Why wouldn&#x27;t it be? Does this claim have any substance?

And I hereby expressly mention that it is, so there you have it.

They didn&#x27;t like people buying VCRs either.

Just so you know, they expressly mention that’s not a good idea in the notice.Also, I&#x27;m just the messenger so please don&#x27;t shoot&#x2F;downvote me

Stating the obvious: but hopefully to a place other than Github, since forks would automatically be removed as well.

Source available on PyPl: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;</a>

Any links to a repo that is still standing would be appreciated -- I would also like to clone the source.

Read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24872959" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24872959</a>

FWIW, I&#x27;m forking youtube-dl right now.

&gt; 1 See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md#readme" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md...</a>.&gt; Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.How, exactly? This is why I dislike GitHub&#x27;s &quot;Fork&quot; button, since a takedown of the original takes yours too.

IANAL but I don&#x27;t even think DMCA applies. It&#x27;s not like YouTube-dl is breaking copy protection schemes, at most it is handling anti-abuse schemes. After all, it&#x27;s not like you can go and bypass Widevine with youtube-dl.

It’s probably a case of fair use but it’ll have to go to court to decide that

Now that 4chan is behind bars, it&#x27;s time to sue the Internet!

Why stop with torrent clients? They should ban all browsers, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!

The RIAA would absolutely ban all torrent clients if they could. If one advertises itself as a way to download copyrighted material, they would try to pull the exact same thing.

What about chromium? They should take that down as well, imagine what children can see using that thing. `curl`, `wget` as well as gitlab - massive offender, random number generators - one of the biggest offenders, any worst nightmare you can imagine can be produced by it!

Hush, don&#x27;t leak their master plan! Of course they&#x27;d love to just ban about anything that can potentially be used to commit copyright infringement. Of course that includes your web browser, too. Unless it can only visit a list of websites pre-approved by RIAA ;)

Why not just ban computers or even why not jail people who even think about using ytdl? These organisations like RIAA need reality check. Sadly there is no body to stand against their bullying and stiffling the freedom of speech.

Yes, would be messed up given the state of play upon gun laws.

The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materialDidn&#x27;t the RIAA put up a considerable effort against torrenting in the early 2000&#x27;s? I remember quite vividly them going after just about anyone who made music available, even if you owned your own songs and were simply uploading them to a web UI to listen to in the browser (Remember Muxtape?)

Well, we (Lithuania) have a law that works along these lines. When you buy any storage device a part of the price is a tax that goes to IP protection agency. The reasoning is exactly that: because you may store some pirated music or whatever on it. How was this bs passed I have no idea.

I was thinking the same thing:
The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material.This is crazy.

Why? youtube-dl is a violation of YouTube&#x27;s ToS most probably, but does using it to download a copyrighted video necessarily constitute copyright infringement? I have literally used youtube-dl to watch YouTube, in the past; it&#x27;s handy to be able to use whatever media player you want, including ones that have better scrubbing.

Why in the world did they include copyright works in the README?  That&#x27;s contributory infringement!

Incorrect. DRMed YouTube-content cannot be downloaded using YouTube-dl. Only regular content.

&gt; according to RIAA, youtube-dl is circumventing the &quot;DRM&quot;I didn&#x27;t find any mention of &quot;DRM&quot; or &quot;Digital rights management&quot; on the page. Can you be more specific?

IANAL, but regardless, according to RIAA, youtube-dl is circumventing the &quot;DRM&quot; built into YouTube, and therefore they&#x27;re violating anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA. Therefore a DMCA claim can suffice to take it down.Perhaps if youtube-dl used different examples (i.e. videos not protected by anti-circumvention) perhaps they could have avoided this.

As much as I would like this to be true, copyright doesn&#x27;t have to be defended in order to be kept. That&#x27;s a very different law, trademarks.You can have your copyright infringed for decades before you try to prosecute the infringers, and the courts will still rule in your favour.

Conversely, the RIAA is making its media available on a known, at-risk platform to attain distribution. They&#x27;re not protecting their copyright sufficiently, and the copyrights should be revoked.I can&#x27;t wait for ML to lower the barrier to entry for music to near nil. Make anyone a vocalist or instrumentalist and hose these assholes.

Wait a minute, there&#x27;s a difference between distributed copyrighted works, and merely copying it for yourself. In France for instance, we have this notion of &quot;copie privée&quot; (private copy), that says we are allowed to copy anything as long as we don&#x27;t distribute it back. We even pay taxes on persistent memory for the privilege.Up thread there&#x27;s also a citation of the Betamax case, which says that it&#x27;s okay for people to record shows so they can watch them later, and it&#x27;s okay to sell video recording devices.This is different from Bittorent, which automatically distribute any content you download. With this too, when you are downloading, you are also distributing, which is a much clearer case of infringement in most jurisdictions.

It seems to me that they are making the claim that this tool is expressly for doing something that is forbidden by the YouTube TOS and breaking the music licenses provided.Of course YouTube has other videos that are under different licenses so it isn&#x27;t clear that this is the only use case of the software.

Should it stand up to legal scrutiny though?What does it matter if I play the beatles on youtube by watching in a web browser or watching an .mp4 file that I just downloaded? It&#x27;s functionally the same.

No it doesn&#x27;t follow at all, any more than had the repo owners included a couple of public domain recordings in the repo then the conclusion that the tool was clearly intended to download public domain recordings.

Can&#x27;t it be trivially reinstated then by removing any references to copyrighted content? youtube-dl has plenty of legitimate uses beyond just copyright infringement.

Just to add a data point, but back when I still was working for a video distribution startup, we offered our customers the ability to directly import their video inventory from YouTube. They were the owners of the videos, it was just a convenient (and very popular!) feature for them to let us handle this import.We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have done this easily without it. We imported hundreds of thousands of videos like this.I suspect there are many more legitimate uses of YouTube-dl than you would expect.

Curiously, what do scrapers (aka &quot;readers&quot;) have to worry about with this topic?Eg, i&#x27;m making an archiver and reader combination that, for personal use, archives stuff in a Git-like store. Yet, Git (and Git-likes) can also be used to distribute.. so hypothetically i could use this software to scrape and distribute content.My intention is primarily to make news articles&#x2F;etc searchable, archived, etc. Yet i&#x27;m sure NYT would have something to say about my test cases scraping their site... the world is interesting.

