Fantastic compromise.Arguing that you have a right to break RIAA DRM is much harder that taking it out entirely.I use this for downloading national archive videos off youtube, I&#x27;m very happy about this news

I wonder if RIAA lawyers believe themselves productive members of society, or if they recognize themselves as the parasites they are.

I have become convinced that the RIAA lawyers emerge from their crypts every few years, generating a slew of copystrikes to justify their retainer fee.

&gt; Seems like the copyright holders making a big fuss over nothing really.This should be the conclusion. Since they have won nothing with such whole noise. Only increase more the OSS wave.

They don&#x27;t understand technology, and in this case I don&#x27;t think they should be told...

It&#x27;s a shot across the bow, to achieve a chilling effect. They&#x27;ve achieved a few weeks of downtime, for now, and sent a message to the project that they&#x27;re being watched. It might well not be the end of hostilities.

My experience has been that Github doesn&#x27;t ever purge commits from the history. Even when you rewrite the history, all the dangling commits are still there and can be access. I&#x27;ve yet to find a way to force Github to do a gc so such commits are removed. Without Github running a GC on the repo, the commits will not be removed.

I guess that if they want to run those tests they can cherry-pick that commit, run the tests and then drop it

The way I read it, the test cases weren&#x27;t really the problem. The RIAA was alleging that the purpose of youtube-dl is to circumvent DRM and they try to back this statement up by pointing out that copyrighted works are being downloaded in the test cases.Here is a bit of a discussion about it by seemingly knowledgeable people:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;57421&#x2F;is-youtube-dl-takedown-due-to-their-tests-which-use-copyrighted-content" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;57421&#x2F;is-youtube-dl-...</a>&gt; &gt; the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and&#x2F;or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:
&gt; &gt; Icona Pop – I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) [Official Video], owned by Warner Music Group Justin Timberlake – Tunnel Vision (Explicit), owned by Sony Music Group Taylor Swift – Shake it Off, owned&#x2F;exclusively licensed by Universal Music Group&gt; Complainants are &quot;confused&quot; about actual infringement (which is prohibited by copyright law), and creating a method for infringing copyright. Under DMCA and US copyright law, copying is infringing, programming is not infringing. The complaint does not clearly allege unauthorized copying of another person&#x27;s intellectual property, and their complaint is based on the theory that certain programming actions constitute copyright infringement. I don&#x27;t actually think they are confused, I think they are testing the boundaries.

And not even purged from the repo, it&#x27;s still in the history if needed. Seems like the copyright holders making a big fuss over nothing really.

That won&#x27;t work, because Youtube applies the particular sort of protection that those tests exercise only to copyrighted music.

It would have been fantastic if every test using RIAA copyrighted music had been replaced with public domain sources. Or, better yet, videos the maintainers created and uploaded themselves.

Yes, and I unfortunately still see no argument related to the DMCA&#x27;s provision that breaking copy protection is legal if you have a license to use the work. In this case, a license to use it via a specific browser is not mentioned, so you can rightly download it with anything.This was the suspected cause for py-kms&#x27;s reinstatement but as it related to Windows licensing.

Shouldn&#x27;t these tests be considered fair use since they are arguably necessary to validate interoperability?

Is there a way to get equivalent tests on non RIAA videos?

&gt; Looks like they&#x27;ve removed the tests for RIAA member videos as the only changeAnd even that was more likely to allow certain somewhat too loud organizations to save face, not out of legal necessity.

Excellent.Looks like they&#x27;ve removed the tests for RIAA member videos as the only change, which I assume helped get this restored: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7feafe45f64e6a0808663ad315e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7...</a>

Here is the commit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7feafe45f64e6a0808663ad315e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7...</a>It seems that only removing the test was enough.

Good news.What if someone were to write a separate script that generated the necessary tests for youtube-dl?Then prior to releases they could privately generate the code and run the tests, but still ship it not referencing any copyrighted material.

I was under the impression that those obfuscation methods were exclusive to certain YouTube partners, including the RIAA members. If youtube-dl stopped supporting that method, it would still be a useful tool for the bulk of its use cases and the RIAA would no longer have any leg to stand on since it&#x27;d no longer be able to download their members&#x27; videos.

I suppose a developer that wants to make sure that it works with certain DRM schemes can add cases of their own, locally, without pushing the change.

Since this affects only tests, they could easily change the relevant scripts to download a list of test videos at runtime. I bet the RIAA github-scrapers would not &quot;see&quot; it. Just serve statically a rot13-encoded list of URLs from pastebin or something, and Bob&#x27;s your uncle.

feel free to file an issue and tell them that, but clearly it does work in this case.

It doesn&#x27;t work like that since certain videos use obfuscation methods that random cat videos don&#x27;t.

So it seems that the dealbreaker was that one of tests that downloaded copyrighted material (see the last commit [1]). Seems like a reasonable thing to not do, and just replace those tests with just random cat videos.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7feafe45f64e6a0808663ad315e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;1fb034d029c8b7...</a>

IIRC the complaint was about the &quot;circumvention&quot; algorithm in the code.

I think the point was that their real goal was to kill youtube-dl entirely, and the tests just happened to give them something to complain about to do so.

Random cynical thought -- they noticed because the automated testing was bumping up the # of views on those streams, so their members were being forced to pay royalties on views that were not real ...

Actually that&#x27;s all they complained about.

Nice...I bet the evil RIAA didn&#x27;t think only about the two tests when they reported the project....

gitlab.com? No. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube-dl.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube-dl.org&#x2F;</a> ’s host? That’s almost exactly what they did. (Edit: here’s my comment on a story that details their response somewhat: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24909982" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24909982</a>).

