27 ms·

YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

4240 points by phantop 6y ago

vernie 6y ago
Ha I'd nearly forgotten about the RIAA, thanks for reminding me to re-up my EFF donation.
bergstromm466 6y ago
I’m so glad that Github is owned by Microsoft and that they don’t immediately comply with the takedown... /sarcasm
esalman 6y ago
FWIW, I'm forking youtube-dl right now.
- alexfromapex 6y ago
  Just so you know, they expressly mention that’s not a good idea in the notice. Also, I'm just the messenger so please don't shoot/downvote me
  - jaspergilley 6y ago
    Why wouldn't it be? Does this claim have any substance?
    - esalman 6y ago
      A claim like this is also a threat to the open-source software ecosystem.
  - 3np 6y ago
    And I hereby expressly mention that it is, so there you have it.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    Still a better idea than DRM
  - icandoit 6y ago
    They didn't like people buying VCRs either.
- mgbmtl 6y ago
  Stating the obvious: but hopefully to a place other than Github, since forks would automatically be removed as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  Any links to a repo that is still standing would be appreciated -- I would also like to clone the source.
  - esalman 6y ago
    Source available on PyPl: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872959
Lammy 6y ago
> 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#readme https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md.... > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown. How, exactly? This is why I dislike GitHub's "Fork" button, since a takedown of the original takes yours too.
jchw 6y ago
Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an example of that: > We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies: They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be. This doesn't circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don't understand what leg they have to stand on here. This feels like DeCSS all over again. P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it's not listed. [1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn't in the readme, but in the test cases. See extractor/youtube.py. To me this seems even more tenuous, but IANAL.
- alexfromapex 6y ago
  It’s probably a case of fair use but it’ll have to go to court to decide that
  - jchw 6y ago
    IANAL but I don't even think DMCA applies. It's not like YouTube-dl is breaking copy protection schemes, at most it is handling anti-abuse schemes. After all, it's not like you can go and bypass Widevine with youtube-dl.
    - rmrfstar 6y ago
      Unfortunately, it is making a copy. These guys also fucked up by "marketing" it for use in circumventing such controls. They should have showed how to pull OCW lectures. (a)(2)(C) is the part. IANAL but that's my take. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
      - 6y ago
dheera 6y ago
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown. (a) Are there mirrors? (b) Are there Github equivalents in e.g. Russia where the RIAA doesn't have jurisdiction or extradition power?
- slezyr 6y ago
  In Russia they've banned whole github multiple times and have their own "RIAA" that helped to create the firewall.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Not looking for Github specifically, but a Github-equivalent where the entire contents of the repo could be pushed to for continued development. If not Russia, any other country that has more freedom than the USA in software, doesn't take crap from the US, AND doesn't block Youtube.
- nguyenkien 6y ago
  Chinese gitee, or self-hosted some where -- edit found one: https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
- esalman 6y ago
  https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  You can grab from the web archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20201018120927/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018120927/https://github.co...
Santosh83 6y ago
How can a program be in violation of DMCA? Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? How ridiculous.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > How can a program be in violation of DMCA? The DMCA contains provisions that criminalize circumvention tools. The plaintiff only has to prove that a tool is mainly designed to aid in copyright infringement and/or that's the most common use. It's a super super bad law, but has unfortunately been used quite successfully over the past 20 years by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA and others. > Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? Many jurisdictions in the US consider carrying a hidden knife beyond a certain length as illegal carry of a concealed weapon.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  > Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? I mean, guns are banned in many countries using precisely the same reasoning. And I might totally be wrong about this but I heard that in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knives.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    > in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knives There's a "Challenge 25" (formerly "Think 21!" IIRC) policy which covers these kinds of situations - although it is just a voluntary agreement from the major retailers. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-vo...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    In New York, you need to be over 18 to buy Sharpies and spray paint.
stingraycharles 6y ago
I’ll admit that I’m ignorant of US law specifics here, and I’m not sure about YouTube’s DRM and/or policy regarding downloading videos is. So I’ll ask: is this DMCA request justified? Why would the RIAA be going after YouTube-dl, rather than Google? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the RIAA to go after YouTube instead?
- evan_ 6y ago
  YouTube licenses the music.
- itake 6y ago
  I wonder why they don't go after Chrome and Firefox as well.
  - gorbachev 6y ago
    Give them time.
- burkaman 6y ago
  The RIAA's logic is that a youtube-dl user is equivalent to someone in a movie theater with a video camera. The situation they're concerned about is somebody downloading a music video that they've authorized to be on Youtube. They make money on Youtube views, but they're losing precious fractions of a cent when you download it and watch it offline. This is obviously not ethically justified, but I have no idea if it's legally justified.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    The problem with their argument is that youtube-dl is a video camera. The US has already rules that video cameras, VCRs, DVD recorders, etc are all devices with legitimate uses, and you can't stop them from being made or sold. A movie theater is within its rights to ask patrons using video cameras to leave, and Google would be within its rights to lock down Youtube. The RIAA is fishing, and all the precedents are against them pulling up even a minnow.
robgibbons 6y ago
As long as the source code in the repo itself does not infringe on their copyrights, this seems like a plainly frivolous lawsuit.
shmerl 6y ago
They should have counter claimed this nonsense instead of taking down the repo. RIAA is an abusive troll.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  >> RIAA is an abusive troll That is one of nicer things that one say about the Recording Industry Association of America.
- gorbachev 6y ago
  Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice. It's then on the owner of that content to file a counter claim to restore it. Even if the content is not in violation of DMCA, your files will be gone for a day or two, or longer depending on how slow the publishing platform operators are to process the counter claim and how long it takes to file the counter claim.
  - gouggoug 6y ago
    Has anyone tried sending automated DMCA for the entirety of Github? Once half of github is under bogus DMCA, maybe that'll make them think for a minute. I'm halfway serious.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      You as a random person would be committing what's essentially (or actually?) perjury and I'd expect you'd either be ignored or prosecuted. Big companies seem to get freebies on this, doubt you would.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice. No, they aren't obligated to do anything. Github is immunized from any liability they would otherwise have to the complaining party for hosting the material affected by the notice if they comply within the parameters of the DMCA safe harbor provision (which requires action "expeditiously" rather than "immediately") when they receive a notice.
orliesaurus 6y ago
> We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies IMHO this wasn't the best move, I mean... the use of copyrighted music as an example DIRECTLY stated in the repo, as an example to show what you can download with the tool
- userbinator 6y ago
  If I remember correctly, PopcornTime's screenshots and examples were all carefully selected to contain only public domain movies for this reason.
- paulgb 6y ago
  Copyrighted content with a notoriously litigious industry group behind it, no less.
- deelowe 6y ago
  So, someone could fork it, change the readme and other files to remove all references to copyrighted content. No problem?
- hysan 6y ago
  Does anyone have a local copy of the repo? I’m curious when that particular mention was merged into the repo. Thought - It’s possible that someone in association with the RIAA made a code contribution that included that change for the purpose of creating evidence to file a DMCA.
