monetization of that content by the licensee. (Generally, the license will say something like royalties shall be X% of revenue derived from the content, without limiting itself to specific methods of monetization.)
Youtube doesn't have a license to give to the viewer; the license they have is merely to show you the content.
I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.
This has been the law for several decades already. But the key thing to understand is "fair use" doesn't mean "to avoid paying." If digital content is available for purchase, the courts generally have not found making a permanent copy from a streaming source to be fair use. (Where it gets complicated: multiple copyrights applying to a single work, such as the dancing baby Prince video. The creator of the video was okay with people viewing it and downloading it freely, but Prince was not. In the music arena, this would be a non-issue due to compulsory licenses, but those licensing schemes don't exist for other types of media. Ultimately, the court said that the focus of the video was the toddler dancing, and that the music was incidental, so including it in the video was a legitimate fair use. But it took more than a decade for the case to be resolved.)
For sure, that is the argument they will have to make! As a counter-argument, what if I paid for my youtube premium membership though, to avoid the advertising, and really what I want to do is to ___location-shift within the bounds of the law, I want to take my laptop into the wilderness and watch the movies I paid for, on an Indian reservation in front of a mountain scene, ... where there is no broadband or cell radio tower service?
(Hypothetically of course! Youtube-dl is not only for Youtube.)
That's multiple different licensing scenarios. Paying for Youtube Premium doesn't give you a right to download whatever videos you want, since that right has to be granted by the copyright owners of the videos.
If you purchased a movie, presumably this included the rights to watch it offline (and most of the movie lockers like Vudu, etc, generally include such rights), then the selling website generally makes available copies for offline viewing (and many Blurays include codes to activate on movie locker service to get a license for a digital copy). In such case, you would need to use that service for downloading the offline copy, because the Youtube copy isn't part of that license to you.
There are fair use rights that are not able to be satisfied without a copy.
You can assert all of that, but unless you have some landmark precedent to cite that agrees with what you're arguing, I'd like to hear a court decide on that. Sony Betamax says what I'm arguing, and archival can be for fair use, too. There is 36 Cinema, which maintains copies of classic kung-fu movies that aren't available for purchase anymore, and invites Rza from Wu-Tang Clan on periodically for broadcast viewing with a value-add, Rza's commentary. Since the movies are no longer available for sale, there is no impact to marketability. Since commentary is added, transformative. That's all fair use, format-shifting. I say youtube-dl is a tool for format shifting, with substantial non-infringing uses that present a compelling value and don't impact marketability, exactly in line with the Betamax case. If format-shifting and copy for archival was strictly prohibited as you suggest, those movies could be lost forever whenever a format becomes obsolete. When was the last time you saw a VCR? (CD or DVD player?)
That's just one of the things that the fair-use rules and exemptions in copyright were written to help resolve positively.
You can record anything on TV with a VCR, even if it's available separately for purchase on video. There is no technical way I can see in which this scenario differs. You are not obligated to pay for content again and again in every medium, format-shifting is also an allowable kind of fair use. Everything you're saying makes sense, but I don't think it's as clearcut as you say, until it has been decided by a court (and appealed, and decided again by a higher court.)
You're literally just arguing against how the law works in the US. I'm not going to argue against the fictional legal system you've set up in your head.
The 36 Cinema stuff resulted in a new copyrighted derivative work: the commentary. And they can distribute that commentary all they want...but to distribute the underlying films as part of a commercial offering they need copyright licenses to those films. It's irrelevant that the underlying films are not for sale at retail, since they can still acquire a copyright from the copyright owner.
Format-shifting isn't fair use. It's literally an act of copying that is subject to copyright protections. Format-shifting might be fair use, but you have to do the full analysis, and format-shifting to avoid paying for a copy in the destination format is not fair use.
That's just one of the things that the fair-use rules and exemptions in copyright were written to help resolve positively.
Now you're just making stuff up. 17 USC 107 sets forth the basic rules for fair use, and they're quite limited.
When was the last time you saw a VCR?
Last week. Best Buy and Walmart still sell VCRs...Millions of people in this country still have old TVs with purely analog connections.
You are not obligated to pay for content again and again in every medium, format-shifting is also an allowable kind of fair use.
Actually, yes, you are, since each offering of the content in a different medium is a different copyrightable work subject to its own copyright. A VHS copy of a film is very different from the Bluray copy of the same film.
> but to distribute the underlying films as part of a commercial offering they need copyright licenses to those films
They sell tickets to these events. It's still fair use, (and it would not be possible to have these events without someone first acquiring a digital copy for archival.) You're arguing that they could broadcast the video with commentary but they can't make (or take) a copy? This is prerequisite to the activity! And many of these publishers may no longer exist, as not everyone agrees these movies are classics.
Also section 117 of Copyright Act explicitly calls out the making of a copy for archival as an allowable exception.
> invited to witness in its entirety free of charge
when you consider advertising. It could be argued that when you watch a monetized youtube video you are being invited to view the video in exchange for also viewing advertisements as a form of payment.
I hope that you're right though, and that we get a ruling in favour of being able to make copies for fair-use.