I think he&#x27;s referring to a self hosted gitlab instance, not gitlab.com

gitlab.com, btw, does clearly advertise that they comply with DMCA takedown notices.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;</a>Others in this sub-thread have identified that the downloadable releases are actually currently hosted on gitlab.com.Gitlab has their internal workflow for handling DMCA takedown&#x27;s public (as with most&#x2F;all of their internal policies, which is cool!). <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;security&#x2F;operations&#x2F;trustandsafety&#x2F;dmca-removal-requests.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;handbook&#x2F;engineering&#x2F;security&#x2F;opera...</a> It may be that they go a little bit slower with more chance for the alleged infringer to respond (with a counter-notice or voluntary takedown) than others.But in the end, any major US company (or company doing business with the US) is probably going to comply with the DMCA, which says that if you get a takedown notice that is formatted correctly, you take down. Then there&#x27;s a process with user filing a counter-notice, then the original filer having a chance to respond to THAT, etc., that you can see in the gitlab workflow, but most of that is just how DMCA works. &quot;If there was a valid counter-notice and no response has been received from the plaintiff within 10 days of the counter-notice being forwarded&quot; then the content might go back up.

The youtube-dl removal was not a DMCA takedown request, under no situation could you consider the repo to be hosting copyright material.

&gt; Actually, I guess I&#x27;m not sure of the consequences to a company of ignoring DMCA takedown requests (whether or not they are US companies; but Gitlab is now btw), but I assume they are not good, or why do companies bother complying? Rather than assume, I should look into it.The request is essentially a precursor to a lawsuit, so the consequences are a potential lawsuit and all of the legal fees that go along with it.

I have trouble believing gitlab would just ignore a DMCA takedown request? This is what people believe? This is something gitlab has said?Actually, I guess I&#x27;m not sure of the consequences to a company of ignoring DMCA takedown requests (whether or not they are US companies; but Gitlab is now btw), but I assume they are not good, or why do companies bother complying? Rather than assume, I should look into it.But yes, redundancy for sure.

Great, now they can import the issues to a GitLab&#x2F;Gitea instance hosted by the same Germans who refused to ever take down youtube-dl.org, and a few other places for redundancy, and not have to go through all this excess stress again.

Please don&#x27;t try to give Google any ideas.

well, git is a block chain, so I guess this is already the case :D

Well this was a wild ride from start to finish. Anyone got a count on how many times someone suggested distributing YouTube-dl via a blockchain in all these discussions?Also, how come Google hasn’t asked for it to be taken down given that it has YouTube in the name?

I agree with you. They double-checked the issue with their legal team.I use the dl&#x27;er to download talks. I am featured in a couple of talks and want to secure these offline.

I think github&#x27;s CEO was keen to restore it [0], probably on a matter of principle but also probably on how much negative advertisement it brings them, in terms of &#x27;trusting&#x27; github as host.I am sure they had MS&#x27;s legal team advise them on what they can get away with.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;t3rr4dice&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320660235363749888" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;t3rr4dice&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320660235363749888</a>

Anti-DRM can&#x27;t be part of a DMCA takedown request. The remedy available to RIAA is to go to court and get an order.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-1...</a>EFF did file a counter-notice

Was a counter-notice filed, or did github restore it without one, once the tests were removed?Because my understanding was that certain decryption&#x2F;anti-drm functions were also in the scope of the takedown request, not just the tests.

Negative time I&#x27;d say; as in, it has already been mentioned what feels like a million times. Maybe just open an issue on the github repo?

How long before we start the discussion about exporting issues&#x2F;comments and preparing for another event like this? :)

Wait? No, no need to wait. Run for office, push out the dinosaurs.&quot;The chief penalty [of good people who refuse to lead] is to be governed by someone worse.&quot; -- Plato

As someone who is old enough to have heard The Eagles when they first came out, this is hilarious. No offense to Eagles fans, but they were mostly forgettable Top 40 from the get go.

True. It seems we need to wait for a generation of media-consuming legislators to age into the Senate to get past The Eagles complaining that their music is being &quot;pirated&quot; on Tik Tok.

All the parties that were pro reform in the &quot;article 13 fiasco&quot; will still get votes. Unless people grow a brain and start remembering things, they will just get away with anything unless it happens right before an election. Alas, we evolved from monkeys, not from elephants.

&gt; So I suppose the hope is that some political will to change the laws around this arises from it.We had mass demonstrations across Europe with the Article 13 fiasco and nothing happened.Revolutions aside, copyright will never be reformed anywhere in a consumer friendly manner - politicians are way too deep in the pockets of the industry.

If the RIAA notice is to be believed, you&#x27;ve still admitted to a crime as you&#x27;ve bypassed YouTube&#x27;s DRM, which is their hosting of the video in other public links.

Honestly, this is what caused me to install it. Have downloaded one video so far - a U.S. government work, so no copyright.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s about whether they&#x27;re reviled enough yet, but rather whether the actions they&#x27;re taking are likely to engender effective activism and organised political opposition to their agenda.In this case, it looks like they&#x27;ve discovered that the community isn&#x27;t asleep at the wheel and that this isn&#x27;t the hill they want to die on.

Some clever people working for the RIAA might have suggested to their lawyers that they take down the youtube-dl repository to generate some publicity around the project.And now they are pretending &quot;What is this youtube-dl thing everybody is talking about recently?&quot;RIAA, you are heroes. That&#x27;s very nice to promote underfunded free software projects like this.

I don&#x27;t believe that RIAA&#x27;s real intention was simply to get rid of youtube-dl. This was probably just a show to push for more DRM on the Web.

The amount of publicity this generated for youtube-dl is astounding... I would love for this to be a ”the plan to get rid of youtube-dl backfired badly for RIAA” ending. But I guess RIAA is reviled enough already so nothing they do really matters. So I suppose the hope is that some political will to change the laws around this arises from it.

Update: I have received the procedure for reinstating from GitHub Support: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Aissn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1328610884109938690" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Aissn&#x2F;status&#x2F;1328610884109938690</a>

Wondering what will happen to forks ? Mine is still blocked, and I can&#x27;t push to it to rebase&#x2F;merge, removing the tests.

I guess the maintainers will have to send &quot;forbidden&quot; patches among each other outside of Github, in order to run regression tests against the &quot;extra DRM&quot; videos.

What I meant is that they would rather do a self-hosting (Gitea, etc.) instead of using another platform to have ore control.Moreover, my statement was more of a speculation rather than an advice :-D

Breaking copy protection is only illegal if you do not have a license to the work. Removing the protection breaking code isn&#x27;t necessary, and everyone needs to stop pretending that it is.This same clause of the DMCA is the suspected reason for py-kms&#x27;s reinstatement after a takedown: it&#x27;s perfectly legal to break the Windows license scheme if you already own a license to Windows.