  - cipherboy 6y ago
    The videos mentioned in the takedown notice are part of the test suite and not part of the README. Definitely not made by a RIAA member. See youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py line 588 in HEAD. Video was originally added in f7ab6cbe160afbba60537c7a830a4c65c6f0b3ea back in '13, to the file test/tests.json.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
Github has received a takedown request for the youtube-dl repo and forks, not youtube-dl itself, correct?
jonathan-neil 6y ago
They've learned absolutely nothing from two decades of failed wars vs torrenting.
neiman 6y ago
But it can also be sued for downloading uncopyrighted material. It's like submitting DCMA for Office Word because people can use it for creating pirate copies of Harry Potter.
- tertius 6y ago
  To be fair, more like "Harry Potter Copier Word".
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    To be fair, more like Microsoft® Office® OneNote™; it has a camera feature and an automatic OCR feature and a “copy text from image” convenience feature.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - CJefferson 6y ago
      Also, using copying an entire Harry Potter book as the basic tutorial.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        Which youtube-dl didn't do…?
    - tertius 6y ago
      If also connected to the db for all fiction ebooks on Amazon.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  It's not because Word doesn't: 1. Advertise that it is intended to aid in copyright infringement 2. Include some tools to circumvent DRM used in harry potter e-books.
3np 6y ago
It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying. It's not that far from targeting wget or curl, were it not for the widespread use of them in industry.
- gruez 6y ago
  >It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying. Because there's no upside and only downside. If they refuse to comply and it turns out that youtube-dl did infringe, then they won't have DMCA safe harbor status and could be liable for damages.
- NobodyNada 6y ago
  IANAL, but as far as I know GitHub has to comply with DMCA requests. Otherwise, they would lose their safe harbor protection and become liable for all distributions of copyrighted content through their service. However, GitHub is also required to reinstate `youtube-dl` if the creator files a DMCA counter-notice.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    This is not a valid DMCA takedown request, as the claimant has not asserted copyright ownership of anything in the repository. This notice is a conflation of two separate aspects of the DMCA, the copyright takedown process and technological circumvention devices. If the RIAA wishes to claim that youtube-dl is a circumvention device, the proper route is to sue the authors of youtube-dl. This notice is an abuse of process, and highlights the need for a penalty for fraudulent DMCA requests.
    - vhold 6y ago
      This is a good point, but I think ultimately Github has to comply with it to maintain their legal immunity, it's not their responsibility to determine if a copyright claim is valid. Similarly, youtube-dl can issue a counter-notice, and Github will have no responsibility to determine the validity of that either. They simply restore access unless they have been notified that a lawsuit is in progress.
crazygringo 6y ago
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 user can view anyways, and the "reproduce and distribute" feels like a stretch -- there's no inherent distribution. This isn't anything like a pirating or a torrenting tool. It feels more akin to when movie studios sued VCR manufacturers for being able to record TV back in 1984 -- and lost [1]. (Also, side note but I have never in my life seen a story upvoted so quickly on HN. 130 points in just 7 minutes so far.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  The entire IP concept is really hard to make sense of with the web: a browser works by making a local copy of a remote resource and then making that local copy available to the user. I don’t see why, from the server’s perspective, the precise client matters: if I use curl + pandoc to read your webpage, is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome?
  - superkuh 6y ago
    > is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome? In the USA legally it is because the vast majority of the judges that have ruled on these things think anything that isn't a browser is a hacking tool. Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web resources.
    - ReaLNero 6y ago
      > Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web resources. Example?
cft 6y ago
This needs free legal assistance from EFF and needs to go to court if RIAA is actually ready to litigate this
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  > This needs free legal assistance from EFF Legal assistance isn't free; it's just paid for by other donors: [0] [0] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/30for30--S https://supporters.eff.org/donate/30for30--S
- jedberg 6y ago
  I don't think Microsoft needs the EFFs help.
  - cft 6y ago
    Youtube-dl is not a Microsoft's project. If they send a counter-notice to GitHub (they should), per DMCA Youtube-dl is exposed for liability when GitHub restores the repository (but GitHub is shielded from liability after they restore)
jaspergilley 6y ago
You can download the most recent version of the YouTube-DL code from Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co... Fuck the RIAA
- viro 6y ago
  ok so I might just be stupid but how does that link let me clone the repo?.....
  - 29_29 6y ago
    click code, download zip
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload.github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/zip/master https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload.... is a ZIP containing the repo.
    - dheera 6y ago
      Wow I didn't think they'd host ZIP files of every commit of every repo. Where the hell do they have that much hard disk space, and who is funding them?
      - mikeyouse 6y ago
        Archive.org https://archive.org/about/credits.php https://archive.org/about/credits.php
      - qwerty456127 6y ago
        We are funding them together: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
whatsmyusername 6y ago
This will do nothing. The tool will instantly be hosted outside the US. Even if the developer is American it's just going to get instantly scooped by someone else.
Conan_Kudo 6y ago
This is the first time I've read a DMCA notice that also references EU Directives and German law too (admittedly it's a thin note saying it's materially equivalent to U.S.C.). Is that even meaningful in a DMCA takedown notice?
- varispeed 6y ago
  It is like your abusive partner brings up all the things they think you did wrong when they don't have any logical argument.
  - ferdek 6y ago
    I believe the way you put it describes this part in the DMCA takedown notice the best way possible. Bringing up European laws on intellectual property and mixing it with US "copyright" is comical to me, especially after reading this [0] article on French law recently: > France doesn’t have copyright. Sorry for US readers, your “copyright” is nonsense that doesn’t apply here, though the word “copyright” can be seen misused verbatim once in a while. I believe this interpretation of "copyright" is all similar around Europe. US copyright law is all about "right to make copies", be it software or music/video and it just doesn't make any sense on the other side of the globe. In the country where I live I can purchase a music or video file and legally make unlimited copies for my personal use. It is also legal to download it from any other source as long as I can prove that I paid for it some time ago in the past. Torrents are illegal as the protocol forces me to share the file, and sharing part is illegal. Downloading is fine xD. [0] https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-license-to-be-inapplicable-in-french-copyright-court/ https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-lice...
    - Shared404 6y ago
      > Torrents are illegal I assume this only applies to "copyrighted" content? Is it illegal to torrent a Linux distro or some such thing? Either way, this seems much more reasonable than the US's current system.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
That's pretty stupid. You don't takedown technologies that could be used maliciously or we wouldn't have anything. I'm worried about Newpipe now, it's been a life changer.
ddavis 6y ago
This is really dumb. By the logic of the letter all that needs to be done is change the README file.
erk__ 6y ago
This is not a new thing, DMCA was also used to take down specific plugins on Streamlink (tool to download livestreams) https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/1493 https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/1493
keyme 6y ago
How is this not perjury again? They need to be punished for this harshly.
- larrik 6y ago
  What about this is perjury? The readme actually did encourage downloading copyrighted material...
  - 15155 6y ago
    Great! Then they should have sued the responsible party. Circumvention devices are not something the quintessential "DMCA takedown" process allows for or covers: these claims need to go to court where an injunction may be granted.
- chrisshroba 6y ago
  How is this perjury? No one's under oath.
  - chjj 6y ago
    DMCA takedowns are filed under penalty of perjury: "Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet."