This is exactly the point. All they had to was use their own videos for the tests and readme and the dcma takedown would probably never would have happen. Plausible deniability.

It beats me why they&#x27;d use those videos as examples knowing how finicky copyright law is.

&quot;Napster could have been used for legal means as well, and it got destroyed in court.&quot;But Napster was a service run by an organization.youtube-dl is neither a service nor an organization. It&#x27;s just some source code floating around the internet, to which volunteers contribute to.A very different situation.If anything, it&#x27;s Youtube itself that&#x27;s like Napster, and it&#x27;s telling that the RIAA has gone after youtube-dl rather than Google.

Intention is a component of the law. Youtube-dlc apparently intended to assist in infringing the copyright.We&#x27;re still fighting over the color of bits. It&#x27;s all a bit technically bozo, but, sigh.

&gt; The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that useHow could that be true? if the YouTube link in the test case was a video of farmer on his truck would that show it is intended for that use? No. YouTube dl is made to download any YouTube videos it has not been made to download specifically Taylor Swift music videos, it just has just been picked as a test case as any other YouTube videos could have been

We might as well ban screen shots because it can illegally reproduce photography stills. &#x2F;s

Napster wasn&#x27;t merely a tool it was a centralized service that provided an index of infringing files and where to get them. It both directly assisted in the act of infringement it profited from same.You used the words &quot;unintended side effect&quot; in quotes but I am unaware of where that comes from while I am familiar with the term &quot;substantial non-infringing use&quot; and &quot;contributory copyright infringement&quot;Youtube-dl neither assists nor profits from copyright infringement and it possesses arguably non infringing uses.- You can download non infringing videos. Youtube-dl works on a variety of sites beyond youtube- If you feed mpv a url it will transparently use youtube-dl to handle fetching the media for playback. Unless you specifically tell it to this does not permanently save the video and is not materially different from watching the video on firefox.Mpv incidentally uses far less resources for decoding video even with newly added hardware decoding in linux.- You can consume the same video you are allowed to access on a different device or in a situation wherein you lack network access. For example one could watch and then delete a youtube video one wanted to watch on the train where you lacked internet access. This is analogous to format or time shifting which have been deemed fair use.

&gt; The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that use, and the RIAA complaint will likely stand up to any legal scrutiny.This. FWIW Grokster is the relevant case law here, not Napster:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,...</a>.

Distributing something that downloads copyrighted content isn&#x27;t the problem though - the problem is &quot;circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access&quot;.If the media provided by YouTube were DRM&#x27;ed and youtube-dl would be e.g. extracting the decryption key, this would make sense. Is that what youtube-dl is doing though?

&gt; The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that useIt&#x27;s an alternative web browser for videos, of course it was intended for copyrighted works, just like Chrome is. I don&#x27;t understand your argument, is creating alternative web browsers illegal in the US somehow?

From my perspective it kind of seems like YouTube-dl is like a knife, it can cut your food, but it can also be used to kill someone. In the case of YouTube-dl the knife was included with instructions on how to kill someone, so it was deemed a potential &quot;murder weapon&quot;.<pre><code> What if someone sold a car and included instructions on how to run over pedestrians? Should the car no longer be sold, or should the instructions be removed?
</code></pre>
My point here is that banning all of something based on the fact that the something could be used to commit illegal acts, when that same something also has legitimate legal uses, is a slippery slope. These days the RIAA pretty much lives on that slippery slope.

I followed the Napster trial closely. Napster’s argument that it had legitimate use was demolished because it had an ability to monitor the specific use of its service on an ongoing basis. That is, it could see queries from users as they happened. In fact, this ability was at the core of the service since Napster relied on a centralized search index maintained by the company. The court ruled this gave the company a more active role in contributing to infringement than the precedent Napster was trying to use (which involved VCRs - the Betamax case).The courts remedy (at least at the preliminary injunction phase) was not to shut down Napster but to force it to comply with search blacklists provided by the record companies.youtube-dl obviously is not a service so had no ability to monitor ongoing use. IMO it would have a much stronger case for legitimate use.IANAL

&gt; The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that useJust because copyrighted works are on youtube and are seen as an example of youtube content does not mean the software was built with the express intent to violate copyright. That just doesn&#x27;t follow.

Just an anecdata point but I was one of the people who used Napster for legitimate purposes (I used it to distribute music I created, gaining small recognition that wasn’t something I could’ve achieved otherwise with my music and my means and other technologies available). The thing that was disappointing in the fallout was that it caused many years of evasion tactics that made finding a comparable distribution multiplier very difficult. For my own use, I stopped caring about making music for others and trying to find a way to get an audience, and I happily play and write music now for my own joy and amusement, but I hate to think how many artists really struggled to find an audience the same way and came up short

The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that use, and the RIAA complaint will likely stand up to any legal scrutiny. Just because it can be used for legit purposes too won&#x27;t matter in the slightest. I mean, Napster could have been used for legal means as well, and it got destroyed in court.The only chance tools like this have legally is when infringement is an &quot;unintended side effect.&quot;

I don’t see how Napster is more applicable than vcrs. YouTube in this case is the broadcaster, putting content out to a general viewing public, ytdl is a recording device. For Napster to work, YouTube has to be imputes with illegally providing the copy and ytdl has to be the means to facilitate the copies transport.

They did not put that in the readme. The README contains only references to test videos, videos that don&#x27;t actually exist, and one small-time video (in spanish?) that seems to be an old test video, but I have a hard time seeing for sure.The source code does contain references to copyrighted videos in the tests, tests intended to make sure that youtube-dl can download the data from videos using the extremely &quot;token&quot; signature scrambling that youtube employs for certain videos. You can see the test cases here:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;HacktorIT&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor&#x2F;youtube.py#L582-585" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;HacktorIT&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;youtub...</a>

Seems like putting that in the readme was pretty stupid. Intent matters in legal things, making the example infringing undermines the argument that the tool is good and some people are just bad.&gt; This feels like DeCSS all over again.I think napster would be the better comparision (and especially napster compared to vcrs)

so should we take down web browsers as well? because they CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos.

