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YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

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

#431

Post by marcosdumay »

grawprog wrote: post #297

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.

Quite obviously, because the developers decided to host their code there.

If they hosted it somewhere else, there would be different laws restricting how people all over the world use it.

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

#432

Post by shiado »

The "under penalty of perjury" part of DMCA has always been fascinating to me. Has there ever been a single case of this being enforced against inappropriate DMCA takedowns? What's next? DMCA against Intel for making a chip that can facilitate copyright infringement? Maybe a power company for providing power to the machine that could do it?

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

#433

Post by Drdrdrq »

CivBase wrote: post #379
RealStickman_ wrote: post #240

Made a torrent of the latest version from pypi. Hope it works. magnet:?xt=urn:btih:da76788b4d05583f8a3a7ed60f136c5647daa113&dn=youtube%5Fdl-2020.9.20.tar.gz&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.bittorrent.am%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fopen.acgtracker.com%3A1096%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fretracker.krs-ix.ru%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.com%3A2710%2Fannounce Edit: NVM. Getting nowhere with setting that up.

Is there anything stopping someone from creating a new youtube-dl repo on GitHub with the README examples in question removed? On that note... how do you actually remove copyrighted content from a git repo? Even if you fixed the problem on the HEAD of the master branch, it would still exist in the version history.

It can be done, the search keywords are "git rewrite history".

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

#435

Post by ikeboy »

crazygringo wrote: post #21

Curious if anyone with legal expertise knows if this has legs? They say: > 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 "circumventing" is still accessing a stream the use…

I'm NAL, but familiar with IP law.

My analysis is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874277 and I'm broadly skeptical of the legal viability under US law.

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

#436

Post by eli »

red_admiral wrote: post #186
eli wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are misunderstanding the legal argument. The DMCA Section 1201 specifically prohibits (among other things) technology that "is marketed ... for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." 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 fo…

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.

Agreed, though the RIAA may well have sent a letter anyway. There's not really any downside to them sending a takedown that is overly broad.

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

#438

Post by elorant »

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…

Comments like this in here seem out of place. We're a community of hackers. Just read the source and figure out how it downloads the videos. Next time YT changes something it'd probably be some query string in the url. It's not rocket science to download stuff from video sites.

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

#439

Post by [deleted] »

NegativeK wrote: post #341
pengaru wrote: post #175

Considering youtube-dl isn't doing anything a web browser accessing these sites can't do, essentially serving as a headless web browser with a convenient CLI, I don't see how this could possibly have a leg to stand on. It's like serving Mozilla a DMCA takedown for FireFox. I however welcome the highly visible reminder that github should only be used as a mirror at most.

There's an obvious difference between a browser that, in normal use, doesn't allow storing of streaming video, and a tool that does and isn't supported by Google at all. Yes, you can download the full video with a browser. Yes, you can use wget or curl to do that. But youtube-dl's community was dumb enough to give clear cut examples of downloading copywritten material, which is obviously not what the RIAA or probably…

[deleted]

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

#440

Post by bawolff »

throwaway17_17 wrote: post #410
bawolff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > This feels like DeCSS all over again. I think napster would be the better comparision (and especially napster compared to vcrs)

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.

Napster and VCRs were both accused of being tools to infringe copyright, VCRs won the lawsuit, napster lost. A big part of that related to how napster positioned itself in terms of marketing compared to vcrs.
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