    - djsumdog 6y ago
      I think you'd need to find evidence they intentionally launched this complaint with bad faith, which would require a discovery process.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Perjury may or may not be the right term here, but it's definitely bad faith. EU and German legal definitions hold no weight on a US law. The repo contains no copyrighted material.
rgovostes 6y ago
YouTube-dl is a great tool that I've found use for a dozen times, and not once to download music or music videos. (Note that it works on sites beyond YouTube.) This takedown interferes with a number of legitimate uses that are completely independent of the RIAA's objectives.
- mikece 6y ago
  Agreed. Once I discovered that "it also works outside of YouTube" when I want to archive something I'll just point it at a page and set it loose. It's also handy for archiving an entire podcast by feeding it only the RSS feed URL and turning it loose.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  It’s also a valuable tool for making fair use of content from YouTube without further degrading quality with an additional re-encoding further ruining quality. Of course, little surprise the RIAA would ever admit these tools could be used for anything but piracy.
- FactCore 6y ago
  I think a rebrand would and a healthy amount of not-with-a-10-foot-pole-itis in their attitude towards any mention of youtube or music downloading would be helpful. Like a secret menu item at a resturaunt you could use <generic>-dl to download youtube videos, but don't specifically endorse it.
em3rgent0rdr 6y ago
Isn't there a 1st-amendment exception for code? The code isn't violating any copyright.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I remember books (with the code inside) being used as a workaround for cryptography export controls. I wonder if the same could apply here (if this notice holds up to begin with), either as a book with code, or as a book with instructions in English language that are equivalent to what the code does.
  - _underfl0w_ 6y ago
    This is a very underrated workaround. I had no idea this was used.
    - em3rgent0rdr 6y ago
      A book. Or any other medium of expression protected by 1st amendment, such as t-shirt [1], poetry [2], music [3]. And more broadly, any way of encoding a number in an artform via steganography [4]. [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt/ https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku [3] https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/138581-decss-midi/ https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/138581-decss-midi/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
- kzrdude 6y ago
  In particular, the website has been taken down as well. If not the code, then at least that, should be a free speech violation; DMCA should not be used to silence websites (even if the code is taken down!)
dfsegoat 6y ago
Funny this happens right as everyone is scrambling to save JRE episodes, before he goes to Spotify.
boogies 6y ago
Hope this motivates a few more free software devs to move away to a free host, at least apart from GH mirrors for exposure. IUUC importing this to GitLab would have taken ~½dozen clicks and saved the open issues, etc.?
- topkai22 6y ago
  GitLab also has to comply with DMCA complaints. A quick search brought up their procedure: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/operations/abuse/dmca-removal-requests.html https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/opera... They'll still take down a repo and block the user if it is hosted. And self hosting something isn't free, plus quite possibly puts more legal exposure on the team. This isn't a problem with technologies or the platform. There fundamentally needs to be a narrowing of DMCA, a presumption of innocence rather than guilt, and penalties for issuing unjustified takedowns.
  - boogies 6y ago
    But ~anyone can host it. Re: your edits, yes, DMCA reform is also important, and quite arguably more so. But decentralizing from GitHub would still slow takedowns down, and have other benefits.
  - caleb-allen 6y ago
    What about https://sr.ht https://sr.ht?
    - jefftk 6y ago
      In general, general purpose hosts are going to want you to fight your own legal battles.
lousken 6y ago
anyone hosting mirror?
- nguyenkien 6y ago
  https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader Or download from https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
VikingCoder 6y ago
I frequently use YouTube-dl, and have never once used it to download music videos and sound recordings owned by member companies of the RIAA.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
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?
- qw3rty01 6y ago
  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 copyright claims on YouTube are not DMCA takedown requests. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-lawsuit-shows-just-how-far-copyright-trolls-have-go-theyre-stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-lawsuit-s...
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > 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.
    - qw3rty01 6y ago
      While this is true, I was responding to a post about abusing DMCA takedowns, which have the assumption that they're using it to knowingly misrepresent infringement. And even though most abusive DMCA takedowns end up without any counter action, the law does provide a way to fight them, which is the disincentive from "simply send a takedown for anything they don't like no matter whether it is legal or not"
jordigh 6y ago
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, my ability to partake in culture will be severely limited.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  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.
  - oefrha 6y ago
    $ 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-org.github.io/youtube-dl/update/LATEST_VERSION Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 HTTP/2 404 content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 server: GitHub.com etag: "5f777b31-239b" content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; style-src 'unsafe-inline'; img-src data:; connect-src 'self' x-github-request-id: 170E:2B71:1A0B5DC:1B8177E:5F933973 accept-ranges: bytes date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT via: 1.1 varnish age: 85 x-served-by: cache-hnd18722-HND x-cache: HIT x-cache-hits: 1 x-timer: S1603484104.479172,VS0,VE0 vary: Accept-Encoding x-fastly-request-id: a7128dab84232184052e51f07eb6263f5c88ab7e content-length: 9115
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      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.
Kenji 6y ago
This is an example of why you shouldn't use a bug tracker that does not store its data on machines you control.
CivBase 6y ago
> this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be Why stop there? I can use my browser to illegally download content, so I guess we better issue a DMCA takedown that too. But who even needs a browser? Let's issue a takedown for the GNU Project while we're at it because I could use wget to do the same thing. In fact, I could write my own program to illegally download content, so we better just get rid of computers altogether. Stop attacking useful tools just because they can be used to do bad things! Youtube-dl should obviously change their README to get rid of the copyright-infringing example, but this DMCA takedown is otherwise rotten from the core.
- perardi 6y ago
  cURL could be used to download pornography. Think of the children!
  - azinman2 6y ago
    It’s about primary purpose.
    - teej 6y ago
      You could make a case that the primary purpose of the internet is to download porn.
      - marv3lls 6y ago
        Avenue Q already has! https://youtu.be/kV7ou6pl5wU https://youtu.be/kV7ou6pl5wU
    - fche 6y ago
      "purpose" this is the "inverse teleological fallacy", q.v.
    - korijn 6y ago
      In that case, let's see what we can do with a gun...
blumomo 6y ago
Many (thousands, if not tens of thousands) YouTube videos are being deleted right now, crazy censorship taking place. If tools like those get banned then it gets harder to keep copies of videos before they will be banned from YouTube.
- rochak 6y ago
  That’s what we get for unrestricted proliferation of a platform offered by a big company. Is it even surprising anymore? Just saddens me but we can’t do anything.
jedberg 6y ago
I'm not sure with the RIAA hopes to accomplish here. I suspect this will be fixed in a day, and just be hosted elsewhere. And also, isn't this like when the studios sued the makers of VCRs?
karmasimida 6y ago
I am not buying this. Does this mean bittorrent client can be taken down as well? Who is drawing the line here?
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Copyright lobby has been pushing the line tighter every year, every decade.
- proffan 6y ago
  IMHO the biggest problem here is the US government is policing the world with DMCA: you have to comply even you are not with physical US jurisdiction. Like the world's biggest cyber-troll, just dressed in business suits.
