I feel most peertube users would not care. But is it legal, or a chance that some one might sue?
edit: added claritiy to the question title and post body.
Peertube is an open source platform where I feel most users are posting there just to have fun and as a hobby for no or little profit. While Youtube is ad supported and creators on there now days want to use it to make profit.
On Peertube should it be legally acceptable to download uploaded videos for free for offline use? Is it legally acceptable?
Your web browser or app downloads videos whenever you stream them, nothing illegal about it. Only difference when you use yt-dl is that the video gets saved on your device storage instead of being cached temporarily.
About number 2, invidious got a letter sent to them by youtubes legal goblins a few months ago trying to make the argument that downloading vids is violating their TOS. The thing is, invidious doesnt use YouTube’s APIs and instead uses the regular way browsers stream content to do its thing. Nothing ever came of this and invidious is still going strong, so while YouTube/google would really really like 2. To be true in order to murk the 3rd party scrapers, as it currently stands it as long as they aren’t using YouTube’s APIs they aren’t breaking TOS (that they never agreed to)
I’m not a lawyer though and could be wrong, this is just my current uneducated understanding of that situation. Just my 2c
There are few legal differences.
-
in cache its harder for the average nontech person to access a cached video outside the website. Additionay in cache it’s considered a temporary store to help aid the service than a permament one.
-
When you download a video on Youtube it is probally against their terms of use while doing the same on Peertube seem widely permited by the playform based on the license the user uses. There are fewer Peertube videos that dont allow downloads then do.
With that said, a concerning amount of them have unknown selected as their license. So its hard to tell most of the time when its ok with the creator to download and if their ok/cool with it.
Why would it be illegal do let people download a video for personal use ?
It’s part of the "private copy right’ so it’s legal even in big platform (which try to block it)
Even without going that far, the person creating the content can decide at which conditions you can use it, and many use copyleft licences
Streaming makes a copy of the video in your browser’s cache, so it’s legal for you to make a local copy to watch unless the server or poster is breaking the law by posting the video. Unless there’s a license accompanying the video that specifically says something about not storing your local copy long-term, it isn’t illegal to do that as well.
One thing to add that I just found and looked into is that Peertube does seem to have a way to sort by license, atleast on sepia search, which is like a global search for most Peertube instance, though probally not every video gets featured on all instances ever made. So that seems to suggest even more that is is case by case basis whether it is legal to just go and download the videos freely.
My other concern is that not every video upload has a license submitted, those videos uploaded to a Peertube instance, that say that the license is ‘unknown’ it’s due to the uploader not deciding and that just complicates things further for whether it’s okay or not okay to download the video.
If we are going for this fediverse and opensource thing especially with video, legal use like this need to be looked into, simplified and more talked about so people can rest assured they are in the right legally. Even if the uploader might not be as likely do anything, it’s still an unknown license and that could leave people vulnerable especally in more creative cases especially when they reupload with little fair use to there aid.
who’s going to sue?
who are they going to sue? an IP address is not a legitimate source used to identify an individual.
other than being raided and your electronic media being seized, the feds (or whomever) dont really have foot to stand on - and even then you’d still have to be found guilty by a jury.
ytdlp to the end of days, nothing is going to happen