Calling the thing youtube-dl in the first place rather than GenericDownloadHelper or something like that could, I guess, be seen as marketing it for a specific purpose.

It definitely was very sloppy of them to show examples on actual copyrighted material. Couldn&#x27;t they have simply put examples of public domain content?

&gt; The example in the README is evidence of this.it wasn&#x27;t in the readme, it was in the test suite.I don&#x27;t think it would be difficult to argue that downloading the world for the sole purpose of making sure the downloading worked was not an infringement (or, alternatively, was fair use).

But what is being circumvented? As far as I&#x27;m aware there are no controls put in place that are being circumvented.Edit: I&#x27;m also curious why the riaa would have standing at all? Even assuming there is some protection being circumvented, it&#x27;s not the riaa&#x27;s control that is being circumvented.

Hm, but youtube-dl doesn&#x27;t break DRM. You can just get the video link from the dev tools panel when you open a youtube page. It doesn&#x27;t let you download anything you wouldn&#x27;t otherwise be able to.

This makes me wonder: if I fork the project into another product without such marketing it in this manner, and BFG away all troublesome uses (e.g. in the tests) the git history, it would then be legal, yes?

Except it’s not in the README, it’s in an obscure unit test. That’s not marketing.

What did the readme say that has no legitimate use? Because even downloading Disney can be legitimate.LockPickingLawyer teaches you how to do things that could be torts, but there are circumstances where those same actions are entirely legitimate. Tort generally needs the context to show that something is not legitimate; so the same applies here. AIUI copyright is not a situation of strict liability.

isn’t DMCA a US law? so why not move youtube-dl outside the US github to a country that doesn’t have DMCA&#x2F;copyright?

I think you are misunderstanding the legal argument. The DMCA Section 1201 specifically prohibits (among other things) technology that &quot;is marketed ... for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.&quot; The example in the README is evidence of this.The argument is that youtube-dl is primarily used for breaking DRM not just that it could be used for doing so.

&gt; this seems outrageous the same way DMCA&#x27;ing a Bittorrent client would bepopcorn time?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23075484" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23075484</a>

A comment somewhere else pointed out that the listed examples aren&#x27;t listed in the README, but rather as part of the unit tests.It&#x27;s confusing, because the letter calls it &quot;the source code&quot;, which is not what anyone who knew what they were talking about would usually call it.

I had the same thought so I checked the git history and it seems, if I’ve checked the right lines, they were added somewhere between 4-7 years ago.

I wonder what commit added those three listed examples (from three different music companies) to the README, and when. They&#x27;re the worrying component as they show intent.In a dark universe timeline somewhere, the pull request for adding them to the README came from an RIAA employee.

Copyright law is illegitimate and should not be respected.The stupid thing is hosting youtube-dl in the Untied States.

FWIW, they did not. This was misinformation from me, misreading the DMCA. I am not glad that my misunderstanding will now spread far and wide, but I at least caught it within the edit window.The DMCA is complaining about test cases. See extractor&#x2F;youtube.py in your local copy.

Using a copyrighted music track as the example in the README is really stupid or just shows a total lack of respect for copyright.

It makes it worse lol. Using links to copyrighted materials in the tests meant to verify correct functionality?It&#x27;s &quot;prominent&quot; in the source code. They literally wrote out &quot;Test VEVO video with video age protection&quot; then linked to a Justin Timberlake song<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;HacktorIT&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor&#x2F;youtube.py#L604" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;HacktorIT&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;youtub...</a>I clicked on this ready to see some stupidity from the copyright industry but literally downloading from links to copyrighted music in your unit tests?That&#x27;s how you give the RIAA a way to take down your project.
-Actually seeing this made the comments made in the worst faith about how &quot;they took it down because you can use it to download bad stuff, what&#x27;s next?!?!&quot; seem pretty dumb.If that was the case Bittorrent... which makes youtube-dl look like a guy slinging tapes out of a van next to Naspter HQ...wouldn&#x27;t have been able to send them packing with a simple &quot;we don&#x27;t endorse piracy&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;bittorrent-to-riaa-youre-barking-up-the-wrong-tree&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;venturebeat.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;07&#x2F;bittorrent-to-riaa-youre-...</a>

Indeed. Those videos are three out of 94 test cases scattered among youtube.py.

&gt; it uses examples in the README as an example of that:&gt;&gt; We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample usesas far as I can tell these videos are not referenced in the README, but instead in the youtube.py extractor file, which would go against the accusation that they were featured &#x27;prominently&#x27;

Linux is already often banned in online videogames with claims that it&#x27;s done to prevent cheating

This is so annoying... this means they can go after the OS we are using because some kids use their OS to download pirated stuff

&gt; LikeThat&#x27;s the operative word, because it isn&#x27;t &quot;like&quot; at all to a nontechinical person. If you explain it as &quot;yeah so I have one tool that literally has &#x27;youtube&#x27; in its name, and it downloads videos, also some of the test cases to make sure it works show it work on copyrighted videos&quot; and the other one is &quot;people can use it to watch videos…sometimes? Maybe you can even run the first tool on it? But like a billion people use it for completely different things&quot; you can probably see how this works.

That&#x27;s some prime rate bullshit. Like saying since I could use Linux to download copyrighted materials, and there are guides around which tell how to do so, Linux should be removed from the Internet.Also a good reminder - never trust a third party to host your files, always have a backup. And hosting your infrastructure on Github means anybody who wants it can take it down with a single letter.

Except the licensing under which the copyrighted works are uploaded explicitly allow for access via a browser, so no you couldn&#x27;t. That&#x27;s like saying that a DVD player &quot;circumvents&quot; DVD encryption, or a key &quot;circumvents&quot; a lock. It&#x27;s the intended use case.

Meh, pretty good claim of fair use. They are just picking a smaller file that unlikely to disappear or move. The fact the file is downloaded and then deleted via a script isn&#x27;t a substitute for actually viewing the file and has zero commercial impact.And the take down could have been targeted against the particular files they found problematic rather than the whole project.And the whole thing is ceded to the public domain. Anyone can remove the examples and unit test, call the code webvid-dl and be golden.

