> youtube-dl does not circumvent any protection measures, so hosting it should not be illegal in any country, including Switzerland.
That's a different argument to "Swiss law is different to the US and permits this" though. Bluntly the international treaty wording that is integrated into all national laws is vague enough that I just don't know if what youtube-dl does would be found to trigger it. I certainly wouldn't gamble my own freedom on it. I also wouldn't instruct on it if I were the RIAA tbh.
Honestly I suspect if you put it to courts in various territories a hundred times you'd probably find it came out about fifty fifty. It's a badly drafted law, but unfortunately many laws are badly drafted and only clarify themselves through precedent and we don't have enough of that here.
> The only problem here is the absurdity of how the DMCA and similar works in the US, which allows companies to easily spam invalid claims and require content removed unless the victim puts in the work to prove the claim invalid. And, of course, that legal cases tend to be settled not moral and innocence, but by the lawyers paychecks.
Not especially. Ultimately if you have a free hosting service you shouldn't be especially surprised they're not willing to gamble the literal freedom of their staff for you to go to bat on legal cases. You get what you pay for. The DCMA doesn't have a takedown regime in these circumvention cases, it's just that Github becomes jointly liable when it becomes aware, and have obviously looked at it themselves and decided they are not willing to take the risk.
In that regard, the law is pretty similar in the US to pretty much every member country in the world that belongs to WIPO.