- lelandbatey 6y ago
  It's much dumber even than. A youtube web page contains everything necessary to view a youtube video. The concrete action the RIAA is 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 youtube-dl implementation, and it turns out the Youtube's "rolling cipher" 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111
ffpip 6y ago
I'm surprised they haven't gone after browsers. They would surely have asked Google to display certain messages when a user visits known piracy sites This website is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice. The website you are trying to access hosts copyrighted content. Please contact support, or seek the copyright holder's permission to access the content.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Don't they ? It might not be really obvious, but take a Walled garden platform like iOS for example. Already third party developers can't build their own browsers and all are efectively a skin over the Safari web engine. What this means is that iOS is effectively one lawsuit (ore even major bribe) away from RIAA or other similar unscrupulous group dictating what sites you can access and what you do with the browser. And you can't just sideload another browser due to the walled garden! And it's not just iOS as there are unfortunately many Walled garden platforms these days - smart TVs, game consoles, browser extensions for some browsers, etc. Even Android limits what you can do with a ROM that is not rooted - and some high profile apps will refuse to run on a rooted one!
nickjj 6y ago
Things like this make no sense from the notice: > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube Using this logic then OBS or any desktop recording tool is also violating the same measures because you could press record while a Youtube video is playing and wind up with your own locally recorded copy of the video. Since we're here, let's also say any smart phone is also in violation since they could technically record a Youtube video playing on another device.
- kelnos 6y ago
  It makes perfect sense to the people who design these twisted legal machinations. A tool like OBS is designed for generic desktop recordings, while youtube-dl is designed specifically to enable the copying of copyrighted works. Or at least that's what the RIAA will say, and unfortunately a judge will likely be very sympathetic to that claim.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    Yep. I wonder where this will go defensively in court if it gets there. I guess what the RIAA is really saying is that murder is legal depending on what was used to kill someone. A hunting knife could be used to kill someone but it could also be used to slice a pizza pie. A pizza cutter was designed to slice pizza but it could also kill someone without too much effort. If it's not ok for youtube-dl to create an mp3 of a music video but it is ok for OBS to do the same then it must also be ok to decapitate someone with a pizza cutter[0]. [0]: Do not try this. I'm not a lawyer.
    - sjy 6y ago
      In that analogy, the RIAA is saying “hunting knives are illegal, because they’re primarily designed or marketed for hunting, which is illegal” and you are saying “that’s unfair because I use my hunting knife to cut pizza.” The analogy breaks down because hunting knives aren’t illegal, but copyright circumvention devices are.
ffpip 6y ago
You can't even search for it? https://github.com/search?q=youtube-dl https://github.com/search?q=youtube-dl
- justinclift 6y ago
  For me, that gives "3,676 repository results" with the standard GitHub UI for drilling into them. Is it different for you?
  - ffpip 6y ago
    They seem to have fixed it. Searching for 'youtube-dl' didnt give any results 10 hours ago. But searching for 'youtube-d' showed many.
getpolarized 6y ago
What I think is hilarious is how many takedown notices they've received! https://github.com/github/dmca https://github.com/github/dmca
- gurpreetsatwal 6y ago
  This person's classmate copied and re-posted their exam as their own: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-22-Exam.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
- jfax 6y ago
  Won't disclouse which, but I'm among them!
  - z3j4e 6y ago
    As affected repository or sender of a complain?
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
As a good internet citizen I have only one question: Where can I find a mirror to fork to preserve this piece of software?
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  git clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874660
Thaxll 6y ago
If the README stated that you can download free to use video such as: https://www.youtube.com/c/VideoLibraryNocopyrightFootage/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/VideoLibraryNocopyrightFootage/vid... You're out of troubles?
aquova 6y ago
While its good to get a backup of the source code, youtube-dl is one of those projects that quickly becomes useless as Google mixes stuff around within YouTube, which they like to do. Without an active developer base, the project will quickly become less and less effective, which is one of the big concerns IMO about this lawsuit.
- yamrzou 6y ago
  What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
  - jaspergilley 6y ago
    In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a build as anything cryptographic actually
    - paina 6y ago
      Yes, we do need this. I feel that the first step would be to move ytdl to a self hosted repository. But even this has the potential for takedowns.
      - actuator 6y ago
        If we rename it and add some open license video as an example instead of music videos, can they still ask for a takedown?
        godshatter 6y ago
        They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be used to download copyrighted content, post it to github, and see what happens.
varispeed 6y ago
What if I remember the song I listened to on YouTube and I can remember any copyrighted material? Are they going to serve me with DMCA to disable part of my brain? These organisations are ridiculous.
jaspergilley 6y ago
Ok, so who's building a distributed, cryptographic, uncensorable version of GitHub?
- dakron 6y ago
  +1
- jitendrac 6y ago
  +1, This was the first thing came in mind after reading the article.
- snuxoll 6y ago
  Keybase, outside of the distributed bit along with the question of their future, provides zero-knowledge git repositories (they’ve literally got no idea what is in your repositories, including metadata).
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I doubt any of Keybase's features from flailing around to see what will stick will last much longer now that they've been bought by Zoom.
    - Avamander 6y ago
      It's on life-support, yes. Incredibly sad, it did IM very well and on top of it all, it had a bunch of very innovative features. And no, nothing really competes with it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bob1029 6y ago
  IMO, Git+blockchain is a pretty good match on paper.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SoylentYellow 6y ago
The only way to fight DMCA abuse is through a lawsuit. Hopefully they setup a legal fund, because I would certainly donate.
mikece 6y ago
This is like issuing a DMCA takedown on Microsoft Word because it's possible to use it as a means to defame someone.
- bkmeneguello 6y ago
  I think a better analogy is to forbid an OCR software because they COULD be used to reproduce a book.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Yeah, anyone using it to save books for future generations instead having them rot to nothing should burn in hell! (sarcasm)
    - Avamander 6y ago
      I have kept an eye on a massive amount of content and it's truly horrifying how much content is lost each month. It's not even clear violation of copyright, it's just that nobody small has the energy to fight for fair use. There should be no DMCA, all ligitation should cost the person suing a percent of income. The tyranny big players have is disgusting.