It&#x27;s pretty ridiculous. They might argue that a browser is a technological measure to protect a copyrighted work which youtube-dl circumvents since the DMCA is written so vaguely. Cases like this demonstrate why anti-circumvention litigation really has to go.

People use it for many purposes. Researches downloading public domain material etc.Does any camera manufacturer showing a camera filming a live concert in some promotional video needs to worry?

From the RIAA perspective it seems clear this tool was created to download copywritten material. You can disagree with the law or think the tool has other valid uses but the intent of the tool author seems clear here.The author of the tool should have chosen a better example in the tests to at least maintain plausible deniability.

I&#x27;m also NAL, but familiar with IP law.My analysis is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277</a> and I&#x27;m broadly skeptical of the legal viability under US law.

I think in that case the copyright infringement would be the uploader rather than YouTube, but IANAL.

Without the existence of youtube-dl, youtube itself is necessarily commuting copyright infringement over the a good portion of the CC-By-SA works uploaded to youtube.(not all of them, since the uploader grants youtube a license... but if the work has copyright holders who aren&#x27;t the uploader, it applies)

actually that it is in the test cases instead of the readme makes it seem worse to me, after all the readme is not addressed to anyone in particular, they needed examples of things someone might do and they used popular videos (that happened to be copyrighted) as those examples.But anyone running the test cases that does not have rights to those videos will have infringed, and then of course youtube-dl must also run their own test cases and we know they don&#x27;t have rights to the videos.

&gt;I&#x27;ve always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers? Are their authors untouchable just because they put in some boilerplate disclaimer like that?I think the answer is that this doesn&#x27;t always sufficiently protect them, but these small bits add up. It&#x27;s useful to be able to point at words written beforehand that could help you in a legal situation. This is what corporate speak is about too and enough people engage in it that it likely does something.

&gt; I&#x27;ve always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers?No. And there&#x27;s no educational exception in the DMCA anyway.

&gt; I think within a year there&#x27;ll be multiple alternatives to youtube-dl which will all bear disclaimers that they are &quot;for educational purposes only&quot; and that they in no way endorse copyright infringement.i dont think you have to wait that long. its client side, its open source, people have the code, it will most likely be maintained further, just not on github.this is just meant as a backup, but here you go:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.svarun.dev&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.svarun.dev&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl</a>or get the source with<pre><code> pip download --no-binary=:all: youtube-dl</code></pre>

Does it really matter what they said?This is like the reverse of those common disclaimers on hacking tools and tutorials which claim:<pre><code> This is for educational use only.
</code></pre>
I&#x27;ve always wondered, are courts fooled by such disclaimers? Are their authors untouchable just because they put in some boilerplate disclaimer like that?As for what was written in some code somewhere in the repo, it could have been written by anyone, even an RIAA plant who contributed that trojan horse to the project.What makes anyone think what was said there is endorsed by or even representative of the views of the rest of the authors of youtube-dl or is what youtube-dl is for?God, it pisses me off to no end to think that I&#x27;m going to be forced to use youtube&#x27;s piece of shit, slow, ad-infested, tacker-infested, feature-poor, non-automatable browser interface.But, after taking a few deep breaths, I think within a year there&#x27;ll be multiple alternatives to youtube-dl which will all bear disclaimers that they are &quot;for educational purposes only&quot; and that they in no way endorse copyright infringement.

&gt; Basically, defaulting to rolling over to DMCA requests had led to an environment where there’s no way to fight themThat&#x27;s the DMCA works I thought? When the host receives the notice they have to take down the content then forward the notice to the user, who can then file a counter-claim and then the host restores the content (if they don&#x27;t take it down they they&#x27;re liable).

What I haven’t seen pointed out is that this is really Githubs problem. They shouldn’t automatically respond to DCMA. The process should really be passed on to the owner of the repo and make them liable. Basically, defaulting to rolling over to DMCA requests had led to an environment where there’s no way to fight them. Even if I hosted something like YouTube-dl myself, my internet provider could cut me off.It’s the same issue with deplatforming people, do we want a world where literally you lose the ability to share knowledge others don’t agree with Or in this case, a tool that could be used maliciously

The use youtubeDL for music would probably fit the fair use in Finland. The fair use allows personal copies of legally licensed material but not redistribution of said copies to third parties. It has been used to defend a service where ISP records the specific shows from TV like a VCR and streams them to customers at different time. The ISP:s and representation of copyright holders made a compromise to avoid legal battle, where ISP:s limited the storage duration of said recordings to two years. ISP:s still had service they could sell, and avoid unnecessary legal battle.
I&#x27;m not a lawyer. So not expert on matter, but just educated local.

Test cases using copyrighted works probably not a good idea... Since one could argue that part of the code is run frequently.

Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an example of that:&gt; We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and&#x2F;or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but this seems outrageous the same way DMCA&#x27;ing a Bittorrent client would be. This doesn&#x27;t circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don&#x27;t understand what leg they have to stand on here.This feels like DeCSS all over again.P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it&#x27;s not listed.[1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn&#x27;t in the readme, but in the test cases. See extractor&#x2F;youtube.py. To me this seems even more tenuous, but IANAL.

Not looking for Github specifically, but a Github-equivalent where the entire contents of the repo could be pushed to for continued development.If not Russia, any other country that has more freedom than the USA in software, doesn&#x27;t take crap from the US, AND doesn&#x27;t block Youtube.

In Russia they&#x27;ve banned whole github multiple times and have their own &quot;RIAA&quot; that helped to create the firewall.

Chinese gitee, or self-hosted some where--
editfound one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitee.com&#x2F;mirrors&#x2F;youtube-downloader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitee.com&#x2F;mirrors&#x2F;youtube-downloader</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;</a>

You can grab from the web archive. 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018120927&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018120927&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.co...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl</a>&gt; Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.(a) Are there mirrors?(b) Are there Github equivalents in e.g. Russia where the RIAA doesn&#x27;t have jurisdiction or extradition power?

