YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#291

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

qw3rty01 wrote: post #267

diffeomorphism wrote: post #84

Is there an alternative to github that is resistant to denial of service attacks^1 like this? 1: At this time this is just a baseless accusation and there are no repercussions to the RIAA for blatant abuse. Why wouldn't they simply send a takedown for anything they don't like no matter whether it is legal or not?

IANAL, but DMCA takedowns do not have "no repercussions" for false claims. If the DMCA takedown was actually baseless, they would be opening themselves up to damage liabilities, as specified under 17 U.S. Code § 512 under section f[1]. This is different than YouTube copyright claims, which as far as I'm aware don't actually have any repercussions for false claims unless YouTube decides to take action[2], since copyri…

> DMCA takedowns do not have "no repercussions" for false claims.

They mostly do.

> If the DMCA takedown was actually baseless, they would be opening themselves up to damage liabilities, as specified under 17 U.S. Code § 512 under section f[1].

The basis for liability there is knowing misrepresentation of infringement. So as long as RIAA believed (and that belief need not be reasonable) the legal theory of infringement that they advanced, there's not a liability problem.

SUre, if they misrepresented their right to act on behalf of the legal owners of the works they claimed were infringed by it, or that would be an issue, but no one even suspects that they are doing that.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#292

Post by bob1029 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

jaspergilley wrote: post #146

Ok, so who's building a distributed, cryptographic, uncensorable version of GitHub?

IMO, Git+blockchain is a pretty good match on paper.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#293

Post by nsgi » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #86

I'm very scared by this. youtube-dl needs somewhat frequent updates as Google moves the youtube codebase around. I'm worried that the RIAA's next move, now that it's starting to get inconvenient to get youtube-dl, will be to make Youtube change in some way to make existing copies of youtube-dl no longer work. youtube-dl has been my primary way of getting videos since I learned about it. If the RIAA manages to kill it…

Do you have some sort of RMS-style setup? If so, I'm curious about your reasons for that and why mainstream browsers aren't an option for you

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#294

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

oefrha wrote: post #235

crazygringo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually curious, when you run "youtube-dl --update" where does it update from? What domain? Trying it now results in: ERROR: can't find the current version. Please try again later. I'm unclear if it had always updated itself from GitHub or elsewhere.

$ rg 'UPDATE_URL|VERSION_URL' youtube_dl/update.py 35: UPDATE_URL = 'https://yt-dl.org/update/' 36: VERSION_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'LATEST_VERSION' 37: JSON_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'versions.json' 46: newversion = opener.open(VERSION_URL).read().decode('utf-8').strip() $ curl -IL https://yt-dl.org/update/LATEST_VERSION HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS) Location: https://ytdl…

Thank you!

Well at least if they can hold onto their domain, and then host development somewhere, they'll maintain the ability to redirect updates to a new location without people having to manually reinstall.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#295

Post by black_puppydog » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

Your weekly reminder that

1. You should not have your development process on a centralized platform, at least not if you're doing anything that smells of copyright issues

2. If you do host on a centralized platform, have regular, decentralized backups of code and issue tracking.

3. Also, avoid US-centric hosting for this kind of thing. But really, refer to 1.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#296

Post by larrik » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #283

larrik wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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 "unintende…

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 hund…

Yes, which makes this very sad that a simple slip-up can make it very difficult to come back from this.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#297

Post by grawprog » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

So why does the Recording Industry Association of America get to decide whether a tool for downloading content on a service that is produced by people around the world and released under many different licenses exists or not?

The RIAA and America in general has no right to police the rest of the world.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#298

Post by mikece » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

Perhaps it's time to take a closer look at projects like Fossil that combine distributed version control with wiki and issues tracker built in. If the devs behind youtube-dl were using Fossil then picking up right where the DMCA leaves them is no sweat.

https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#299

Post by krob » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

I think that they should update the readme and rebase the history and eliminate any references to the original copyrighted material of the readme file. possibly even making a request of GitHub to help them clean the repo or evidence of any logging information with regard to the copyrighted content. I think it would be relatively easy to argue that a web browser would be guilty of every single little thing that can be done through YouTube DL binary in the right hands. The only copyrightable information that YouTube - DL offers is an instruction set or a direct correlation to the fact that they can use this tool to do some things that are implicitly prohibited.

Re: YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

#300

Post by Barrin92 » Fri, Oct 23, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #180

kzrdude wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

just throw it up on Gitee good luck ever getting through the Chinese court system on a copyright issue