[vlc-devel] ATTN: removal of website playlist parsers

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mercredi 15 avril 2009, Jean-Baptiste Kempf a écrit :
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 06:28:17PM +0300, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote :
> > Conveniently, nobody bothered to comment on my several complaints
> > surrounding the inclusion of playlist parsers for various websites.
> > I assume that means I am right, and those may be construed as
> > copyright violations.
>
> Noone could comment because noone of us is a lawyer.

Do you routinely murder people because no lawyer told you not to?
What kind of excuse is that?

> > Hence, I'm going to remove all LUA parsers but the CUE file one
> > before 1.0 goes out. If you have a proof that a given parser is not
> > in breach of copyright for the corresponding website, please
> > explain why/how.
>
> Could you you say why you think those parsers are breaches of
> copyrights?

Deep linking is well-known to be a contentious issue that has lead to 
several lawsuits. At any rate, ad stripping is unfair, hence probably 
not in accordance with the terms of use, hence likely in violation of 
copyrights. That would definitely apply to some of the listed LUA 
parsers. That includes video sharing websites (e.g. Youtube), as well 
as online TV channels (e.g. CanalPlus). In both cases, advertisements 
are delivered "out-of-band" as a separate piece of the HTML document.

If advertisements were part of the video, as with TV broadcasts, it 
might be OK, but it typically is not the case.

> How are those scripts different from GreaseMonkey, AdBlock or any
> other webviewer? How are those scripts different from the
> Youtube-browsing interfaces from TVs, or from the browsing from most
> other free Media Center software?

I don't know, but I really fail to see the point.

> Why not "wait for trouble"?

First, we have no way sane to address the problem a posteriori that I 
know of, so that's a suicidal policy. Second, it is as morally wrong as 
freeloading. Third, we have enough legal hot potatoes already.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/