&gt; in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knivesThere&#x27;s a &quot;Challenge 25&quot; (formerly &quot;Think 21!&quot; IIRC) policy which covers these kinds of situations - although it is just a voluntary agreement from the major retailers.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;publications&#x2F;sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers&#x2F;sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;publications&#x2F;sale-of-knives-vo...</a>

In New York, you need to be over 18 to buy Sharpies and spray paint.

Guns are not banned in any country. They are restricted in almost every country, for good reasons. The level of restriction may vary based on culture, history etc.Also people who claim the same logic applies to kitchen knife and guns are mentally still living in the wild west of the 1800s.

There&#x27;s some subtlety, but basically, yes:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;buying-carrying-knives" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;buying-carrying-knives</a>

The primary intended purpose of a gun is to wound or kill humans or animals.  You _can_ kill people with a kitchen knife, just like you can with a beer bottle or with your hands.  Not exactly the same thing tho, is it?

&gt; Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever?I mean, guns are banned in many countries using precisely the same reasoning. And I might totally be wrong about this but I heard that in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knives.

Switchblades are illegal in many places (all of Canada for example).

&gt; Some knives (switchblades and gravity knives especially) are illegal in most places.I think it&#x27;s usually about carrying them in public outside your house. Likely not as illegal to have them at home.Gravity knives are scary in that the police have occasionally argued that certain common pocketknives (e.g. Leatherman) can be used as a gravity knife and arrest people (usually minorities of the wrong color). I once was going on a road trip across multiple states and had to research the laws of each state because I was carrying a Leatherman.

They&#x27;re probably claiming it&#x27;s a circumvention device.Some knives (switchblades and gravity knives especially) are illegal in most places. I think the UK is even stricter.

From the youtube-dl source code, in a file helpfully called youtube.py:<pre><code> def _decrypt_signature(self, s, video_id, player_url, age_gate=False):
 &quot;&quot;&quot;Turn the encrypted s field into a working signature&quot;&quot;&quot;

 if player_url is None:
 raise ExtractorError(&#x27;Cannot decrypt signature without player_url&#x27;)
</code></pre>
It definitely does do decryption, as stated in the DMCA claim:&gt; is a technology primarily designed or produced for the purpose of, and marketed for, circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to copyrighted sound recordings on YouTube.. and some claims referencing a &#x27;youtube to mp3&#x27; site ruled illegal by a German court.Not defending this, &#x27;effective technological measures&#x27; are a horribly broadly-scoped hole, but there is decryption at play here.

This isn&#x27;t a new debate; in the early days of the DMCA, it was used to go after the author of DeCSS [0], despite the fact that legitimate Fair Use cases for the tool exist (personal backups, playback on unsupported devices at the time, like Linux PCs). The case was in fact stronger there, as DeCSS explicitly circumvented encryption [1], which AFAIK youtube-dl does not.And, of course, the infamous case of Napster [2]; while the vast majority of user behavior was obviously piracy, the tool&#x2F;network itself was content-neutral, and could also be used for public domain content, or works published with the permission of the copyright holder.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DeCSS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DeCSS</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stoel.com&#x2F;legal-insights&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-anti-circumvention-rules-of-the-digital-millennium-copyright-act-changing-the-digital-landscap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stoel.com&#x2F;legal-insights&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-anti-circum...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Napster#Shutdown" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Napster#Shutdown</a>

In many jurisdictions knives of certain length or design are illegal. To posess to manufacture. In short to exist.Many many other tools are deemed iheirently illegal. Guns, explosives, motorcycles over certain CC, encryption software, etc.

&gt; How can a program be in violation of DMCA?The DMCA contains provisions that criminalize circumvention tools. The plaintiff only has to prove that a tool is mainly designed to aid in copyright infringement and&#x2F;or that&#x27;s the most common use. It&#x27;s a super super bad law, but has unfortunately been used quite successfully over the past 20 years by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA and others.&gt; Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever?Many jurisdictions in the US consider carrying a hidden knife beyond a certain length as illegal carry of a concealed weapon.

&gt;knifes are utilities which can be used to kill. guns are made for killing only.What is a bowling ball made for? What are bows and arrows made for?

I don&#x27;t get why you where downvoted. the analogy is pretty accurate. knifes are utilities which can be used to kill. guns are made for killing only.There are plenty of legitimate uses for youtube-dl. There is even fair use in the US. How can i make fair use, eg. remix or a commentary if i can&#x27;t access the videos outside of youtube.

How can a program be in violation of DMCA? Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? How ridiculous.

I wonder why they don&#x27;t go after Chrome and Firefox as well.

The problem with their argument is that youtube-dl is a video camera. The US has already rules that video cameras, VCRs, DVD recorders, etc are all devices with legitimate uses, and you can&#x27;t stop them from being made or sold. A movie theater is within its rights to ask patrons using video cameras to leave, and Google would be within its rights to lock down Youtube.The RIAA is fishing, and all the precedents are against them pulling up even a minnow.

Even further, they are saying that the primary use of youtube-dl is reproduction and distribution. Distribution is the actual illegal act.I can&#x27;t speak to the average youtube-dl user&#x27;s experience, but I&#x27;ve used it a lot and have never distributed a video. I&#x27;ve saved videos to watch later on my own, that&#x27;s it.

The RIAA&#x27;s logic is that a youtube-dl user is equivalent to someone in a movie theater with a video camera. The situation they&#x27;re concerned about is somebody downloading a music video that they&#x27;ve authorized to be on Youtube. They make money on Youtube views, but they&#x27;re losing precious fractions of a cent when you download it and watch it offline.This is obviously not ethically justified, but I have no idea if it&#x27;s legally justified.

I’ll admit that I’m ignorant of US law specifics here, and I’m not sure about YouTube’s DRM and&#x2F;or policy regarding downloading videos is.So I’ll ask: is this DMCA request justified? Why would the RIAA be going after YouTube-dl, rather than Google? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the RIAA to go after YouTube instead?

As long as the source code in the repo itself does not infringe on their copyrights, this seems like a plainly frivolous lawsuit.

&gt;&gt; RIAA is an abusive trollThat is one of nicer things that one say about the Recording Industry Association of America.

Has anyone tried sending automated DMCA for the entirety of Github? Once half of github is under bogus DMCA, maybe that&#x27;ll make them think for a minute.I&#x27;m halfway serious.