fivre 6y ago
Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general) copyright and licensing in the US? The DMCA is over 2 decades old, and seemingly nothing useful has come up since. The current system seems to do not much other than provide a big stick for the RIAA and MPAA to wield whenever they get bored and try to extract rent using law that still seems stuck in some mire of player piano era logic. The last sane system I encountered was when I was doing college radio, where you had a license to play music, were required to log what music you played, and were assured that some clearinghouse would sort out the royalties that needed paying out of the aggregate license fees. There seems to be mass confusion over what's legal on modern services like Twitch, where music is used in the same spirit as radio (background music chosen at the whim of the DJ/streamer), but isn't legal because it runs up against licensing schemes designed for including music in TV and film productions with massive budgets. There doesn't seem to be any clear way to handle shit as any sort of small content creator, as the rightsholders seem to want to preserve some weird fantasy land where they're both entitled to complex negotiated rights deals (which make sense if you're say, some massive entity a la NBC, and want to include music in a new big budget show) while also not providing anything for the rest of society (if you're not NBC- or CBS-sized, the people who negotiate rights contracts won't give you the time of day). If you're not one of the mammoth-class media conglomerates, your options appear to be "do not use music ever" or "use music casually, and then be on the receiving end of a massive legal bludgeon". You can't get the time (or music) of day, but if you do somehow manage to get it, then you _do_ get the time of day, but in the form of massive retroactive fees or whatever that you "should" have paid had the licensing cthulu been willing to engage with you before you determined that the rightsholders weren't interested in dealing with you. Right ol' kafkaesque nightmare, it is.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The DMCA was intended to give large content publishers a big stick to extract rent from third parties without needing to do any work. It is functioning as intended and is very unlikely to be reformed to favor the public interest. If anything, the next DMCA will be tilted even further towards publisher interests. The latest EU publisher payout copyright 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of buildings and skylines -- is the most likely model for the next US copyright 'reform' measure. Congress only passes laws that large piles of money pay for[0], so the only prospect of copyright reform is if someone puts up a billion dollars in campaign contributions (bribes). Further money may be needed to re-stack the judiciary to ensure a reform will survive the wide-eyed fanatics on the USSC. This scenario is deeply unlikely as piles of money large enough to afford to spend a billion dollars purchasing legislation are very happy with the law as it stands. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
pengaru 6y ago
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.
- curtis3389 6y ago
  Someone should issue DMCAs for the Chromium and Firefox repos. Fight fire with fire.
  - Raymonf 6y ago
    That is extremely illegal.
    - fenwick67 6y ago
      How is it illegal to file a DMCA takedown request if you believe you have legal standing to do so? EDIT: The DMCA doesn't require that you have a law degree to submit a takedown request, it just requires that you truly believe it is infringing.
      - ripdog 6y ago
        You also need to either own the copyright or have permission from the owner.
        efreak 6y ago
        My understanding is that it only requires you send the notice in good faith, meaning that if you think you own a copyright but don't (because, say, you own too many copyrights to keep track of them) you're still in the clear.
    - thescriptkiddie 6y ago
olliej 6y ago
They literally recommended downloading copyrighted material, which seems like a beacon of "this is primarily for copyright infringement"
SteveNuts 6y ago
Youtube itself should be taken down because it may be used to upload copyrighted content
gobogobohey 6y ago
I'm a lurker, made this account just to say this: I am not using NewPipe or youtube-dl or other tools like them to by-pass the DRM/whatever the fuck you call this shit on "content" from RIAA/SuckADICKIA etc, because, let's be honest, it's garbage. Yeah, there you go, I said it, hate me if you want but be honest, it's just fucking garbage. On and on and on with shitty super-hero movies, that fucking tribal dance music with some skimpy women twerking their asses, hip-hop from mega-rich "stars" barely able to connect two words together but seemingly able to sing a whole tear-jerker about how bad they have it, yeah, all of that and more, GARBAGE. no. I download original content which Youtube and the rest of the American leeches, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on and on pray upon to make their money cause let's face it, that's about the only thing these American companies are good at doing. Making money. Not generating original content, not original ideas, heck, most of the shit they use nowadays are stuff they stole when they pushed other companies off the market and bought them for nothing. But I digress. I download them just because of retards like you RIAA, and like you Google/Youtube. Remember when you were threatening to ban hacking content because you don't like the fact that knowledge is the great equalizer and then you went "ha ha we were kidding"? Ha, ha fuck you, we have retroshares and full i2P archives of those videos now, thanks to you, so go fuck yourselves, yeah? I still watch them on youtube, not because I care about you fucking leeches, but to give some pennies to the poor fucks which create the content you leech on like the fucking cancer you people and your corporations are, but if you ever decide to take videos down I will have a backup and there's nothing you can do, so again: fuck riaa, fuck youtoube and facebook and hollywood and twerking garbage and pretty much 99% that comes nowadays from the country of the fat entitled boomers. Thank you American original content creators, software creators, scientists, engineers, EFF and everyone else that is trying to make the world a better place in spite of these worms.
hexo 6y ago
As we can see again having github as a sole distribution mechanism was a bad idea. I hope they have backups and will be back online soon.
- toyg 6y ago
  YouTube-dl is actually in pypi and other places, GitHub is not the sole distributor. However, it is their sole development hub, as far as I can see, and that should change. After all, Git is distributed by nature. I suspect they’ll have to investigate a bunch of those new tools that try to do issue-tracking on top of pure git, and the main developers will have to go underground. It’s DeCSS all over again.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
camnora 6y ago
How about we serve the DMCA to the original media source. Attacking the tools does not make any sense. Which tool is going to be next?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
proffan 6y ago
Maybe someone send an email to https://github.com/jessephus https://github.com/jessephus to get more information?
nullc 6y ago
Because of how github works these moves are much more damaging than you might expect: In addition to revoking your access to the supposed "infringing" work, you also lose access to all your pull request comment traffic and issues -- which, unlike the source code, aren't continually replicated to the systems of all developers.
- Cederfjard 6y ago
  Those things are however exposed via their API, so anybody who’s worried about a similar situation may perhaps do well to utilize it and take regular backups.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Looks like fossil does replicate them ? https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki
andrey_utkin 6y ago
Who needs Peertube when there's Youtube, some people asked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183
- yoz-y 6y ago
  If peertube instances started to host RIAA affiliated content they might get a DMCA notice as well.
  - andrey_utkin 6y ago
    The instances yes, but not client apps.
smashah 6y ago
This really needs to stop happening
tpoacher 6y ago
Great. Alternatives to github please.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  SSB-NPM (orig. Git-SSB)
02020202 6y ago
in other words, the data that you download from the network called internet does not belong to you. THE DATA ITSELF.
pdimitar 6y ago
I feared this day for a long time. Yet I am still disappointed that it had come. I wonder if the project can defend itself?
qwerty456127 6y ago
Is there still no safe alternative to GitHub?
mmaunder 6y ago
Who is the defendant here? Do they have resources to take this to court? If not, is there any movement on raising a legal defense fund and finding competent counsel? Anyone from the ACLU team here, and interested in weighing in or at least bringing this to your leadership for consideration?
- noodlesUK 6y ago
  I would be willing to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to support any defence effort. Is the EFF involved?
codecamper 6y ago
fork
bonsi 6y ago
Its quite irrelevant - seems like "forbidding knifes because they can be used as a weapon" or "banning port scanners because of security reasons".
reggieband 6y ago
It is a bit of a tough question. How would I feel about someone borrowing a book from a library and then photocopying it to keep a local copy? If the intent was to re-distribute then I would not feel comfortable allowing it. However, if the proposed remedy was to ban personal ownership of photocopiers I would not even consider that a valid approach. But would I expect I could keep my own photocopied version instead of paying retail price for the book? And what if a purpose built photocopier was designed and marketed for the express purpose of photocopying books from the library? My personal feeling, and obviously not a legal opinion or even morally infallible in any sense, is that storing a local copy of digital content that has been consumed should be allowed. Where it becomes grey (or my feeling tends towards disallowing) is if I share or re-broadcast that content in any form. That is, I feel the DMCA is in the wrong here. Unless they can prove intent to re-distribute it feels wrong that they can ban my ability to maintain a copy for myself. I believe it ought to be a right to store such content locally.