Github is part of the RIAA via Microsoft. That is something wrong.

Why? GitHub didn&#x27;t do anything wrong. They took this down because they were required to by law. It would have been the same story with anyone else.

Simply having a good migration strategy might be more than enough.

But now I guess Github should be used as a read-only redundancy rather than for development.

Then when someone realizes to use the web interface to check out that old commit, the whole thing opens up again. Hopefully github&#x27;s lawyers who OK&#x27;d this know a bit about git.

&gt; Does copyright law end with HEAD on master?I think the RIAAs technical know-how ends with the github web interface, so in a way, yes, copyright effectively ends with HEAD.

Does the fact that the RIAA is packed with stodgy, old corporate lawyers who most likely lack even superficial understanding of the term &quot;version control&quot; lack appropriate explanatory power?

Everything just points to the dmca takedown request being treated as if it was invalid; the repository was restored more quickly than needed and without any real changes.

&gt; Does copyright law end with HEAD on master?With regards to copyright law and &quot;distribution&quot;, there&#x27;s no distinction. The tests are still being &quot;distributed&quot;, just from a different URL. If youtube-dl was in violation before, they still are now.This is a confusing result. I would not expect any copyright litigant to sacrifice legal advantage for the sake of an adversary&#x27;s convenience in maintaining complete version control history.Could there possibly have been a miscommunication over what &quot;remove the tests&quot; meant? Or an offer of compromise outside of legal necessity? Or a bad-faith fulfillment of a promise to &quot;remove the tests&quot;?

If GitHub received a DMCA takedown notice, they would be obligated to takedown the copies of the fonts listed in the notice, including if old copies were listed. I&#x27;m unsure if they could say &quot;all releases before X&quot; or would need to link each one.If the copyright owners tried to sue the project for copyright infringement, IANAL but I would assume that the removal from head would show an attempt to correct the mistake and limit liability.If the copyright holder sued an individual I imagine it would matter if they were mirroring the repo or just intentionally downloaded the copyrighted files for personal use.

On that note, does git as a protocol even have a clean mechanism for redacting history like this? If someone were to press this to the logical extreme, how could a developer most cleanly excise violating history from a repo using current tooling?

A lot of stuff like this is technically infringement but will never be worth anyone&#x27;s time suing over, except maliciously.

I&#x27;ve always wondered about copyright and HEAD.For example, you can find a LOT of copyrighted font files that were committed somewhere in GitHub, and then removed in a later commit once they realized they&#x27;d accidentally uploaded a copyrighted file.But they&#x27;re still always there in the history, effortless to download.I&#x27;m not really sure what to make of that. I don&#x27;t think it would really count as removal in court... but it seems rare and complex enough that it&#x27;s not worth bringing up?

Or that they simply don&#x27;t care about the specific infringement, rather they are just trying to chill the free-speech rights of software developers and fight a culture war on all fronts to expand the rights, privileges, power, and wealth of their clients.

&gt; This makes it especially obvious that the RIAA&#x27;s problem with youtube-dl was never really the tests.Or that the RIAA lawyers are technically oblivious

I suppose it depends on how the claim is formulated? Take the CraftBukkit[1] claim for example. In that case, all commits since a specific point, plus all forks, were taken down:&quot;Pages including infringing content: [...] infringing as of commit [...] and every subsequent commit, including all forks that contain this commit [...] and all forks that share a common first commit [...] and every subsequent commit, including all forks that contain this commit&quot;This made any effort for restoration futile, since most of the repo was being claimed.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2014-09-05-CraftBukkit.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2014&#x2F;2014-09-05-C...</a>

Yes I really doubt the law cares about which commit some code is available on, as long as it is available.&gt; This makes it especially obvious that the RIAA&#x27;s problem with youtube-dl was never really the tests.It doesn&#x27;t, because the RAII were not involved in youtube-dl&#x27;s restoration at all.

I don&#x27;t think the story ends here.If the tests are the issue, they can just send another DMCA specific to those pages.Either way, I think in the US anyone who has the most time and money wins, so… good luck with SLAPP.

GitHub is still hosting the full youtube-dl version history, including versions which include those supposedly infringing tests. Does copyright law end with HEAD on master? Those tests are still there.This makes it especially obvious that the RIAA&#x27;s problem with youtube-dl was never really the tests.

Does anyone know if youtube-dl accepts financial support? The prospect of losing the program made me realize how much I rely on this project.

That would have been a great way to go about it. &quot;This part infringes our copyright, here&#x27;s a patch to fix that&quot;. But we all know they don&#x27;t want to fix anything, they want only to destroy and prop up the corpse as a big bad wolf so the actual content creators get scared and keep paying them.

It will be nice when the RIAA lawyers start submitting PRs to fix an issue.

Excellent news, now the community has a central place to contribute.
All in all I think it even had a positive impact for youtube-dl, the community will learn from it, and the number of people knowing about youtube-dl has grown by quite a lot.

They don&#x27;t need to remove the cipher circumvention code, because there is no cipher circumvention code<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo...</a>

From the irc screenshot that was linked further down this thread [1], it reads that the &quot;cipher circumvention code&quot; needed to be removed? I can only see some rework being done in the past related to the extractors. [2]So they gave up on this one, or is there more to come?[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;t3rr4dice&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320660235363749888" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;t3rr4dice&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320660235363749888</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2de2ca6659a18b6f5ab76565e00491153ae47276" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;commit&#x2F;2de2ca6659a18b...</a>

this is why it was forked a bit before the takedown, youtube-dlc contains fixes not in main youtube-dl. the guy who forked it tried to help but got banned from posting and helping out.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;blackjack4494&#x2F;yt-dlc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;blackjack4494&#x2F;yt-dlc</a>as of last youtube-dl version, the main youtube-dl behaves differently if you simply point it to a youtube channel, while youtube-dlc behaves as you&#x27;d expect... i keep both around for now.

3.3k issues, 756 open PRs. do they need help?

Waiting now for the &quot;Why we&#x27;re moving to Gitlab&quot; blog post.