&gt; Github is obligated to take down the &quot;offending&quot; content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice.No, they aren&#x27;t obligated to do anything.Github is immunized from any liability they would otherwise have to the complaining party for hosting the material affected by the notice if they comply within the parameters of the DMCA safe harbor provision (which requires action &quot;expeditiously&quot; rather than &quot;immediately&quot;) when they receive a notice.

In a 512 case, yes.  The safe-harbour provisions don&#x27;t apply to 1201.

Github is obligated to take down the &quot;offending&quot; content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice. It&#x27;s then on the owner of that content to file a counter claim to restore it.Even if the content is not in violation of DMCA, your files will be gone for a day or two, or longer depending on how slow the publishing platform operators are to process the counter claim and how long it takes to file the counter claim.

Yeah, this process is messed up. It gives preference to abusers, instead of making them prove things to take something down.

&gt; This is part of the DMCA process. Github takes it down until they get a counter-claim from the repo owner, don&#x27;t think they really have much of a choice in it, legally.They have a choice, but if they would be liable for hosting the content but for the DMCA safe harbor, failing to take it down when they receive compliant takedown notice means that they are then exposed to that liability because they are outside of the safe harbor.

This is part of the DMCA process. Github takes it down until they get a counter-claim from the repo owner, don&#x27;t think they really have much of a choice in it, legally.

It sounds like the RIAA is comfortable filing DMCA takedowns when the logic is questionable.If so, then I&#x27;m curious about the legality of a counter-attack: Look at any websites, photos, music, videos, and text presented online by everyone represented by the RIAA. If anyone in a competent jurisdiction sees any similarity to prior art that they&#x27;ve created, even if it&#x27;s their 2nd grade writing assignment, hit them with a DMCA takedown notice.After all, we just need a good-faith belief that it might fly in some court somewhere, right?

They should have counter claimed this nonsense instead of taking down the repo. RIAA is an abusive troll.

If I remember correctly, PopcornTime&#x27;s screenshots and examples were all carefully selected to contain only public domain movies for this reason.

Copyrighted content with a notoriously litigious industry group behind it, no less.

So, someone could fork it, change the readme and other files to remove all references to copyrighted content. No problem?

The videos mentioned in the takedown notice are part of the test suite and not part of the README. Definitely not made by a RIAA member.See youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor&#x2F;youtube.py line 588 in HEAD.Video was originally added in f7ab6cbe160afbba60537c7a830a4c65c6f0b3ea back in &#x27;13, to the file test&#x2F;tests.json.

Does anyone have a local copy of the repo? I’m curious when that particular mention was merged into the repo.Thought - It’s possible that someone in association with the RIAA made a code contribution that included that change for the purpose of creating evidence to file a DMCA.

Yeah, an example downloading a video of Elephant&#x27;s Dream or a tech conference talk would have worked just as well and imply the tool has primarily legitimate uses

I doubt there&#x27;s any &quot;for better&quot; in that.  It&#x27;s an easy bit for the RIAA to latch onto to make their case, and I expect a judge or reasonable person on a jury would make make a distinction between the two, but not enough to matter.

It wasn&#x27;t in the repo&#x27;s README: it was part of the test suite for better or worse.See: youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor&#x2F;youtube.py line L557

Did they win the rights to the source code?

Are the case&#x27;s files on Recap and are you willing to share the name&#x2F;results of the case?Edit: I&#x27;ve googled and found relevant articles. I didn&#x27;t realize how high profile this was.

When the RIAA sued me for operating Aurous a few years ago they nailed me for exactly this. Using copyrighted album art and song names to advertise my FOSS meant to stream music from sources like YouTube didn&#x27;t exactly win me any points in court.

&gt; We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and&#x2F;or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companiesIMHO this wasn&#x27;t the best move, I mean... the use of copyrighted music as an example DIRECTLY stated in the repo, as an example to show what you can download with the tool

Github has received a takedown request for the youtube-dl repo and forks, not youtube-dl itself, correct?

They&#x27;ve learned absolutely nothing from two decades of failed wars vs torrenting.

To be fair, more like Microsoft® Office® OneNote™; it has a camera feature and an automatic OCR feature and a “copy text from image” convenience feature.

To be fair, more like &quot;Harry Potter Copier Word&quot;.

It&#x27;s not because Word doesn&#x27;t:1. Advertise that it is intended to aid in copyright infringement2. Include some tools to circumvent DRM used in harry potter e-books.

But it can also be sued for downloading uncopyrighted material. It&#x27;s like submitting DCMA for Office Word because people can use it for creating pirate copies of Harry Potter.

&gt;It&#x27;s outrageous indeed that GH&#x2F;MS is complying.Because there&#x27;s no upside and only downside. If they refuse to comply and it turns out that youtube-dl did infringe, then they won&#x27;t have DMCA safe harbor status and could be liable for damages.

This is not a valid DMCA takedown request, as the claimant has not asserted copyright ownership of anything in the repository.This notice is a conflation of two separate aspects of the DMCA, the copyright takedown process and technological circumvention devices. If the RIAA wishes to claim that youtube-dl is a circumvention device, the proper route is to sue the authors of youtube-dl. This notice is an abuse of process, and highlights the need for a penalty for fraudulent DMCA requests.

“For all distributions of copyrighted content through their service”I don’t think that’s true? I think that only extends to this particular DMCA. Obviously it wouldn’t extend to eg me claiming Ruby on Rails is copyright infringement.

IANAL, but as far as I know GitHub has to comply with DMCA requests. Otherwise, they would lose their safe harbor protection and become liable for all distributions of copyrighted content through their service.However, GitHub is also required to reinstate `youtube-dl` if the creator files a DMCA counter-notice.

While the takedown request is outrageous, I&#x27;d probably respond the same in MS&#x27;s shoes. Frankly defending it is not worth the corporate lawyering required from MS&#x27;s perspective.That said, I think if Youtube-dl self-hosted on Gitlab or something and received a similar takedown, they could probably mount a successful defense.