- vaccinator 6y ago
  Mix tapes of copyright content are legal... not sure why youtube-dl you be illegal even if only used to copy copyright content
- tlburke 6y ago
  I don't think anybody really disagrees that redistribution is a copyright violation and the youtube-dl software doesn't provide any facilities for uploading or re-broadcasting content. This takedown is completely frivilous.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Aren't books kinda a special case ? Given all the past (and even current!) cases of censorship and book burning, shouldn't we strive to never allow that ever again and to protects books for future generations ? Finally we have a way to preserve books in perfect form forever digitally yet people somehow try to shackle this new technology with paper book technology limitations. The same limitations that coat us so much ideas, knowledge and stories as books would burn, rot or turn to dust. Frankly any form of technology trying to prevent digital book distribution and archiving really is a digital equivalent of the inquisition book burning (or helping make that happen again).
RealStickman_ 6y ago
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.
- CivBase 6y ago
  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.
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    It can be done, the search keywords are "git rewrite history".
  - alias_neo 6y ago
    Git history, just like human history, can be rewritten, if you only know how. (It gets a bit harder of it's cryptographically signed) EDIT: To whomever is downvoting, I'm not making a remark about some specific event, is a tongue in cheek poke at "history is written by the Victor". Chill.
codecamper 6y ago
gitlab ftw
trhway 6y ago
can RIAA be hit back? - to me it looks like the RIAA actions to take down software intimidate the authors of the software and obstructs the authors from exercising and enjoying of the copyright of their software.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Microsoft are in a strategically very interesting position, one which could render the RIAA's actions suicidal. Microsoft could pursue alternative copyright or music regimes which undermine the RIAA's stranglehold. Notably, the Microsoft Store online marketplace dropped books and music in 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367), meaning the RIAA has minimal leverage here. At the same time, an unencumbered alternative could provide an opening against two of Microsoft's biggest rivals, Apple (music), and Amazon (books). Possibly Google (both, plus, obv., video) and Netflix (video) as well. A large-corporate-backed Creative Commons media service would be a game-changer. https://tildes.net/~tech/suf/youtube_dls_github_repository_has_become_inaccessible_due_to_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa#comment-5rp0 https://tildes.net/~tech/suf/youtube_dls_github_repository_h... Microsoft claim to have staked their future on Free Software. https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3584911/how-microsoft-went-from-linux-is-a-cancer-to-microsoft-loves-linux.html https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3584911/how-microsoft-... How believable this is can be argued, of course. The company paid $7.4 billion for GitHub in 2018, a $5.4 billion premium over the service's 2015 valuation. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-github-deal-acquisition-complete https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-githu... https://fortune.com/2015/07/29/github-raises-250-million-in-new-funding-now-valued-at-2-billion/ https://fortune.com/2015/07/29/github-raises-250-million-in-... https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105087121976979704 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105087121976979704
int_10h 6y ago
I'm not saying anything but there's a gitlab source clone of this on debian's repo :) https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl
skottk 6y ago
Not a lawyer, software guy working in licensing & copyright for 20+ years. Was paid for a few years to talk about this stuff with tech and publishing people. They're requesting the takedown under 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201] It's a few paragraphs of the actual law at stake here. There's no much to it. Essentially, they're arguing that Youtube's normal stream distribution technology is "effectively control[ling] access to a work." Given 3A & B from the link above, that will take a fair amount of arguing - there's no encryption, there's nothing that requires information under the authority of the copyright holder (like a key) to descramble the information. Unless the repo has code that's breaking browser-based DRM, in which all bets are off - breaking DRM is by definition circumventing a technical protection. Doesn't matter if it was easy to break-- you break encryption, there's no more argument over whether you're circumventing. Decryption is right there in the text of the law. Github agreed to the takedown because they don't want to be distributing a circumvention tool, and they don't feel like going to court over whether this is a circumvention tool or not. There are a lot of repos out there, you can't go to court over every single one. I'd be surprised if it stayed up on GitLab for much more than a New York minute, either. The EFF might fight this, because there's a pretty good argument around the noninfringing uses; however, they also might not, because there's not much of an argument around whether it violates the Google Terms. Some us are mentioning that there are use cases for this software that don't infringe copyright. That goes back to Sony v Universal, the VCR/Betamax case, which permitted the production and sale of technologies with "substantial noninfringing uses." In the case of the VCR, the particular noninfringing use was time-shifting of broadcast television, taping shows to watch later. The noninfringing uses here are around downloading works that are in the public domain or Creative Commons, and definitely around offline use. Easily a colorable argument. The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some lines around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses. However, both products promoted their products as offering free access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing use outside the trial. IOW, if you're providing a dual-use technology for noninfringing use that is also capable of infringing use, you absolutely cannot promote the infringing uses to the exclusion of others. Not only do you draw unwanted attention to yourself, you may actually (as in Napster and Grokster) invalidate the most important defense that you have for your activities.
bob1029 6y ago
Assuming youtube-dl is dead and the web APIs become hopelessly obfuscated, how hard would it be to talk to youtube as if I were a samsung smart tv? Perhaps the next iteration of this project can leverage google's own insatiable greed against them. Embedding youtube into every "smart" device on the face of the planet probably requires that google maintain a fairly consistent private API which all of these devices can communicate with. If someone were to reverse engineer one of these devices or just throw wireshark on the WLAN, it probably wouldn't take long to emulate the same approach... What is stopping someone from using these types of internal interfaces instead of the public ones?
- GlitchMr 6y ago
  YouTube TV is a web page, albeit one you can't simply open with a web browser. Google could easily obfuscate it too.
avodonosov 6y ago
What is the simplest way to store source code repos in some decentralized file system? Like store git repo in IPFS folder, would others be able to clone it and submit pull requests?
- slim 6y ago
  it's already decentralized. now developers just need to setup a different remote. as in git remote add whatever. the problem is how to publish the software.
  - avodonosov 6y ago
    What will server as the 'whatever'? I'm speaking exactly about decentralized publishing. Where the repository is mirrored in content addressed network, so there is no specific location(s) to take down. (I realize it is problematic, because even with content addressed mirroring, the people who actually host the replicas of the content, can be accused of distributing prohibited content, but still it's more difficult to censor, and maybe those problems are solvable). Just curious.
    - avodonosov 6y ago
      Just now on the HN front page: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) (printf.net): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874994 While in the current topic my comment adout decentralization is downvoted to the bottom of the multi page comment thread.
google234123 6y ago
This tool literally recommendeds downloading copyrighted material. This is a good take down.
- Avamander 6y ago
  It literally doesn't. It isn't a good takedown.
- kristopolous 6y ago
  With what flag? I've got a copy right here
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
Maybe a stupid question but can the repository just be hosted in a server outside US jurisdiction and everyone carries on as before? Why do I need to be denied access to a repo if I'm outside the US?
q3k 6y ago
Git mirror: https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl This is master on 4eda10499e8db831167062b0e0dbc7d10d34c1f9, retrieved from gitee.com, and is the last known hash from Google Webcache [1]. Clone, verify and rehost. [1] - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o7ilf8kWUQsJ:https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o7ilf8...