If any maintainers or contributors see this, thank you all for your incredible work! youtube-dl is one of the best tools I&#x27;ve every used. It&#x27;s polished and always working and with such an incredible community. This is seriously a killer piece of software that is part of my default setup for every new machine I&#x27;ve had over the past 4-5 years.I&#x27;ve downloaded countless free lectures that some universities offer for offline viewing and sometimes listening if it&#x27;s a discussion based class. Seriously, this is great software.

Great news! It&#x27;s also worth pointing out that the team has been releasing new versions while the repository was down which is quite remarkable.

And now more people know about youtube-dl than ever before. What exactly was the RIAA&#x27;s goal?

Congrats on the Streisand RIAA!Flawless execution.

If you want to put your everyday Amazon spend to good use, don&#x27;t spend on Amazon.

If you want to put your everyday Amazon spend to good use by sponsoring EFF at no cost to you then checkout <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.Amazon.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smile.Amazon.com</a> and start sending the EFF money today.

I didnt think I could have much more goodwill toward the EFF, yet here we are.Donations link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supporters.eff.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;30for30--D" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supporters.eff.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;30for30--D</a>

Dues are $2500&#x2F;y if you have revenues of $1-5MM, $5000&#x2F;y if you have revenues of $5-15MM, and &quot;contact us&quot; beyond that: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.riaa.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;RIAA_ApplyForMembership-2.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.riaa.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;RIAA_ApplyFo...</a>Since one presumes that Microsoft does not sell much music (didn&#x27;t they shut down their music store a few years ago?), I can&#x27;t imagine they&#x27;ve negotiated dues that scale linearly on Microsoft&#x27;s total revenue - so, in fact, I&#x27;d expect that $1M is well beyond their RIAA dues.Now, it&#x27;s possible that MS is contributing money other than dues to the RIAA, but you can bound that a bit from their Form 990: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;131669037&#x2F;201930469349301928&#x2F;full" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;nonprofits&#x2F;organizations&#x2F;131...</a> For 2017, they got under $100K in &quot;contributions and grants&quot; and $29MM in &quot;program service revenue,&quot; which is later determined to be dues. They received no other significant revenue. So no donor could have possibly given them more than $100K.(... also, why did the RIAA give $4K to the Kenai River Sportfishing Association?)

If MS is a member of RIAA they should consider putting forward a motion to close it down or at very least leave it.

I wonder how much MS funds the RIAA as a member of it.

Is replacing EFF that easy?Honestly asking.

They are creating a fund that they control to take the place of EFF and avoid future stand-offs.

Wow. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

&gt; Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars.Expected contribution to legal defense costs of developers - $0Current contribution for legal defense costs of developers- $1 million

Your metaphor is kind of silly, since it compares the EFF with the unhoused, but, playing along, it&#x27;s more like someone worth 16 billion giving an unhoused person $10,000.A million bucks is real money, EFF can do a lot of good with it. They&#x27;re not going to buy a pack of chewing gum with it.I&#x27;m old enough that I doubt anything will ever turn me around on Microsoft, it annoys me to no end that they bought Github. But by the same token, I&#x27;m big on the EFF, and I&#x27;m stoked that they scored some loot: I&#x27;ll give Microsoft credit for that, but the only way I&#x27;m forgiving the company its past sins is if it liquidates the company and sets up a charitable fund for free software.

There&#x27;s now a bulwark between developers and bad actors attempting to use Github and the legal framework against them. It is very probably that outside actual, valid legal justification, what the RIAA tried will never be tried again, thanks to the presence of that fund.Put a price on that.

&gt; Is this real?I&#x27;m as amazed as you are.&gt; The &quot;love&quot; for microsoft recently is interesting.The Corporatocracy has never been so polarizing.

&gt; A million dollars is a million dollars.Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.But that $1 million dollars probably bought them a lot more in free press.To put it into perspective, it would be like someone worth $1.6 million giving a homeless person $1, filming it, putting it on youtube and profiting off of it.&gt; Thanks Microsoft&#x2F;Github.Is this real?Edit: Of course the downvotes. Not sure if employees of microsoft or people working in microsoft shops or the quality of people HN has attracted as declined.For people saying nonsense like &quot;A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars.&quot;...Do you think forcing someone who makes $100 million to pay $1 million in taxes is the same as forcing someone who makes $2 million to pay $1 million in taxes? $1 million is still $1 million right? I guess the concept of proportionality is foreign to many here?The &quot;love&quot; for microsoft recently is interesting. Facebook should look into buying that kind of love.

As I understand it, DMCA claim fraud requires legally proving bad faith, which is a quite high bar to clear.There are no provisions for negligence (which is what most of these claims probably amount to - you could even make a good argument for depraved indifference, but there are no provisions for that either) or mistakes, it has to be intentionally fraudulent. Even if it was a completely BS takedown, you&#x27;re left with proving malice rather than error.

&gt; GitHub will establish and donate $1MWhat is really needed is a &quot;counter-DCMA troll.&quot; So far as I understand DCMA, legal fees can be collected for a successful counter-claim.With the rife DCMA fraud these days, someone could make a pretty penny. DCMA has provisions for claim fraud, it simply requires attorneys to creatively weaponize it (which unfortunately doesn&#x27;t apply to YouTube, because their process is not DCMA&#x2F;legal).

Say what you will about Github and Microsoft, this was a classy move. A million dollars is a million dollars. &quot;Putting your money where your mouth is&quot;.&quot;Nonetheless, developers who want to push back against unwarranted takedowns may face the risk of taking on personal liability and legal defense costs. To help them, GitHub will establish and donate $1M to a developer defense fund to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. We will immediately begin working with other members of the community to set up this fund and take other measures to collectively protect developers and safeguard developer collaboration.&quot;Thanks Microsoft&#x2F;Github.

Truly surprising and welcome response from GitHub. I did not expect them to go this far for developers at all. As a FOSS developer myself, I wish more companies would treat DMCA requests like this.