&gt; which has the main purpose of downloading clean copies of YT videosAmong many other sites and services.&gt; against the wishes of the content creatorsI&#x27;m a content creator on YouTube and I&#x27;d be honored if anyone chooses to save my videos on disk. The tool has its legitimate uses and abuses.

&gt; It&#x27;s outrageous indeed that GH&#x2F;MS is complying.Not really. They&#x27;re legally required to do so. The DMCA notice (despite what someone suggests downthread) is unfortunately quite properly served. Even if it is flat-out wrong, GH&#x2F;MS has no reason (and likely no resources) to investigate whether or not that&#x27;s the case. And if they did, and got it wrong, they&#x27;d lose their safe harbor status and be liable for damages.If the youtube-dl author believes it to be bullshit, they can send a counter-notice, and GH&#x2F;MS will then put it back up. If the RIAA still has a bone to pick, they can file a lawsuit. Unfortunately, they very well may.&gt; It&#x27;s not that far from targeting wget or curl, were it not for the widespread use of them in industry.I get really confused when I hear things like this, because this makes no sense. Targeting a program called &quot;YouTube Download&quot;, which has the main purpose of downloading clean copies of YT videos, against the wishes of the content creators is absolutely not the same thing as targeting a generic HTTP&#x2F;FTP download tool.I think the DMCA is garbage, but it feels like willful ignorance to be at all surprised about things like this, and to compare this to something obviously non-infringing.

It&#x27;s outrageous indeed that GH&#x2F;MS is complying.It&#x27;s not that far from targeting wget or curl, were it not for the widespread use of them in industry.

&gt; is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome?In the USA legally it is because the vast majority of the judges that have ruled on these things think anything that isn&#x27;t a browser is a hacking tool. Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web resources.

The entire IP concept is really hard to make sense of with the web: a browser works by making a local copy of a remote resource and then making that local copy available to the user. I don’t see why, from the server’s perspective, the precise client matters: if I use curl + pandoc to read your webpage, is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome?

I feel like if they&#x27;d been more patient, they might have addressed the similarity to the &quot;analog hole.&quot;

Youtube does have a &quot;download&quot; feature in YouTube studio.  Where you can download a heavily compressed version of any video you&#x27;ve uploaded.  But only videos you&#x27;ve uploaded.

&gt;Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn&#x27;t supply a download feature constitute a &quot;technical protection measure&quot;?Yes, they have some sort of DRM, albeit a very weak one.

There is a &quot;Download&quot; button in the mobile Youtube apps (if you&#x27;re paying for Youtube Premium).

You are able to download YouTube videos on your phone, if you subscribe to YouTube premium. I haven’t made any deep investigation of this but I kinda assume the videos are protected by DRM.

&gt; Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn&#x27;t supply a download feature constitute a &quot;technical protection measure&quot;?My understanding is that basically anything at all, if it is in any way &quot;technical&quot; and shows intent, will be accepted as a &quot;technical protection measure&quot; if you go by what has worked so far.Much more absurd and blatantly bad faith arguments have been accepted, &quot;conspicuously not supplying the feature&quot; is a very strong case in the absurd world of the DMCA cases.

The fact that youtube wants people to come back to the site and use servers, miles of wires, electricity, network machinery instead of letting them download videos so they can watch them from thumbdrive just says to me this company is unethical and harms environment. Any business model that forces people to be on the network without any reason other than greed, should be illegal. If you can stream the file, download option should be mandatory by law.

The button doesn&#x27;t exist, but apparently they do have a link that lets you download the video, it is just obfuscated. &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277</a>&gt;

&gt; It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn&#x27;t exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their site if you want to rewatch a video.Lets be clear though - the only reason copyrighted material is allowed on Youtube is because the owners then grant a license for the content in exchange for ad revenue. Offering a download link severly damages the &quot;owners are paid for their content&quot; part of the equation.

As mentioned in the notice, the RIAA is specifically claiming youtube-dl&#x27;s deobfuscation of youtube&#x27;s request signatures is what&#x27;s infringing, which a german court ruled to be an effective technological protection measure.

&gt; Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn&#x27;t supply a download feature constitute a &quot;technical protection measure&quot;?an actual court in germany ruled that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openjur.de&#x2F;u&#x2F;2194436.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openjur.de&#x2F;u&#x2F;2194436.html</a>sadly german only. lots of fud and hamburg is often pro copyright owner. not sure if that would hold at the highest instance.

&gt; Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn&#x27;t supply a download feature constitute a &quot;technical protection measure&quot;?The law is so vague on this point so as to include practically anything. Here is the text:&gt; a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Also, does the fact that YouTube doesn&#x27;t supply a download feature constitute a &quot;technical protection measure&quot;?From the RIAA&#x27;s point of view, it works to their benefit that a download link doesn&#x27;t exist, and it may be something they like, but that doesn&#x27;t mean that&#x27;s why.It could just as easily be that a download feature doesn&#x27;t exist because YouTube wants you to keep returning to their site if you want to rewatch a video.It would be one thing if some YouTube videos had a download button and others didn&#x27;t. That would suggest that, on the ones where it&#x27;s missing, it is missing for a reason, and that reason might be DRM. But as far as I know, YouTube doesn&#x27;t have download for any videos.Software doesn&#x27;t always have all the features that end users might want, and the mere absence of a feature doesn&#x27;t necessarily tell you why it&#x27;s missing. Also, it&#x27;s not some weird, suspicious thing to write software which fills in a feature gap in some other software. (Google encourages add-on software on other products, too. For example, Chrome extensions and Gmail add-ons.)But, maybe there is some legal reason why this could make sense. Maybe some terms of service or licensing (for video uploaders or for regular end users) says not to download something, which would make it clear that the download feature is missing on purpose.

I&#x27;m NAL, but familiar with IP law.My analysis is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24874277</a> and I&#x27;m broadly skeptical of the legal viability under US law.

&gt; a stream the user can view anywaysThe true purpose of the DCMA is to control the distributors via the use of tools like DRM.The fact that you can view music on YouTube at all is something of an anomaly. The recording industry would love to dispense with YouTube entirely if they could.

