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But it can also be sued for downloading uncopyrighted material. It's like submitting DCMA for Office Word because people can use it for creating pirate copies of Harry Potter.
1. Advertise that it is intended to aid in copyright infringement
2. Include some tools to circumvent DRM used in harry potter e-books.
I’ll admit that I’m ignorant of US law specifics here, and I’m not sure about YouTube’s DRM and/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?
The RIAA's logic is that a youtube-dl user is equivalent to someone in a movie theater with a video camera. The situation they're concerned about is somebody downloading a music video that they've authorized to be on Youtube. They make money on Youtube views, but they'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's…
I can't speak to the average youtube-dl user's experience, but I've used it a lot and have never distributed a video. I've saved videos to watch later on my own, that's it.
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: > 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…
IANAL, but regardless, according to RIAA, youtube-dl is circumventing the "DRM" built into YouTube, and therefore they'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.
> this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be Why stop there? I can use my browser to illegally download content, so I guess we better issue a DMCA takedown that too. But who even needs a browser? Let's issue a takedown for the GNU Project while we're at it because I could use wget to do the same thing. In fact, I could write my own program to illegally download content, so we better just…
DMCA is a bad law, but you'd have a harder time arguing a general purpose web browser meets any of the following conditions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 (2)No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that— (A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a techn…
A simple "cease and desist" against the youtube-dl project regarding their README examples almost certainly would have been sufficient. Instead, the RIAA took needlessly drastic measures with a DMCA takedown that paints RIAA as a poor defenseless victim from start to finish. This was not an attempt to right a minor copyright infringement, this was a public declaration from RIAA that they are aware of and object to the youtube-dl project.
This part of the DMCA takedown document is particularly rotten:
> 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.
YouTube-dl is a great tool that I've found use for a dozen times, and not once to download music or music videos. (Note that it works on sites beyond YouTube.) This takedown interferes with a number of legitimate uses that are completely independent of the RIAA's objectives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why in the world did they include copyright works in the README? That's contributory infringement!
Why? youtube-dl is a violation of YouTube'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's handy to be able to use whatever media player you want, including ones that have better scrubbing.
You can download the most recent version of the YouTube-DL code from Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co... Fuck the RIAA
Does anyone see the video links in the README claimed by RIAA?