When I opened Streamus today, I received this message:
Hey everyone, Sean here.
So, good news for people who love bad news.
I've been working with YouTube on-and-off since November of last year regarding their Terms of Service. The past four months have involved a lot of talks with them.
Prior to July 7 I was led to believe that Streamus would be fully compliant with YouTube's demands once it supported showing video. I spent hundreds of hours making this a reality.
Unfortunately, after adding this functionality, I was informed that showing video was not sufficient. YouTube has demanded that Streamus pause music when minimized. Failure to do so will result in Streamus being removed from the Chrome Web Store on July 14.
So, for now, this is the end of the road. :(
This update provides you with the ability to export your playlists back to YouTube. Right-click on a playlist through the left-side menu, or click the 'More actions' button, to see the option. Doing so will create a new playlist on your YouTube account and move all available songs to it. The code isn't very smart. It won't be able to update an existing playlist, but at least you can get your songs out.
As for me? I will begin working on SoundCloud support effective immediately. Streamus will be unpublished from the Chrome Web Store while I work on this.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to e-mail me at admin@streamus.com or you can find me on the r/streamus subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/streamus
I'm truly sorry. I had the utmost confidence that adding support for video would fulfill YouTube's demands and was heartbroken when I learned this would not be the case. You can view the full conversation I've had with YouTube here: http://i.imgur.com/15gaOf6.png. I fought long and hard for you all and this was not a decision I took lightly.
I look forward to listening to music with you all once again in the future.
Themgt, it's obviously a matter of legality, not practicality.
Chrome's rules are that no plugins in their store may do illegal things, so if Youtube says that Streamus isn't compliant, then Streamus can't be in the Chrome Web Store.
That doesn't prevent us who already have the plugin from continuing to use it, it's merely a violation of youtube's license agreement to do so.
It's unfortunate for Streamus, but expected and reasonable in my opinion (especially since the developer knew he was breaking the ToS from the beginning).
YouTube presumably has negotiated contracts with the content owners which allow them to stream audiovisual content under a certain set of constraints. Many content owners distribute their content in other ways (e.g., selling music on the iTunes store), so they allow their content for "free" on YouTube only because they know that the audio component will be accompanied by a video of their choice and they will be supported by ads. These content owners wouldn't want YouTube to be used just like an ordinary music streaming service without being compensated properly. In order to hold up their end of the deal, YouTube has to enforce their terms of service, otherwise they risk losing the contracts that they have already negotiated.
If Streamus wanted to keep doing things like they were before these changes, then they would have to go and negotiate contracts with the content owners, just like YouTube had to do. Streamus has to abide by the ToS (which is in turn the terms of the negotiated contracts) if they expect to use the YouTube API.
I've been a fan of Streamus from early on. Thanks.
YT's policy seems to be "No Audio without Video, unless the Audio is from YT running in another browser tab, then it is OK."
That being said, there's a Chrome App that lets you run YT in a separate, hidden tab (so you can't accidentally close the tab, for example).
Maybe you could open a hidden YT tab in parallel to Streamus, and you would be meeting their requirements? Or maybe you could start with a version that opens a visible parallel tab, and then later add an option to make it hidden?
Of course, this implementation might use double the bandwidth. Maybe you could play the audio through Streamus, and the video in the tab?
Thanks for posting this. While I can empathize with the work he put in, I can't imagine that he thought this would turn out any other way. He has an app that allows users to play music for free, he thought he could find a loophole that would be allowed?
I wonder what's gonna happen, will they let his code behave like an embedded youtube player or will they backpressure on every other websites at the risk of annoying a big chunk of the web ?
Companies have the right to operate and have a TOS
I also believe individuals have a right to consume content however they want to.
Large corp. are accelerating their control over tech and the net and freedom is rapidly decreasing.
If we want to keep that freedom, we'll have to fight for it, just like they're fighting to extract more profits from users by trying to make it illegal to do things that would get in the way of that.
I also believe individuals have a right to consume content however they want to.
That's the line that always ends the argument for me. Consume your content however you want, just don't assume you can consume someone else's content however you want.
Why do you deserve to stream to music written by A, composed by B, recorded by C, published by D, marketed by E, uploaded to and served via F without permission from any of them?
Why do you deserve to stream to music written by A,
composed by B, recorded by C, published by D,
marketed by E, uploaded to and served via F without
permission from any of them?
I assume, from your use of "deserve", that you're interested in the moral justification rather than the legal justification.
Back when ripping CDs to MP3s was a controversial idea, a lot of people took the view that when you legally acquire a copy of an artwork you have fulfilled your moral responsibility to pay your share of the fixed costs of production. That when the creators give you permission to access the artwork you have permission to access any transformation of that artwork.
So for example if you buy a CD and rip it to MP3 that's fine. If you buy a DVD and fast-forward over the adverts, that's fine too.
By the same logic, some people would say even if you haven't directly paid for an artwork, so long as you've acquired it legally you gain the same rights. For example, if you record a broadcast TV show onto VHS, fast-forwarding over the adverts is fine. And if a web page is delivered with adverts, not displaying them is fine.
Likewise, if you can legally view a music video on youtube, a version that strips out the video and adverts to leave only the audio track is just a transformation - and therefore fine.
Personally I don't 100% agree with this view - I think ripping CDs to MP3 is fine, but for free ad-supported content I follow an imprecise "is the creator being fairly compensated" maxim where I usually keep the adverts enabled, unless they bother me.
>By the same logic, some people would say even if you haven't directly paid for an artwork, so long as you've acquired it legally you gain the same rights. For example, if you record a broadcast TV show onto VHS, fast-forwarding over the adverts is fine. And if a web page is delivered with adverts, not displaying them is fine.
>Likewise, if you can legally view a music video on youtube, a version that strips out the video and adverts to leave only the audio track is just a transformation - and therefore fine.
That doesn't make sense. The license terms between purchasing a CD and watching a YouTube video are completely different. Just because you watch a Taylor Swift video on YouTube, due to what is laid out in the license terms, you do not get a perpetual license to view that content forever. This is different from a CD. Now how they enforce it is a different manner (aka DRM), but the license terms are explicitly different from a CD.
I don't see this a matter of "agreeing", but something fundamental for licenses to work. By your same logic, I could also argue that I can download the source code to GNU GCC, strip out all the GPL "nonsense", because since I acquired it for free I "gain" the same right to do whatever I want.
You might argue that "well you can strip the GPL if you don't redistribute it", however that is not what is happening in Streamus' case. Streamus is technically redistributing music that was originally licensed to play on YouTube with a given set of conditions under a new set of conditions. And if you are going to subvert a license that makes you no different than what Apple tried to do with Taylor Swift.
The license terms between purchasing a CD and watching
a YouTube video are completely different.
Yes, that's why I included the proviso "moral justification rather than the legal justification"
You might argue that "well you can strip the GPL if
you don't redistribute it",
Yes, in case I wasn't clear in my post I was thinking of someone ripping a CD and keeping the MP3s for personal use. Distributing the artwork to other people would be a different matter altogether :)
however that is not what is happening in Streamus'
case. Streamus is technically redistributing music
A streamus supporter would probably say streamus is analogous to a VCR manufacturer, or a website that provides links to pirated content without hosting the content themselves. That because the big file comes from a youtube server, youtube is doing the distributing.
Personally I've always found such arguments a bit disingenuous, but there's merit to them in some cases.
In general, we don't need to ascertain that we "deserve" to do something to do it. The default in a free society is that we can do anything. What we need to deserve is the reverse: the right to prevent others from doing something. That's what needs to be justified.
This doesn't mean those parties shouldn't have the right to prevent us from streaming, I just dislike how the burden of showing so is distorted to assume one needs to justify each action one does.
In any case, the ToS explicitly says I can stream: you agree not to access Content or any reason other than your personal, non-commercial use solely as intended through and permitted by the normal functionality of the Service, and solely for Streaming.
I don't think you can say anyone "deserves" free videos on youtube. I don't see how that has any connection to the issue.
"without permission" is wrong. D and E with the permission of A B and C explicitly granted permission through F to serve the file. They choose to give me a free copy, and I accepted. Now it's my copy. I can make personal use of it as bound by copyright.
It's always a pain working with legal stuffs & guys. YouTube make two valid points:
- Streamus has to display video
- Streamus has to display ads
And Sean's doing his very best job to display the video. Ads will be fixed by YouTube team. So far so good...
However, the final one is not reasonable at all: "stop playing after hiding the extension". How could that be different with another tab open and playing YouTube video on YouTube website? If this is a requirement in the deal with labels, even YouTube.com is not compliant with its TOS :-)
Honestly reading the conversation I think Youtube made it pretty obvious what they were going to require. The dev seems to be willfully ignorant in his replies.
It's been weird following streamus for a while, I don't use Chrome so I've never really used it. It's sad to see a project backed by such a dedicated developer go down like this.
It's open-source so you can still change it to do what you want, right?
Incidentally, I've also been using YouTube as a sort of internet-radio recently, with just a simple shell script that searches for videos matching specific keywords and plays them in a pseudo-random order via youtube-dl. Works well enough, although I do get the occasional non-music coming through.
> Streamus always loaded the video and it is now simply being presented to you
I really didn't know this. I thought Streamus only download the audio stream (since most youtube downloader able to retrieve audio stream without the video)
Use youtube-dl to download from YouTube (and many other sites). youtube-dl downloads the full video/audio file by default (which these days involves downloading and muxing audio and video streams), but it can also just download the audio.
Hey everyone, Sean here.
So, good news for people who love bad news.
I've been working with YouTube on-and-off since November of last year regarding their Terms of Service. The past four months have involved a lot of talks with them.
Prior to July 7 I was led to believe that Streamus would be fully compliant with YouTube's demands once it supported showing video. I spent hundreds of hours making this a reality.
Unfortunately, after adding this functionality, I was informed that showing video was not sufficient. YouTube has demanded that Streamus pause music when minimized. Failure to do so will result in Streamus being removed from the Chrome Web Store on July 14.
So, for now, this is the end of the road. :(
This update provides you with the ability to export your playlists back to YouTube. Right-click on a playlist through the left-side menu, or click the 'More actions' button, to see the option. Doing so will create a new playlist on your YouTube account and move all available songs to it. The code isn't very smart. It won't be able to update an existing playlist, but at least you can get your songs out.
As for me? I will begin working on SoundCloud support effective immediately. Streamus will be unpublished from the Chrome Web Store while I work on this.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to e-mail me at admin@streamus.com or you can find me on the r/streamus subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/streamus
I'm truly sorry. I had the utmost confidence that adding support for video would fulfill YouTube's demands and was heartbroken when I learned this would not be the case. You can view the full conversation I've had with YouTube here: http://i.imgur.com/15gaOf6.png. I fought long and hard for you all and this was not a decision I took lightly.
I look forward to listening to music with you all once again in the future.