Curious if anyone with legal expertise knows if this has legs? They say:&gt; The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use.But the &quot;circumventing&quot; is still accessing a stream the user can view anyways, and the &quot;reproduce and distribute&quot; feels like a stretch -- there&#x27;s no inherent distribution. This isn&#x27;t anything like a pirating or a torrenting tool.It feels more akin to when movie studios sued VCR manufacturers for being able to record TV back in 1984 -- and lost [1].(Also, side note but I have never in my life seen a story upvoted so quickly on HN. 130 points in just 7 minutes so far.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive...</a>.

&gt; This needs free legal assistance from EFFLegal assistance isn&#x27;t free; it&#x27;s just paid for by other donors: [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supporters.eff.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;30for30--S" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supporters.eff.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;30for30--S</a>

Youtube-dl is not a Microsoft&#x27;s project. If they send a counter-notice to GitHub (they should), per DMCA Youtube-dl is exposed for liability when GitHub restores the repository (but GitHub is shielded from liability after they restore)

I don&#x27;t think Microsoft needs the EFFs help.

This needs free legal assistance from EFF and needs to go to court if RIAA is actually ready to litigate this

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018130325&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeload.github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;zip&#x2F;master" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018130325&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeload....</a> is a ZIP containing the repo.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018130325&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeload.github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;zip&#x2F;master" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018130325&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeload....</a> is a link to zip of master from commit 4eda10499e8db831167062b0e0dbc7d10d34c1f9, which was around 18&#x2F;10&#x2F;2020

You can use the download zip button instead of cloning.

As another comment pointed[0], there is a mirror on gitee: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitee.com&#x2F;mirrors&#x2F;youtube-downloader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitee.com&#x2F;mirrors&#x2F;youtube-downloader</a>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24872999" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24872999</a>

Here&#x27;s a git mirror of the entire repo history up the the latest commit hash that I&#x27;m aware of. Compare against the commit hash on Google Webcache [1] for safety:<pre><code> git clone https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.hackerspace.pl&#x2F;q3k&#x2F;youtube-dl
</code></pre>
Clone, verify and rehost.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:o7ilf8kWUQsJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:o7ilf8...</a>

ok so I might just be stupid but how does that link let me clone the repo?.....

*PyPi.  PyPy is an alternate implementation of python.

I can still install it via pip:<pre><code> pip3 install --user --upgrade youtube-dl
</code></pre>
So I guess they haven&#x27;t issued a take down to PyPy yet.

they need to move development elsewhere thoughyoutube-dl becomes obsolete very quickly as endpoints make changes on their settings and formats, notably youtube.com themselves

youtube-dl is in every linux repo, so the source code is widely mirrored and is not going anywhere.

The gzipped tarball, was that as of latest commit?  just curious if we can consider it the definitive final copy

You can only download a snapshot from that page. Here&#x27;s a tarball with the entire git repo in case anyone&#x27;s interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transfer.sh&#x2F;Hj9dD&#x2F;youtube-dl-git.tar.gz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transfer.sh&#x2F;Hj9dD&#x2F;youtube-dl-git.tar.gz</a> (52MiB)Here&#x27;s Debian&#x27;s mirror btw, somewhat out of date and using the one-commit-per-upstream-release development model (in the upstream branch), so lacking a lot of history: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;salsa.debian.org&#x2F;debian&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;salsa.debian.org&#x2F;debian&#x2F;youtube-dl</a>

Unfortunately, the claimed videos are in some tests in youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor&#x2F;youtube.py, e.g.<pre><code> # JS player signature function name containing $
 {
 &#x27;url&#x27;: &#x27;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM&#x27;,
 &#x27;info_dict&#x27;: {
 &#x27;id&#x27;: &#x27;nfWlot6h_JM&#x27;,
 &#x27;ext&#x27;: &#x27;m4a&#x27;,
 &#x27;title&#x27;: &#x27;Taylor Swift - Shake It Off&#x27;,
 &#x27;description&#x27;: &#x27;md5:307195cd21ff7fa352270fe884570ef0&#x27;,
 &#x27;duration&#x27;: 242,
 &#x27;uploader&#x27;: &#x27;TaylorSwiftVEVO&#x27;,
 &#x27;uploader_id&#x27;: &#x27;TaylorSwiftVEVO&#x27;,
 &#x27;upload_date&#x27;: &#x27;20140818&#x27;,
 },
 &#x27;params&#x27;: {
 &#x27;youtube_include_dash_manifest&#x27;: True,
 &#x27;format&#x27;: &#x27;141&#x2F;bestaudio[ext=m4a]&#x27;,
 },
 },</code></pre>

I mostly see this video &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj</a>&quot;, which should not be copyrighted.Does anyone see the video links in the README claimed by RIAA?

There&#x27;s also that copy in the Arctic. I don&#x27;t think that Github will remove that one.Edit: On a serious note, though. I just realised that Internet Archive apparently doesn&#x27;t archive most PRs? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018122643if_&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;pulls" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018122643if_&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github...</a>)
If so, that&#x27;s a real shame, I had an open PR on youtube_dl and even though I still have the code locally, I would&#x27;ve liked to keep the PR conversation as it had some really helpful feedback and a bunch of people that were potentially interested in my feature.

I can still find youtube-dl on gitlab, so it&#x27;s still out there.

While they may have made collaborative development more difficult for the moment, what hasn&#x27;t changed is the strong motivation from a wide range of technical people to be able to download whatever they can watch in a browser. Something will rise from the ashes.

That doesn&#x27;t matter. As development stops, youtube-dl will stop being able to download videos in a matter of months (at best). This is an extremely brittle system that relies on youtube-dl being one step ahead of Youtube at all times. Without further development, the next update to Youtube&#x27;s site will break the tool.It was really a matter of time. I&#x27;m sure most of us were already amazed it lasted this long - and it did because it remained a relatively obscure tool for years.It&#x27;s also the case that the development of subversive&#x2F;illegal tools requires a certain amount of subterfuge and sneakiness that the youtube-dl developers apparently weren&#x27;t ready to engage in. While this is understandable, it also underscores the fact that such tools live on borrowed time (as does, I would argue, general-purpose computing itself).

You can download the most recent version of the YouTube-DL code from Wayback Machine here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018144703&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20201018144703&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.co...</a>Fuck the RIAA

YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA