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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

#463
post #428

Disclaimer: IANAL. The legal reasoning here is shaky. Notice that they cite a German court and assert that the law there is materially the same as that in the US. I did some research on this specific issue at one point, and I'm skeptical that Youtube's controls qualify under the law in question. RIAA cites two sections of the law: >the provision or trafficking of the source code violates 17 USC §§1201(a)(2) and 1201(…

The concrete action they're accusing youtube-dl of is that it "circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher". The RIAA has used this same complaint to have other sites/tools taken down. I've looked into the implementation, and it turns out the Youtube is at most merely rearranging the characters of the CDN url of the video, and they send you JS code in the page to correctly arrange the characters of the URL so you can download it. Youtube-dl is using the Google-supplied JS and a JS interpreter to transform the Google supplied URL into the URL they need to download the videos. Youtube is asking Google what to do, and Google is saying "here's how you download the video".

I explained the full RIAA complaint, with links to prior complaints and the youtube-dl source code, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111

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

#464
Worth noting the MPA already tried doing this to Popcorn Time, a BitTorrent client designed to provide a Netflix-like UX.[1] The Popcorn Time devs put in a counter-notice and the repository was back up a few weeks later when the period for the MPA to respond expired.

The same thing will probably happen here because this is not one of the purposes of DMCA takedown letters, period. Even if there are inappropriate test cases or something in the repo, or if they’re correct that youtube-dl bypasses DRM in violation of a different part of the DMCA, it’s still not a valid takedown because GitHub isn’t hosting anything the RIAA/those it represents own the copyright to. The correct way to do this is to go after the lead youtube-dl developer(s) and/or GitHub for facilitating infringement or whatever, but I don’t think RIAA wants to do that because they probably don’t have much/any legitimate grounds for legal claims against them, so they abuse the DMCA to look like they’re doing something.

Edit: for a more concrete picture of what happens next, read GitHub’s DMCA policy.[2] Basically youtube-dl can file a counter notice assuming they disagree with the claims, after that the RIAA has 10-14 days to get a court order or the repo goes back up.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-code...

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called Git.

how git is decentralized?

For real? It’s decentralized just like http, ash and email is decentralized.

It’s a protocol. You can use it against any target you like.

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

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called Git.

how git is decentralized?

Legitimate question, as most people see this as hosted on a server somewhere and your client doesn't sync with other clients... usually!

You do, in fact, have a client capable of working without a central server. It's tedious but sending patches over email is definitely one way to make it work without relying on a single system. You can also have and push to or fetch from multiple servers with your client, which can be other developer's own servers, or a server reachable over Tor as a hidden service, etc. It's very flexible if you want to go that path.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's called Git.

how git is decentralized?

git was designed to be used decentrally. Every clone of a git repo is technically an equally valid source of truth for the repository. In practice though, pretty much every project has a single git repo that is used to synchronize all the other copies of the repo, because it's much easier to coordinate.
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