(Unless I&#x27;m missing something) you can&#x27;t even delete the dcma&#x27;d one in the repository settings to clear up the repo name again :&#x2F;

Yeah, my fork of the original also shows the same never seen before repo as source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ppawel&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ppawel&#x2F;youtube-dl</a>

FWIW: My fork is now back up -- I got a friendly support email from GitHub, and based on their suggestion I opened a support ticket to have them delete my current fork&#x2F;url and then I simply reforked the original repo.I guess this is best outcome one could expect from dealing with such a situation xD

The forks still seem to be borked, hopefully they will get resolved.My fork[0] is still showing DMCA notice and shows that it&#x27;s a fork of some repo I&#x27;m sure I never forked, I forked the original ytdl-org.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ozburo&#x2F;youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ozburo&#x2F;youtube-dl</a>

If you read the blog post, it goes over several good changes:- What we’re changing- Developer defense fund- How we’re working to improve the law

Would they?  They&#x27;ve not for Netflix, nor (to my knowledge) does youtube-dl support even the videos on youtube that you have to pay to watch.

The developers would release an update to circumvent the block.

This makes me wonder, what would happen if Google started blocking yt-dl?

I wonder how much involvement there was from Microsoft on this matter. Either way, good job guys!

&quot;The RIAA reports that total retail value of recordings sold by their members was $10.4 billion at the end of 2007, a decline from $14.6 billion in 1999&quot;Not sure where that value&#x27;s gone in the last 13 years, but it didn&#x27;t look like exponential growth.Microsoft&#x27;s annual profits are about $14b.

EFF responded about that whole subject, and that allowed GitHub to &quot;reinstate&quot; the repo back:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-1...</a>

My understanding is that it&#x27;s takedown was due to fact that youtube-dl &quot;bypasses technical measures that control access or copying of copyrighted works&quot;. I don&#x27;t see how youtube-dl could be considered a &quot;circumvention tool&quot; if the end user of said tool would have access to the content if they used a web browser instead.

out of curiosity (and total legal ignorance)&quot; wouldn&#x27;t that logic make chrome also illegal? since it&#x27;s a tool that can be used for circumvention as well. If the defense is that it&#x27;s not chrome&#x27;s intended purpose, then one could argue that the defense also applies to youtube-dl since its intended use isn&#x27;t necessarily to download _licensed_ videos.

&gt; Can someone with more knowledge on the matter help explain why downloading copyrighted material using youtube-dl as opposed to a browser is treated differently under the DMCA?It&#x27;s not.It may be treated differently under other parts of copyright law based on implied license or other theory, but the DMCA impact is on distributing, offering, etc. youtube-dl, not using it, insofar as it constitutes a circumvention tool under the DMCA.

I think it only queried the metadata of that video.

AFAIK the integration tests had a link do download copyrighted video and that was the initial basis of the claim. &quot;They are demonstrating how to &#x27;pirate&#x27;&quot;

If that ends up in favor of RIAA, that will be a very chilling precedent: that when a client-server application has a UI to perform a client-side translation of user i&#x2F;o into a more readily transmissible format, you are authorized only to interact with the UI, and you must not touch the translation thereof, at least if the application is handling copyrighted material.

The RIAA&#x27;s claim includes that the browser UI conspicuously does not provide a download option, and the download option available in YouTube apps coming with protections for the media indicates an intent not to allow this, thereby not providing a download link is a technical protection measure.The EFF&#x27;s claim (on behalf of the youtube_dl developers) is that youtube_dl is performing the same actions as a browser as far as accessing the video file and so should not be treated differently, even if its output is to disk and not to the screen.Under DMCA then we&#x27;ve had a claim, and counter notice. Despite the phrasing of Github inviting and wanting a counter notice, ultimately they are not the arbiters of legality, so their part in the process is now done.The RIAA now has to bring the youtube_dl developers to court if they plan to keep pushing their argument, at which point we&#x27;ll have the RIAA lawyers vs EFF lawyers and an eventual legal decision (with potential appeals in the process).

It&#x27;s not treated differently at all - that&#x27;s exactly what the EFF just argued in its response to the RIAA [1]:&gt; Because youtube-dl simply uses the &quot;signature&quot; code provided by YouTube in the same manner as any browser, rather than bypassing or avoiding it, it does not circumvent, and any alleged lack of authorization from YouTube or the RIAA is irrelevant.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-1...</a>

Can someone with more knowledge on the matter help explain why downloading copyrighted material using youtube-dl as opposed to a browser is treated differently under the DMCA? In either case you&#x27;re accessing copyrighted material by downloading from youtube&#x27;s servers.

The point is that youtube-dl does more than just download videos.  It can also be used for downloading metadata.  I use -J to download metadata formatted as JSON.

&gt; Whenever you watch a video you are downloading it.Why is this comment downvoted? It&#x27;s highlighting one of the most common misunderstandings that laypersons have regarding video download&#x2F;streaming. Most people think that you can &quot;view&quot; content on the internet without downloading it. In this context, a tool which purports to &quot;download&quot; content, you know... sounds like it&#x27;s nefariously doing something that the &quot;viewing&quot; tool (like a web browser) doesn&#x27;t do.

Whenever you watch a video you are downloading it. youtube-dl merely gives you control over where that stream goes, whether it&#x27;s to a hard disk or to a media player like the regular Youtube.

Right, but the law makes no mention of secret keys, it just says you can&#x27;t go around anything that controls access to a copyright work; and you can&#x27;t provide tools to do so. The actual legal definition of tools covers both actual technical purpose as well as marketed purpose. Rebranding, say, OBS as &quot;Recorder for YouTube&quot; and talking about how you can use it to get around YouTube&#x27;s downloading protections by screencapping the entire video would possibly constitute a 1201 violation.There&#x27;s also another question of law, though: does 1201 apply when only the intent of the DRM has been circumvented, as opposed to it&#x27;s technical scope? In other words, does pointing a camera at a monitor constitute circumvention of DRM under section 1201? Most DRM can&#x27;t actually validate, say, that a human is watching instead of a camcorder. (Let&#x27;s ignore pesky things like Cinavia which are more akin to post-piracy frustration techniques, and easily circumvented with any kind of Free media player.) Likewise, YouTube&#x27;s rolling cipher can&#x27;t really validate that it&#x27;s not sitting inside of an instrumented browser that will dump whatever URLs it grabs. Our hypothetical OBS rebrand wouldn&#x27;t actually be a 1201 violation unless the law specifically covers things that DRM can&#x27;t technically enforce but would like to.

