Bad actors allegedly tried to brute force their way into accounts belonging to Paxful’s users in an ongoing series of attacks.
Can anyone hold North Korea responsible for its attacks on the crypto industry?
A new collaboration this week between R3 and IBM is raising eyebrows in the world of enterprise blockchain.
Read more Market observers were not surprised by an immediate but mild sell-off of bitcoin after it hit 2020’s new highs.
Read more Researchers are waiting on a final audit of a critical crypto library before releasing the deposit contract, Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan said.
Read more Ripple was threatened three years ago when the prices of XRP and bitcoin shot to historic highs.
Read more From Brazil to Argentina to Turkey, bitcoin priced in local currencies is reaching all time highs. But is this a story of bitcoin succeeding, fiat failing or both?
Read more Shortly after voting to move forward with a pair of subpoenas, the Senate Judiciary Committee has reached an agreement that will see the CEOs of two major social platforms testify voluntarily in November. The hearing will be the second major congressional appearance by tech CEOs arranged this month.
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions at the hearing, set for November 17 — two weeks after election day. The Republican-led committee is chaired by South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who set the agenda to include the “platforms’ censorship and suppression of New York Post articles.”
According to a new press release from the committee, lawmakers also plan to use the proceedings as a high-profile port-mortem on how Twitter and Facebook fared on and after election day — an issue that lawmakers on both sides will undoubtedly be happy to dig into.
Republicans are eager to press the tech CEOs on how their respective platforms handled a dubious story from the New York Post purporting to report on hacked materials from presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. They view the incident as evidence of their ongoing claims of anti-conservative political bias in platform policy decisions.
While Republicans on the Senate committee led the decision to pressure Zuckerberg and Dorsey into testifying, the committee’s Democrats, who sat out the vote on the subpoenas, will likely bring to the table their own questions about content moderation, as well.
In ye olden days of piracy, RIAA takedown notices were a common thing — I received a few myself. But that’s mostly fallen off as tracking pirates has gotten more difficult. But the RIAA can still issue nastygrams — to the creators of software that could potentially be used to violate copyright, like YouTube downloaders.
One such popular tool used by many developers, YouTube-DL, has been removed from GitHub for the present after an RIAA threat, as noted by Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Parker Higgins earlier today.
This is a different kind of takedown notice than the ones we all remember from the early 2000s, though. Those were the innumerable DMCA notices that said “your website is hosting such-and-such protected content, please take it down.” And they still exist, of course, but lots of that has become automated, with sites like YouTube removing infringing videos before they even go public.
What the RIAA has done here is demand that YouTube -DL be taken down because it violates Section 1201 of U.S. copyright law, which basically bans stuff that gets around DRM. “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
That’s so it’s illegal not just to distribute, say, a bootleg Blu-ray disc, but also to break its protections and duplicate it in the first place.
If you stretch that logic a bit, you end up including things like YouTube-DL, which is a command-line tool that takes in a YouTube URL and points the user to the raw video and audio, which of course have to be stored on a server somewhere. With the location of the file that would normally be streamed in the YouTube web player, the user can download a video for offline use or backup.
But what if someone were to use that tool to download the official music video for Taylor Swift’s “Shake it off”? Shock! Horror! Piracy! YouTube-DL enables this, so it must be taken down, they write.
As usual, it only takes a moment to arrive at analogous (or analog) situations that the RIAA has long given up on. For instance, wouldn’t using a screen and audio capture utility accomplish the same thing? What about a camcorder? Or for that matter, a cassette recorder? They’re all used to “circumvent” the DRM placed on Tay’s video by creating an offline copy without the rights-holder’s permission.
Naturally this takedown will do almost nothing to prevent the software, which was probably downloaded and forked thousands of times already, from being used or updated. There are also dozens of sites and apps that do this — and the RIAA by the logic in this letter may very well take action against them as well.
Of course, the RIAA is bound by duty to protect against infringement, and one can’t expect it to stand by idly as people scrape official YouTube accounts to get high-quality bootlegs of artists’ entire discographies. But going after the basic tools is like the old, ineffective “Home taping is killing the music industry” line. No one’s buying it. And if we’re going to talk about wholesale theft of artists, perhaps the RIAA should get its own house in order first — streaming services are paying out pennies with the Association’s blessing. (Go buy stuff on Bandcamp instead.)
Tools like YouTube-DL, like cassette tapes, cameras and hammers, are tech that can be used legally or illegally. Fair use doctrines allow tools like these for good-faith efforts like archiving content that might be lost because Google stops caring, or for people who for one reason or another want to have a local copy of some widely available, free piece of media for personal use.
YouTube and other platforms, likewise in good faith, do what they can to make obvious and large-scale infringement difficult. There’s no “download” button next to the latest Top 40 hit, but there are links to buy it, and if I used a copy — even one I’d bought — as background for my own video, I wouldn’t even be able to put it on YouTube in the first place.
Temporarily removing YouTube-DL’s code from GitHub is a short-sighted reaction to a problem that can’t possibly amount to more than a rounding error in the scheme of things. They probably lose more money to people sharing logins. It or something very much like it will be back soon, a little smarter and a little better, making the RIAA’s job that much harder, and the cycle will repeat.
Maybe the creators of Whack-a-Mole will sue the RIAA for infringement on their unique IP.
A California court weighs in as Prop. 22 looms, Google removes popular apps over data collection practices and the Senate subpoenas Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. This is your Daily Crunch for October 23, 2020.
The big story: Uber and Lyft defeated again in court
A California appeals court ruled that yes, a new state law applies to Uber and Lyft drivers, meaning that they must be classified as employees, rather than independent contractors. The judge ruled that contrary to the rideshare companies’ arguments, any financial harm does not “rise to the level of irreparable harm.”
However, the decision will not take effect for 30 days — suggesting that the real determining factor will be Proposition 22, a statewide ballot measure backed by Uber and Lyft that would keep drivers as contractors while guaranteeing things like minimum compensation and healthcare subsidies.
“This ruling makes it more urgent than ever for voters to stand with drivers and vote yes on Prop. 22,” a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The tech giants
Google removes 3 Android apps for children, with 20M+ downloads between them, over data collection violations — Researchers at the International Digital Accountability Council found that a trio of popular and seemingly innocent-looking apps aimed at younger users were violating Google’s data collection policies.
Huawei reports slowing growth as its operations ‘face significant challenges’ — The full impact of U.S. trade restrictions hasn’t been realized yet, because the government has granted Huawei several waivers.
Senate subpoenas could force Zuckerberg and Dorsey to testify on New York Post controversy — The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of issuing subpoenas for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Quibi says it will shut down in early December — A newly published support page on the Quibi site says streaming will end “on or about December 1, 2020.”
mmhmm, Phil Libin’s new startup, acquires Memix to add enhanced filters to its video presentation toolkit — Memix has built a series of filters you can apply to videos to change the lighting, the details in the background or across the whole screen.
Nordic challenger bank Lunar raises €40M Series C, plans to enter the ‘buy now, pay later’ space — Lunar started out as a personal finance manager app but acquired a full banking license in 2019.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Here’s how fast a few dozen startups grew in Q3 2020 — This is as close to private company earnings reports as we can manage.
The short, strange life of Quibi — Everything you need to know about the Quibi story, all in one place.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
France rebrands contact-tracing app in an effort to boost downloads — France’s contact-tracing app has been updated and is now called TousAntiCovid, which means “everyone against Covid.”
Representatives propose bill limiting presidential internet ‘kill switch’ — The bill would limit the president’s ability to shut down the internet at will.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