Kim_Bruning 6y ago
Lesson learned: always use Creative Commons licensed data to demo your multimedia tools. Else people get the wrong idea. Some examples for youtube-dl might be: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ Big buck bunny * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ Sintel * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY Spring In fact, youtube actually allows you to filter by CC, so there's never a reason not to!
- throwawaylolx 6y ago
  I think to take your lessons from the pretexts is like judging a war by its casus belli.
- defen 6y ago
  The smart thing would have been to always filter by CC. And then anyone who can type # could just modify their source code a bit to adjust the filters.
- grishka 6y ago
  In the case of youtube-dl, they couldn't do that. At least VEVO videos have an additional layer of "protection" — the direct links to video files require a signature of some sort IIRC. Downloading a non-DRM-ed video is as easy as making a request to https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=aqz-KE-bpKQ https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=aqz-KE-bpKQ and then following a link to the format you need, but with those music videos, that won't work. So the test cases were a necessity.
  - Kim_Bruning 6y ago
    Hmm, are you sure that link is correct? In firefox and chromium that gets me about 122K of not-very-easy-to-parse text.
    - grishka 6y ago
      Yes, it's correct and it should return that. The top-level serialization format is simply a URL query string aka application/x-www-form-urlencoded. No idea why but probably historical reasons.
sakoht 6y ago
Setting aside the evils of the DMCA itself: Seems clearly that if youtube authorizes downloads, then people shouldn't put things on youtube they don't want downloaded? The takedown notices should be going to youtube. But of course they want to use youtube to promote themselves.
- pteraspidomorph 6y ago
  If the video is viewed directly on youtube, the majority of viewers will also be served ads which generate revenue that is shared with the copyright holder (note how youtube identifies the music in the video and who the copyright holder is below the description of the video). So it's not about not wanting it downloaded, it's about not wanting the ads circumvented.
black_puppydog 6y ago
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.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > at least not if you're doing anything that smells of copyright issues Or lets people communicate. Or broadcasts news. Or can filter messages or news. Or directly applies encryption to anything. Or is related to accounting. Or can be indirectly linked to health services. Or, well, you get the idea.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Or in plainer terms: 1. You should not have your development process on a centralized platform, period.
- Deely123123 6y ago
  Should we count country and government as 'centalized platform'?
- orthecreedence 6y ago
  Yes, I'm watching https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ with great anticipation.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  there will never be a safe country. The robust option is to mirror them in hostile countries. Divide them and conquer
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I'm sure the developers have the whole thing on their local machines and it would be terrible if it was uploaded somewhere in a country that doesn't give a squat about DMCA.
grawprog 6y ago
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.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  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.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    What is the percentage of content hosted on youtube actually under control of the RIAA vs other content? If less than the majority of content on youtube is theirs, what gives them the right to have a tool removed for downloading content from a service that's not theirs and which they don't own the majority of the hosted content? Why does the tool being hosted on an American website make any difference? YouTube's content doesn't all belong to them, they don't even own the majority of the content on there and a huge number of users and creators on youtube do not live in or fall under American jurisdiction which means neither does the content they create, so again, why should the RIAA have the ability to do this?
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    I am guessing they'll find a country with more respect for freedom than the USA and host it there. All the devs will obviously have the full repo and history to put it elsewhere.
- fireattack 6y ago
  Because GitHub is also American?
mikece 6y ago
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 https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Pagure is a git forge you can self host, where every repo contains not just project source code but also all related metadata (wiki, issues, etc.): https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure This makes it very easy to backup and move all project data as needed. In comparison most other forges hold project metadata in an instance wide database, making it much harder to extract & import when needed.
krob 6y ago
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.
baldfat 6y ago
I warned everyone The Fight Club Rule needed to be in effect. There is no Youtube-dl
- zeppelin101 6y ago
  Very true, but it was inevitable. The tool worked way too well to remain under the radar for too long. What will be interesting to watch will be where the forked versions of Youtube-dl will end up.
cute_boi 6y ago
Even Meme will be DMCAed in future. Future is dark :(
fabiomaia 6y ago
Wow even release downloads were taken down $ brew install youtube-dl ... ==> Downloading https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz ... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons Error: Failed to download resource "youtube-dl" Download failed: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz
tbabej 6y ago
The removal of youtube-dl is a loss to the open source community. I hope this does not set a precedence going forward and that authors re-establish themselves (and the bug tracker, which had immense amount of information). At the same time, this lead me to browse the Github's DMCA repo, which has some real gems. For example, this DMCA takedown of repo with copied course assignment of a different student and did not comply with the Apache 2.0 Licence [1]. [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-22-Exam.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
- tbabej 6y ago
  Removal of repositories like youtube-dl seems to have been happening for a while though, here are couple of examples: Removal of Udemy-dl (2015,2017): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015/2015-08-12-Udemy.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015/2015-08-12-U... https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-11-13-Udemy-2.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-11-13-U... Removal of linuxacademy-dl (2018): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2018/2018-09-24-linuxacademy.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2018/2018-09-24-l... Removal of Instagram-API (2020): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-22-facebook.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-2...
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    py-kms (https://github.com/SystemRage/py-kms https://github.com/SystemRage/py-kms) was taken down briefly but remains up, so there is hope. These projects are just instructions, it's like selling a kit for a radio that is illegal to put together and use. The kit itself isn't illegal.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago
  I remember back in 2008 I read a research paper on what to not do when publishing/advertising peer-to-peer networks in order to avoid stuff such as RIAA. Showing copyright-protected work in your website/screenshots/etc was a big thing. Sadly I cannot find the paper anymore and I don't remember all the advice :( If someone here with a good research-paper-search-fu can find the paper, it would help help our community a lot. All I remember is that it was from some peer-to-peer conference, and I read it in 2008.
rektide 6y ago
How quickly does Microsoft usually HTTP Response Code 451 (#rfc77525 [1]) sites that get DMCA notices? They acted very fast on this one. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725
johnnyapol 6y ago
We're going to need another flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
resynth1943 6y ago
There are some mirrors here FYI :: https://resynth1943.net/articles/youtube-dl-takedown/ https://resynth1943.net/articles/youtube-dl-takedown/ Self-plug, I know. But I'll update it if anything new comes in.
arno1 6y ago
Seems like a fresh mirror here https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl to fork and start it over somewhere else. Gitea is a great project. Now we need someone to fork and publish it over Tor or something. Decentralized solution would be a next step. Diff between that mirror and the one from the web.archive.com looks good. I.e. no hidden/evil things inside. Looks safe to start over. ``` $ git log --oneline -3 48c5663c5 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) [afreecatv] Fix typo (#26970) <=== https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl 7d740e7dc [23video] Relax _VALID_URL (#26870) <=== https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl 4eda10499 [utils] Don't attempt to coerce JS strings to numbers in js_to_json (#26851) <=== https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703if_/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703if_/https://github... ``` https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/4855/is-it-possible-to-have-a-hidden-git-service https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/4855/is-it-possible-...