that&#x27;s how understood it as well:&quot;youtube-dl stands in place of a Web browser and performs a similar function with respect to user-uploaded videos. Importantly, youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies, such as Widevine, that are used by subscription video sites, such as Netflix.&quot;&quot;We presume that this “signature” code is what RIAA refers to as a “rolling cipher,” although YouTube’s JavaScript code does not contain this phrase. Regardless of what this mechanism is called, youtube-dl does not “circumvent” it as that term is defined in Section 1201(a) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because YouTube provides the means of accessing these video streams to anyone who requests them. As federal appeals court recently ruled, one does not “circumvent” an access control by using a publicly available password. Circumvention is limited to actions that “descramble, decrypt, avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate or impair a technological measure,” without the authority of the copyright owner.&quot;

If a program had its own implementation of widevine, why wouldn&#x27;t you also be &quot;effectively a web browser&quot; ?

I called this a couple of times[1][2] so it is nice to finally see someone else make this argument. It seems obvious to me.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25006577" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25006577</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24997072" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24997072</a>

That&#x27;s a DMCA argument (I&#x27;m not hacking).But it doesn&#x27;t really work: If you protect your house with no lock, not even a door, but just a little rope with a sign on: &quot;Do not jump over or duck under this ribbon, or cut it!&quot;, that&#x27;s, for the DMCA, enough - so you get into fun games where you claim that, say, a long random unique key that is right there in the HTML youtube.com serves which links to the video is a &#x27;security measure&#x27; and that &#x27;I shall read the URLs in this &lt;video&gt; tag and download what I find there instead of showing it on the screen&#x27; is &#x27;circumventing this&#x27;.How far can you stretch the meaning of &#x27;circumventing access-control measures&#x27; before, in court, you lose your argument? I don&#x27;t think anybody quite knows yet, but surely github doesn&#x27;t want to be on the hook for it without microsoft&#x27;s legal team and management signing off on the risk.Furthermore, separate from DMCA&#x27;s hacking provisions, there is simply the concept of who is responsible for any copyright infringement caused by stuff github hosts. As per 17 USC §512 (the so-called &#x27;safe harbor provision&#x27;), the idea of claiming &#x27;hey I just host this stuff, I&#x27;m not responsible for this, why dont you take it up with whomever uploaded this&#x27; is codified: You can do that, but it does mean that you _MUST_ take down the content in response to a takedown notice, and if you don&#x27;t, then you are now liable any infringement that content makes.The idea is that the owner of the data files a counterclaim notice, at which point the hoster (github) is free to re-host everything without opening itself up to liability, but only if, as per 17 USC §512, they do so &#x27;no less than 10 days and no more than 14&#x27;, and github did it in 1 day, so whoopsie there I guess.At that point it does turn into a fight between claimer and counterclaimer: The idea behind those 10 days is that the supposed real content owner can then go file in court against the counterclaimer; merely filing a lawsuit is enough: Show that to the hoster (github), and they can no longer re-enable the content without then being liable for infringement by doing so.You can&#x27;t file a counterclaim until your content is removed.Yeah, that means an utter bozo can take your content down for at least 10 days and there is nothing you can do about this. The DMCA is not particularly well designed in this manner (it doesn&#x27;t protect against trolly crud well, and getting a barratry verdict in the US is borderline impossible). But that&#x27;s how it works.In github&#x27;s shoes, the fact that youtube-dl doesn&#x27;t infringe is relevant only insofar that they are willing to ride that notion allllll the way to the gavel in the ensuing court case, because they will be defendants if they ignore the takedown request. Presumably they weren&#x27;t going to just do that without at least a close look by microsoft&#x27;s legal team, and a signoff from the big wigs for the likely millions this will cost, given that US law in these matters is... well, have you ever seen one of those shows where 2 people are on a beam and trying to knock the other one off with a giant q-tip? US law is like that, except the ends of the q-tips are moneybags.

I wonder if the RIAA will now be putting pressure on YouTube to use the same DRM as Netflix, so that when a video is downloaded they can’t use this ‘it’s just a browser guv’ defence because there would then have to be some circumvention to make it work.

AFAIU the argument is more that youtube-dl is effectively a web browser and doesn’t do anything that a web browser doesn’t do. Further, it does not include any “secret” key for DRM circumvention like might be bundled with e.g. Chrome in the case of Widevine, where browser vendors agree to protect the secret key.

&gt; If GitHub were fighting for the developer they would have funded the attorney, right?By expressively taking the side of the accused (such as paying their attorney), Github could have opened themselves to being liable for whatever youtube-dl does.Having the EFF as an independent party sidesteps that issue.

&gt; I&#x27;d rather cut this problem off at the headI don&#x27;t understand what you mean by this! I know it&#x27;s an expression or a way of saying something, but I don&#x27;t understand what you mean

Pretty sure Google is ensuring employees to give money to EFF.

Open question to HackerNews: are there big tech firms that give lobbying money to free software lobbyists?Feel free to highlight them here.I&#x27;d rather cut this problem off at the head than sit around and establish legal defense funds if possible. I&#x27;m glad GitHub and Microsoft could help contribute to this victory though.

EEF deserves every penny of donation they receive.

This. Github is acting like the knight in shining armor, but they really didn&#x27;t do anything except respond to the backlash their complicit no-questions-asked removal caused.

Github links to the EFF letter [0] in the DMCA repo.This letter spells out in clear, convincing and explicit detail why the RIAA was wrong.Profit-making Github and Microsoft could have performed this analysis and championed developers themselves, but it was the non-profit EFF that actually did the work.EFF deserves more credit than just a link for fighting against this shit.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-1...</a>

I don&#x27;t believe that Github actually needed the EFF&#x27;s writing for this, or that they don&#x27;t have the necessary technical expertise themselves. That is probably rather a protective assertion not to lose face. But at least they seem to have learned something from it now and want to review such requests technically before they (unjustifiably) act.

Why didn&#x27;t they start with youtube-dl though? They will defend developers and err on their side &quot;going forward&quot; but no not that one?Surely they already had the legal manpower when the youtube-dl removal started making waves. The fact that they did nothing for over three weeks and are publishing this blog post right after the issue was fixed by someone else (EFF) makes it hard to believe their &quot;changes&quot;.

Lets assume, for once, that what they wrote, is what they stand for.I think this is a very very good &#x2F; exemplary reaction.

Microsoft won&#x27;t square off with the RIAA since they&#x27;re part of it.

When Microsoft and the RIAA square off, the letter of the law isn’t really the battlefield. The battlefield is influence with the US Senate, and the EFF, while well regarded, is a Sancho Panza compared to Microsoft.

&quot;Downloading&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;saving a copy&quot; (unless you count &quot;saving a temporary copy of its chunks in RAM&quot;...). Most of my youtube-dl usage comes from its mpv integration, so the video is simply streamed directly for playback.

It supports a lot of video sources [1], not just Youtube.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;tree&#x2F;3f1748b9445e9d9367d29221c4b7bf9b88895e4e&#x2F;youtube_dl&#x2F;extractor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ytdl-org&#x2F;youtube-dl&#x2F;tree&#x2F;3f1748b9445e9d93...</a>

youtube-dl is a networked multimedia swiss army knife supporting many operations and manipulations of audio, video, metadata, and auxiliary content from many video and audio hosting sites and platforms, as well as serving as an access layer for several playback tools, including mps-youtube, mpv, and VLC.

It supports audio-only sites too. I personally sync my favourites on Mixcloud with it.

It support a gigantic amount of website, including audio one. Most of the time, I use it to have an offline copy of a podcast, radio show or some video that I might need to look at wherever I am not guarantee to have an internet connexion (very useful when travelling).
It also has a lot of useful option like downloading the audio only of a video, choosing the quality of the video&#x2F;audio which might be hidden in the website you are trying to watch it from, download subtitle (this is just so useful), you can pass ffmpeg options also to post-process the video in one go, ... There is just so many thing you can do with it. One last example : one of my computer really struggle to watch video&#x2F;stream directly from the browser (for whatever reason), but with youtube-dl I can stream directly to VLC&#x2F;MPV and it use 1&#x2F;10 the CPU comparing to watching the same video in the browser.

To be honest, I had no idea youtube-dl did anything else other than download YouTube videos. What other functions does it have?

Also their examples in their docs for youtube-dl included copyrighted content ...I&#x27;ll let the lawyers debate that whole thing, but IMO I think that was a bit of a mistake &#x2F; bad idea. Granted, fixable, but maybe a lesson of something to avoid.

&gt; It seems like EFF fought for youtube-dl and GitHub used their letter as legal firepower to bring the repo back online.I&#x27;m at least one of those who requested EFF to take a look on &quot;The RIAA’s attack on YouTube-dl is not a DMCA 512 infringement&quot; thread.[0,1][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;app4soft&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320617082866847746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;app4soft&#x2F;status&#x2F;1320617082866847746</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24888234" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24888234</a>

Youtube has to realize that a significant amount of content that people watch on its site is reaction, commentary, compilations, and other recycled content.I think its for this reason that they don&#x27;t go after these projects very aggressively.

How has youtube not sent a cease and desist for the name youtube-dl?They would most definitely have a case that the name makes it appear to be a youtube product. Would a cease and desist for the name only somehow imply that google has no issue with the functionality?Because I know not protecting your trademark can lead to dilution. And by issuing takedown notices, they are showing that they are aware of the existence of this usage of the youtube trademark.

Actually it seems more like the EFF had nothing to do with it at all and the unit test patch is the reason it was restored - just like Github says in the blog entry.

i have ytdl bound to some macros on my browser, so i can stream videos outside of the browser for accessibility reasons

From the outside in, there are a lot of aspects of the legal system that look like this - welfare for lawyers. Unfortunately, fixing it requires changing the law and we&#x27;ve made of practice of sending a lot of lawyers to Capitol Hill who are very sympathetic to the needs of lawyers. It&#x27;s probably the biggest self-perpetuating interest group there is.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, who is a member of the RIAA who created this legal action.For Microsoft to pay for the lawyers to take it down (via their RIAA membership payments) and also pay for the lawyers to keep it up seems... rather silly.

Add to this that the original author recently posted a story about the origins of the youtube-dl script admitting it was designed to do:- download YouTube videos and name the downloaded files appropriately.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rg3.name&#x2F;202011071352.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rg3.name&#x2F;202011071352.html</a>Under DMCA, neither writing a script like youtube-dl nor using it is prohibited (making an unauthorised copy of a video could be fair use).FN1 Section 1201 however prohibits distributing the script to others. Thus, the author of the script who &quot;releases&quot; (distributes) it is not necessarily the only one who might be violating the DMCA. Any recipient of the script who distributes it further, e.g., Microsoft, could be violating the DMCA as well.FN 1. Section 1201 prohibits distributing technology that is designed to circumvent either &quot;access controls&quot; and&#x2F;or &quot;copy controls&quot;. Similarly, the act of circumventing &quot;access controls&quot; is prohibited. However, the act of circumventing &quot;copy controls&quot; is not explicitly prohibited. Making unauthorised copies, e.g., downloading YouTube videos, is subject to the defense of fair use. It is arguable that youtube-dl is only designed to circumvent &quot;copy controls&quot;. As others in the thread point out, there are generally no &quot;access controls&quot; on YouTube videos, e.g., password protection. There could be exceptions. If youtube-dl is designed to circumvent geographic or age restrictions, would those be considered &quot;access controls&quot;.Aside from DMCA concerns, Google&#x27;s Terms of Service for YouTube would appear to prohibit use of youtube-dl:&quot;The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;2. circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service (or attempt to do any of these things), including security-related features or features that (a) prevent or restrict the copying or other use of Content or (b) limit the use of the Service or Content;3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube&#x27;s robots.txt file; or (b) with YouTube&#x27;s prior written permission;&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;static?template=terms</a>Would these TOS be enforceable if challenged. #1 makes no allowance for fair use. What do you think.

