Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which the utilities question comes up again, we create spin-off show “Sussing Out Stocks With Stuart”, and:
The Github removal of Youtube-dl interests me as I use it all the time. Not for music (I still buy that stuff), but for videos that I can’t watch when I don’t have internet - say, at work.
As I see it there are many ways to split this. And whether it’s good or not to keep Youtube-dl depends 100% on what you care about. Legally the arguments get pedantic, and lawyers and judges will determine that. I’m fine with that. whether the laws well conceived, or whether they are stupid and short sighted, that argument is one i try to keep separate.
Philosophically though, similar to bittorrent, Youtube-dl is an extremely useful technology. All the arguments that were pro bittorrent are also pro youtube-dl, and they were and are still valid. All the arguments that bittorrent was good for the recording industry by all evidence were and are still valid. And all the ways that the recording industry is shooting itself in the foot repeatedly in a market that they could no longer control were and are still valid.
This is like paying an organization to protect your art. Say, your painting business. Then they decide to go around and harass people that make cameras. It’s stupid. It’s bad for your business, it’s bad for your customers. Whether or not a law like the DMCA says they can do this is besides the point.
Once this pandemic is over and we all go back to work in offices again (assuming we will) I think Zoom will loose a lot of it’s users and therefore it’s value.
The thing that makes Zoom great can easily be copied by their competitors; but the thing that makes their competitors great can’t easily be copied by Zoom. Webex, Teams, and Meet are small parts of a larger offering. Once companies start rationalizing their IT spending when they have time to sit down and think about it some one is going to point out they’re already paying for this kind of service within something they already had, aren’t willing to give-up (or can’t easily), isn’t as necessary any more, and is 90% the same.
The only angle Zoom has is video-conferencing. Cisco, Microsoft, and Google all have a ton of different angles and video conferencing can be what it needs to be for each individual customer.
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