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?
i thought saving for the purpose of timeshifting was allowed, but im sure the law is murky
That would apply if its scheduled like on tv but that wouldnt work if for standard video uploads would it?
I was thinking since most on peertube don’t tend to seek revenue from ads, so should it be acceptable? Peertube itself is opensource.
In summary i’m really asking for whether if it should be acceptable or not. Maybe it varies from uploader to uploader, but even then channels dont tend to state their own stance on this.
In summary i’m really asking for whether if it should be acceptable or not.
That is a question whose answer will be different for each person answering. Because it is a value judgement and people have different values.
Even “Is it legal?” Depends on where the person is answering and what laws apply to them.
First off, let me say IANAL and what little I know about copyright law is pretty biased toward U.S. copyright law.
Second, the title of your post asks “should” it be legal and the body asks “is” it legal. And that’s two very different questions.
My personal opinion is that it should (as in “ought to” or as in “the world would be better off if it were to”) be legal. But whether or not it is legal is, well, not always straightforward.
Complicating the question, some PeerTube instances require that all local videos be under certain specific licenses. For instance, Diode Zone only allows videos that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses which allow making/saving copies and sharing those copies (at least for non-commercial purposes.)
However, saving a video locally creates a “copy.” And copyright covers the creation of “copies.” So I’d expect in the general case saving a local copy of a video from a PeerTube instance (or from YouTube or Vimeo or some such for that matter) would itself be infringement. Copyright law doesn’t have any special allowances for “personal use” as far as I know. (And if it does, it’s likely that allowance doesn’t apply to all sorts of works – just to one or two kinds of works. Like for instance the right to make a digital backup is allowed explicitly in U.S. copyright law for software but not for, for instance, audio CDs.)
Assuming each word is meant literally in the question, yes believe it should be legally acceptable to download video from youtube.
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
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.
