I think a few folks haven’t read the article or know who Jeff Geerling is. The title of this article is confusing.
Jeff posted a video on YT about how to self-host your own media in 2024. He recently got a violation from YT that YT considers his video to be harmful and dangerous. He appealed, got denied, but then the update is that YT removed the violation.
Saw the video… It mentions ”ripping” and even shows clips of some blockbuster movies. No wonder any copyright-sensitive automation gets triggered pretty fast. This will only get worse.
Pretty fast? The video was uploaded in 2024.
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What if I decide to digitize my entire movie catalog? I would have to rip those DVDs and blurays…
Yeah. That’s illegal in lots of countries.
But it is legal in the country he lives in as well as the country YouTube is headquartered in.
Is it? I’m not totally sure, as I’m not from the US but I think the DMCA is the nasty player in this game.
Technically I’m half right and half wrong (I think). It’s not illegal to backup media that one owns, but it is illegal to break DRM/copy protection which is required to rip most physical media these days.
Suffice to say the legality of it is a cluster fuck, but the morality, in my opinion, is pretty clear. Fuck the corpos.
Yeah fuck them.
Nearly all digital media is locked so in order to back up something you own you’ll have to break the lock. Fuck. Them. (And the people who voted for these laws)
You’re right https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2018/faqs.html
A lot of people don’t realise that the application of the VCR was technically copyright infringement, especially so when you lent tapes to your friends.
I think if the ripping includes de-DRM-ing it’s is illegal in a lot of countries. I am not saying it’s right, we should own our own content, I am just saying it as a fact.
Yeah isn’t that crazy?
Copyright by itself only protects distribution but then laws like DMCA (US) and EUCA (EU) make drm removal illegal. Its hard to believe that these laws exist and should be opposed at every possible opportunity.
Can you imagine buying an ebook and being told you can’t remove malware from some strings of text or you’ll go to prison? Also you have no consumer protections like refunds or ability to pass down the license so you’re literally have worse consumer rights than a physical product and digital data costs nothing!
The current copyright framework is so broken and so toxic it needs to be completely destroyed.
Yeah, totally agree. You know, I would perhaps be even ok keeping the drm, I have been thinking about it the other day. I would have to have a guarantee that I can use it even 50 years from now and it would have to be public, open-source solution, not owned but shaity companies like Adobe, Apple and Amazon (there is really no choice nowadays), who will use this to also track us. Plus, as you say, I want to have a right to pass it onto someone (but more like lend it to a friend, because I can’t imagine somebody caring about inheriting my 50 year old books, really. About the refunds, I think some online stores offer (limited time) refunds and if you buy e.g. physical book, especially in the physical store, you are also very limited when it comes to returns.
What really triggers me is that digital products that are significantly cheaper, easier and safer (environment etc) than physical counterparts have significantly worse rights and protections.
Even if I agreed with the idea of copyright the economical implementation is so absurd.
None of that is illegal. He states he purchased the media. And it’s certainly not harmful content.
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It says (updated) but what is the update?
Update (one day later):
YouTube has just reinstated the video, after what I presume is a human review process. I wish it didn’t take making noise on socials to get past the ‘AI deny’ process :(
Go forth, and self-host all the things! I’ll post further updates in this issue in my YouTube project.
Go forth, and self-host all the things!
He means self-hosting as in hosting his own PeerTube instance? Right??? 🙏
if you read further, he writes about peertube too
Yes, he says he’s dependent on the ad revenue. However, no one is asking for him to drop YouTube. Also posting on PeerTube will simply have him reach more viewers. It won’t move viewers away from YouTube.
People don’t pay. They say they would but they don’t. So we are stuck with YouTube and ads. I know people complaint about them but what is the alternative. People have to eat.
And yes I block ads I don’t care but I understand why they are needed. And for some reason most don’t block them.
All European citizens have the right to object to automated decision making under the GDPR
YouTube restored the video, but not until Jeff had made a huge stink about it (and rightfully so, those yt fuckers can eat a dick).
I hate youtube so much. When are they moving all to
freetubepeertube or something? How long do we all accept Google youtube?When are they moving all to freetube or something?
Unless I’m missing something Freetube is a client. So it wouldn’t be Jeff moving to freetube it would be you using freetube to watch his content on YT.
I’m guessing you meant peertube instead of freetube and your answer there is “When they can get paid.” Making content takes time and costs money and YT pays creators like Jeff for doing it.
I dislike YT alot but there’s financial decisions at play here that can’t really be argued with.
Have there been any announcements for plans for monetization on PeerTube? Any idea what that would look like for creators?
I went over and looked at the peertube FAQ and nope, there’s no monetization plan. Their reasoning for that is consistent with their goals but it is a hurdle to creators moving to the platform.
It’s not one or the other though. Peertube with patreon can exist alongside YouTube
Patreon is just one source of income. Ad revenue is another. Its good to have more than one source if you wanna make a living with it.
That was my very point :)
I guess I missed your point lol. Is it possible to paywall a peertube video behind Patreon?
Ah yes peertube. There it goes wrong already. The name is too much alike.