They literally had a test case in the repo for circumventing copy protection on youtube.I&#x27;m somewhat baffled they managed to get the repo reinstated given that&#x27;s very much a violation of the DMCA.

Honestly, the name is problematic. Why do some developers insist on bad names? Stop the bad names .. unpronounceable crap like xoyx-mp4, zycx10 should also be avoided .. what&#x27;s wrong with vidl, or something simple like that? .. I&#x27;m half joking, but it&#x27;s worth  underscoring.

An important point:There are many videos on YouTube that are 100% legal to download.

It seems like EFF fought for youtube-dl and GitHub used their letter as legal firepower to bring the repo back online. If GitHub were fighting for the developer they would have funded the attorney, right? Though from their blog post it does look like they are taking steps to fund defense in the future as well as other steps to improve the situation.Reading EFFs claim is pretty interesting, they state that saving a copy of a video is only one function of youtube-dl. I think the biggest problem is the name is called &quot;youtube download&quot;, it is sort of difficult to downplay that saving a copy is only one function when the name implies it is the main purpose of the program.

It&#x27;s kinda pointless to reverse that takedown. You can find it elsewhere, and Google plans to revoke the key in Q1 2021 after increasing&#x2F;changing the obfuscation on widevinecdm.dll.

This really is great to see, but it’s clear from their careful wording that the google takedown of the recent widevine l3 repository won’t be reversed:&gt; And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM)Since it is clearly circumventing a “TPM.”

&gt; To help them, GitHub will establish and donate $1M to a developer defense fund to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims.At the end. While I hope it won&#x27;t be needed, I hope it will be useful when the need arises.

Microsoft recognise that it&#x27;s developers that have been pushing for open source&#x2F;free software so they are desperate to keep them on side and locked in.

Not to be confused with Github developers, who work on plugins, calling GitHub API, etc?

GitHub also has a large number of other users like people downloading software and reporting issues, product managers, qa testers...I get that developers are the main drivers but it struck me as some unnecessary pandering.

You can use git to version almost anything - e.g. your essays or todo lists. That doesn&#x27;t make you a developer.

Github&#x27;s users are developers, so I think both terms are fair game. Pick the one that sounds best.

Year ago, long before I developed software, I would search for some software (to use, not to extend) and often find that the way to obtain it was by visiting SourceForge. In many ways, SourceForge and GitHub can be directly compared. Was I a developer for using SourceForge in this manner?

GitHub&#x27;s users are developers, not the general user.

I found it strange that they constantly used &quot;developers&quot;. I guess this is the marketing department word to use instead of &quot;users&quot;?

Thank the EFF for their letter:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;2020-11-1...</a>They explained why the DMCA has no grounds.

Well done Microsoft!I can&#x27;t imagine the political turmoil in the org that led up to this. It wasn&#x27;t simply a quick sting that would fade, the mass protest on the site was probably the biggest wake up call. MS could easily have pissed away the 7.5+ billion they paid for all the developers that use github.Without developers, github is nothing.

Exporting your issues and PRs is easy: file a DMCA claim against yourself.Jokes aside, you might also be able to make a claim under GDPR, as with Spotify.

&gt; Even after a repository has been taken down due to what appears to be a valid claim, we will ensure that repository owners can export their issues and PRs and other repository data that do not contain the alleged circumvention code, where legally possible.So they have the ability to export issues and PRs already, but it isn&#x27;t exposed to users?

I&#x27;m late on this discussion but as Google has made Youtube their platform for music streaming, their only platform for music streaming, this can be used to download all music from there no? (not even talking about movies)
Kind of sucks for them, seems like this is a major threat to that service in eyes of their content providers (record labels)

Would be stupid and naive to ignore or belittle every other contribution but open source and hacker culture has pushed the human race forward by leaps and bounds within just last two decades alone.This spirit and culture must live on forever.

Cue ewok celebration.  However by episode 7 everything we&#x27;ll be back in the same situation sans ewoks.

Just spitballing, but maybe Tortuous Interference. The Youtube-DL developers and users have an advantageous business relationship with GitHub&#x2F;Microsoft, which was interrupted and permanently harmed by the frivolous claim. Github has done this to mitigate the harm, but people will continue to question whether Microsoft will reliably serve, etc.YouTube-DL could potentially argue Slander of Title, which is well established in terms of claiming ownership of another person&#x27;s copyright. Claiming someone else&#x27;s intellectual property is inherently illegal seems pretty similar.It would be hard for YouTube-DL to prove damages, but with a showing of intent there could be room for punitive damages based on what the RIAA thought they stood to gain.

Sincere question: What kind of punitive counter-measures could they implement here?

Doubtful as the law would likely need updated to allow for that.They&#x27;d basically have no way to enforce the punitive counter-measures. They could certainly hit a company with an invoice, but that company could just ignore it. As Github ignoring future 1201 violation claims from that company would open Github up to liability, regardless of the reason for ignoring the claims.

They could throw few millions at lawyers to draw a law that makes organisations like RIAA illegal and then put forward few more millions at congressmen and lobby for its passage. That would make real difference. RIAA estate should be confiscated, sold and proceeds distributed among artists (not labels)

I take GH&#x2F;Microsoft won&#x27;t implement any punitive counter-measures for frivolous 1201 claims?Their new claim processing appears to be fairly resource-heavy. It&#x27;d be only fair to recover some of the costs they will end up sinking into it.

Previously in DMCA 1201 takedowns, Admiral anti-adblocking v. EasyList (2017)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14990137" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14990137</a>

I have a rather large project that is in a stage where asking &quot;where do we host it?&quot; is appropriate.I was &gt;&lt; this close to choosing Gitlab over Github due to this - I stopped all efforts to make the decision until I saw how this plays out.Happy to push to Github now.It&#x27;s a data point of one, but there you go..

Sadly, I don&#x27;t think there is any risk for them for &quot;losing developers en-masse to competitors&quot;.Everyone who seriously considers to leave the platform has already left when they were acquired by MS and&#x2F;or continued to work with ICE, and both of those only caused a miniscule amount of people to leave.

Competition in the source-control space is a great thing. I am not entirely convinced that they would have done the right thing without the threat of losing developers en-masse to competitors.

YouTube-dl's repository has been restored