Chat GPT Is Eating the World

The law of course only allows one to make copies, not that the provider must provide a means by which to make those copies, nor a restriction on those providers to any efforts to thwart making those copies.

When Justice asks:

“when did surgically extracting audio from a secure video environment become “copying” under the law?”

The answer, without distraction from the ‘secure video environment’ argument, is that it has always been copying. It is copying (storing) of the actual bits and bytes sent by the server to the client. That the law doesn’t require such an exact method of copying in order for it to qualify as copying does not negate it to /be/ copying.

This relates to Justice’s other statement:

“Circumvention is not needed on YouTube to obtain exact copies of videos for fair use purposes. While platforms like Hulu and Netflix institute encryption to prevent users from screen recording videos to make copies (even after gaining access via a paid subscription), as discussed further herein, YouTube permits copying through screen-reccording tools like OBS, while concurrently employing a rolling cipher encryption to safeguard the underlying video and audio files.”

This is a partially incorrect assessment; the copy would not be ‘exact’. OBS can only capture that which is output. The exact decoding method and any (post-)processing that occurs in the video and audio pipelines from the temporary media chunks to the output devices for OBS to capture can affect the result. To give an exaggerated example, an old netbook will never capture a 4K YouTube video; the captured video is often limited to 720p due to the screen resolution, and even if it were to have a 4K display it would not have the processing power to capture it. Contrast this with the alleged “surgically extracting” (a term solutions such as yt-dlp should embrace with honor), which would happily download this data, thus making a copy.

This is not pivotal to any form of ‘fair use’ discussion, nor the alleged circumvention. A provider could completely prevent screen recording and only require secure hardware connections, and a ‘fair use’ copy could still be made by pointing a camcorder at the screen displaying the output and providers could still be keen to suggest that this, too, is a circumvention of technologies as defined under 17 USC§1201(a)(3)(A).

But it bears stating as it appears Justice has just enough of a handle on the technological side of the subject matter to say things that superficially make sense, but are factually incorrect.