They’re the 800lb gorilla, and no other platform can create “youtuber” income, so it’s a real problem for people like Jeff Geerling to move from yt, even if they know it’s bad, because it’s a major part or all of their income.
Yeah, and it was a one off restore, so others who are mentioning self hosting will still be taken down as long as that policy remains.
I agree.
I will add, however, that Jeff’s main concern isn’t the policy itself, but that he and other youtubers can’t see it or know what the rules are. The lack of transparency is the real issue.
Update (one day later):
YouTube has just reinstated the video, after what I presume is a human review process. I wish it didn’t take making noise on socials to get past the ‘AI deny’ process :(
Yeah I remember once when my friends Synology started acting harmful when he run jellyfin on it. it started off gasing mustard gas. It poisoned the well and made his son addicted to zyns. All of the cars in his neighborhood needed new batteries. The country’s GTP dropped a lot that month and the ozone layer is gone. Thank God YouTube stopped platforming such harmful content. Too bad so luch damage has already been done.
Yes, exactly. The server I run jellyfin on kept promising me cake, though I am fairly certain the cake is a lie.
Synology is already enshittifying itself
I would go so far as to say they are already in a shit state, but they’re just not stopping the process yet.
Jeff should consider hosting on Peertube and keeping his Patreon active. He’s awesome and more than capable, I’d mirror him in a hot second.
He’s on float plane. I think he’s trying to make a living, so I’d assume YouTube ad revenue is a factor
He’s on float plane
I’ll never support anyone on that platform. I’ll never do anything to give LTT a cent.
Yeah I’m not big on LTT either, I’d like to see him on Nebula. The price is reasonable and they have some really good high quality content.
I seem to remember Jeff explaining his choice, and a big factor was that Nebula doesn’t have comments under videos, nor any other similar forums for video posters and watchers to chat. I think he said he wouldn’t be happy without that direct interaction.
I admit I don’t watch every video, I’m subscribed but I just kind of let videos come to my home feed and watch that way. I mainly use YT as background noise while doing something else.
His reasoning makes sense, so I guess I’ll just continue to watch on YT since I have no desire to join FP. Thanks for the info!
What they did to you?
Lied
Can you tell me more please? Or send a link please? I would like to know what happened, thanks.
It’s been talked about to death. It’s been analysed to death.
But here’s a very detailed and thorough breakdown:
I see, you mean this, I thought there is something new. Thank you for sharing. What I didn’t like about Luise’s contribution to this drama is that he focused solely on LTT’s side and didn’t mention the other side. Because I think both sides made some mistakes.
Flotplane is a decent enough alternative. They keep gutting YouTube’s ad-rev, sooner or later, something will have to give.
It’s pretty harmful to Googles cloud business.
Who would win:
- A 2 trillion dollar multinational technology company
- Some guy’s hobby project
Another reason to self host: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/google-cloud-outage-brings-down-a-lot-of-the-internet/
Isn’t that what an mp3 players main purpose is? Are mp3 players bad now?
Yes cause they can’t sell you a subscription for your mp3 player.
Fucking rent seeking behaviour from corporate parasites.
That’s the one thing idiocracy got wrong it wouldn’t be Costco it would be Rent-A-Center
Costco bought RAC in a stunning buyout in 2437 after Costco’s CEO Harambe Memelord Disney Jr. offered RAC’s CEO Squiggy John John John John Johnson a 2-for 1 deluxe latte coupon and an extra big-ass fry.
Correct, if you ain’t streaming from corpo, you are denying them engagement and profits
That’s a crime, shit Lord
I cannot stress enough that I would download a car.
You’re God Damn Right.gif
An “off” switch… She’ll get years for that! Off switches are illegal.
MP3 players aren’t bad, they’re just mostly obsolete when smartphones can do the same thing and we mostly already have one.
I like to keep several GB of music on my phone from my MP3 library, and I have no streaming music accounts. I pay once for my music at most.
Your phone is an mp3 player. It just does other stuff too.
I remember when the iPhone came out, it was a little more than an iPod that made calls. The rest is history.
I think you might be misremembering; the original iPhone had YouTube, maps (though it lacked a GPS for whatever reason), a camera, Safari, and even a primitive HTML based App Store that paved the way for modern PWAs. Games like Bejeweled were available months before iOS 2.0 came with the App Store.
The Moto ROKR was an iPod that made calls.
Tbh there also was iPod Touch, which did everything iPhone did except making calls.
You’re right. It was released almost at the same time as the 1st gen iPod touch, and that iPod ran the same OS as the iPhone (then named iPhone OS). I thought the iPod touch came before, it didn’t. The iPod classic was significantly different from the iPhone.
There is a subsection of mp3 players that have enough power to drive high impedance headphones, Hifi players, some call them. They still make decent sales to their customer base of particular people.
Clearly
Hey kid… You wanna self host an api call? 😈
You wouldn’t steal an API call…
Would YOU download an API call?
Would you create an api to download an API call?
it would be amazing if geerlingguy was the one to make youtube go mask off
Google has been mask off since they removed “don’t be evil” as their slogan, and they’ve been proving it ever since. Apparently people don’t pay attention!
