Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 686 posts

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#361

Post by goodluckchuck »

agency wrote: post #259
huhtenberg wrote: post #233

I take GH/Microsoft won't implement any punitive counter-measures for frivolous 1201 claims? Their new claim processing appears to be fairly resource-heavy. It'd be only fair to recover some of the costs they will end up sinking into it.

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

Just spitballing, but maybe Tortuous Interference. The Youtube-DL developers and users have an advantageous business relationship with GitHub/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's copyright. Claiming someone else'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.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#362

Post by em-bee »

kevincox wrote: post #241
myself248 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

but only those who maintain code will be affected by takedown requests on their repos

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#363

Post by Aissen »

ldjb wrote: post #346
Aissen wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a program had its own implementation of widevine, why wouldn't you also be "effectively a web browser" ?

Sure, it would be "effectively a web browser". But it would also require a secret key. If the program is not licensed to hold the key, that could be considered circumvention.

Other browsers have the key, why would this one be different ?

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#364

Post by RonanTheGrey »

disown wrote: post #258
toomuchtodo wrote: post #159

Say what you will about Github and Microsoft, this was a classy move. A million dollars is a million dollars. "Putting your money where your mouth is". "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 developer…

> 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. > Thanks Microsoft/Github. Is this real? Edit: Of course the downvotes. Not sure if emplo…

There'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.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#365

Post by the8472 »

kevincox wrote: post #241
myself248 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Those other users probably don't get their content taken down as much.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#366

Post by seba_dos1 »

NoSalt wrote: post #353
ryanar wrote: post #184

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 c…

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

"Downloading" doesn't mean "saving a copy" (unless you count "saving a temporary copy of its chunks in RAM"...). Most of my youtube-dl usage comes from its mpv integration, so the video is simply streamed directly for playback.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#367

Post by wgjordan »

CivBase wrote: post #292

Why did the EFF have to step in here? What did the EFF letter provide that GitHub couldn't have figured out itself? If GitHub really was "standing up for developers", why couldn't Microsoft's own army of lawyers figure this out? If youtube-dl (or any OSS project) continues to use GitHub, I hope they have a backup plan ready at all times. Even if GitHub truly is on the right side, they've proven themselves to be a lia…

> If GitHub really was "standing up for developers", why couldn't Microsoft's own army of lawyers figure this out?

I think the 'What we're changing' section is the real interesting part of this post regarding this. I read this section as a half-apology for not doing enough to stand up for developers in this case (allowing the repository to be taken down to begin with), and a promise to do more in the future to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. We'll have to wait and see if their future actions match this promise.

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#368

Post by boogies »

smnrchrds wrote: post #264
reacweb wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe their purpose was Widevine. The youtube-dl takedown was a way to distract the attention. I don't think we should rejoice until Widevine is back.

I am out of the loop. What happened to Widevine?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=widevine

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#369

Post by RonanTheGrey »

hobofan wrote: post #300
mmastrac wrote: post #238

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.

Sadly, I don't think there is any risk for them for "losing developers en-masse to competitors". Everyone who seriously considers to leave the platform has already left when they were acquired by MS and/or continued to work with ICE, and both of those only caused a miniscule amount of people to leave.

I have a rather large project that is in a stage where asking "where do we host it?" is appropriate.

I was >Happy to push to Github now.

It's a data point of one, but there you go..

Re: YouTube-dl's repository has been restored

#370

Post by calcifer »

NoSalt wrote: post #353
ryanar wrote: post #184

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 c…

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

It supports a lot of video sources [1], not just Youtube.

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/3f1748b9445e9d93...

Post reply on HN