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  I would like to add that Git works over I2P which will render it anonymous https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git
- andrew3 6y ago
  I've created http://youtube-dl-sources.org/ http://youtube-dl-sources.org/ with links to a static torrent and IPFS content. It's not much but I would like the sources to be easily accessible.
- vault 6y ago
  the author of gittorrent recommends https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
- sj_krueger 6y ago
  Thank you. I have created the repo at Darktea, feel free to create your anonymous accounts and join the project, until we find a better/decentralized place. For now this should be sufficient: http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzhvyd.onion/sj.krueger/youtube-dl http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzh... I will give the main contributors the neccessary access for reviewing/merging/etc.. or will entirely hand over the project if you can prove you are the maintainer.
precommunicator 6y ago
I really hope the author will send a counter-notice.
josteink 6y ago
Sounds like it’s about time youtube-dl moves to IPFS.
banana_giraffe 6y ago
Ironically, I've heard of video takedown service that this has broken.
cphajduk 6y ago
On a technical side-note... Would it be possible to host a Git server on an IPFS distributed system?
siliconc0w 6y ago
Time to upload youtube-dl-legal a computer program created for the express purpose of downloading only videos with permissible licenses. The readme shall note that any use of youtube-dl-legal to download illegal videos is expressly forbidden and even thinking about using it in this way is thoughtcrime of the most serious degree.
ohyash 6y ago
Not just users, this is a good nightmare for a lot of projects that were relying on yt-dl (maybe for other features than downloading) And even a lot of unofficial libraries that allowed easier yt access. Dead in a go. Do we have a cli alternative that does everything of yt-dl except the video download part?
lelandbatey 6y ago
The actual content of the legal argument being made by the RIAA in this and associated documents is lying by omission at best, and arguably is straight up perjury. The only _concrete_ circumvention they level at youtube-dl is that it "circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher". I looked into this more, and before I go into how totally bulshit it is that they've apparently conned judges into believing this, you should read their full accusation (or just read the full DMCA letter from the RIAA): For further context, please see the attached court decision from the Hamburg Regional Court that describes the technological measure at issue (known as YouTube’s “rolling cipher”), and the court’s determination that the technology employed by YouTube is an effective technical measure within the meaning of EU 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#readme. and German law, which is materially identical to Title 17 U.S.C. §1201 of the United States Code. The court further determined that the service at issue in that case unlawfully circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technical protection measure.2 The youtube-dl source code functions in a manner essentially identical to the service at issue in the Hamburg Regional Court decision. As there, the youtube-dl source code available on Github (which is the subject of this notice) circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted audio files, in violation of YouTube’s express terms of service,3 and in plain violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §1201. So that's what the RIAA is saying that youtube-dl is doing. However, they're referencing a document that I _presume_ was attached to their original email, the document from the Hamburg Regional Court, but we don't have that email, as Github didn't publish that document for us to see. So I went looking, and it turns out that the RIAA has used this exact same excuse to go after some other people, their documents are available, and we can see more of what they wrote. I'm referencing this[1] document which I found through this[0] blog post about a 2016 case where the RIAA went after an online service called TYMP3. Here are the links, and here's what the RIAA said: [0] - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160927/17062135646/can-someone-explain-to-riaa-that-sopa-didnt-actually-pass-it-doesnt-seem-to-know-that.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160927/17062135646/can-s... [1] - https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3114545/YTMP3-Complaint.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3114545/YTMP3-Com... < The following is found on page 8 of the PDF linked above > 39. Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on that basis allege as follows: YouTube has adopted and implemented technological measures to control access to content maintained on its site and to prevent or inhibit downloading, copying, or illicit distribution of that content. YouTube maintains two separate URLs for any given video file: one URL, which is visible to the user, is for the webpage where the video playback occurs, and one URL, which is not visible to the user, is for the video file itself. The second URL is generated using a complex (and periodically changing) algorithm - known as a “rolling cipher” - that is intended to inhibit direct access to the underlying YouTube video files, thereby preventing or inhibiting the downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files. < further down, on page 12, they lay out their accusation > Among other things, Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on that basis allege, that YTMP3 employs a means to circumvent the YouTube rolling cipher technology described above, and other technological means that YouTube employs to protect content on its site. So, let's go see what the Youtube-dl source code actually is doing. The tl;dr version is that youtube does some slight rearranging of the characters in the URL of the remote resource, but they also supply you with the JS code to un-arrange that code into the actual working "signature" which you can use to request the video from youtube. So youtube-dl downloads the rearranged URL, and the JS that youtube provides, and uses a Python implementation of the JS interpreter to run YOUTUBE'S OWN JS THAT YOUTUBE SENT US IN CLEARTEXT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO. See the source code (hosted on gitlab for now, hopefully that stays up): https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py#L1399-1418 https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub... So to summarize, youtube creates two URLs: one that's a public video URL, and one that's the URL to the actual video content. The URL to the video content changes on a rolling basis, and is slightly rearranged. All that's true. However, what the RIAA is avoiding saying, and which completely changes the context of this discussion is: YOUTUBE SENDS YOU BOTH URLS IN CLEARTEXT, AND INCLUDES THE CODE FOR HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO, SO YOU AND YOUR WEB BROWSER CAN DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS WITHOUT USING ANY ENCRYPTION/DECODING. So when a judge asks "how is it that you're getting around this 'rolling cipher' to access the video?" all you have to say is "Youtube told me where to download the video, so I followed Youtube's instructions and downloaded it from the URL that Youtube gave me." Frankly, I'm amazed that any judge, or any lawyer, would ever lay out or believe such bare faced lies as is being spouted by the RIAA in this document. FUCK THE RIAA
White_Wolf 6y ago
It's still up on gitee Warning: do a diff against the last archive.org copy to make sure it's clean.
dylan604 6y ago
hold on... brew update && brew upgrade phew. i'm all good.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Reports are that Homebrew is affected: https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319750021319852032#m https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319750021319852032#m
  - dylan604 6y ago
    They can't claw it back though!! That's why I just ran the update && upgrade to make sure I have the latest
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      I don't know. Micah's pretty reliable though. Any recent Homebrew commits?
      - dylan604 6y ago
        now i'm super glad that i ran it when i did, as it must have been before it got pulled. it updated without issue. i also followed the Micah provided to download the source. you know, just in case.
deleted 6y ago
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JdeBP 6y ago
RealPlayer next? "Download Web Videos" "Keep your favorite web videos safe on your PC by downloading them. You can save videos from popular sites in one click – including YouTube." * https://www.real.com/uk/realplayer https://www.real.com/uk/realplayer
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
This should be about impossible to enforce? Every developer and everyone who has ever cloned the repo has the complete source tree with commits. I can think of a list of countries where United States laws are not a concern, I imagine that shortly this will be one of the most distributed repositories ever. It also shows again that while free services like Github are convenient, and truthfully their interface is the one to beat, it is better to use them as a mirror of something you self host then the primary. Some options: (I prefer gitea - easiest to install and maintain, very active development community, single binary, written in Go) https://gitea.com/ https://gitea.com/ https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb
- tux1968 6y ago
  It's not access to the current program that is at stake, it's the ongoing public updates to handle changes made by the Youtube site.
  - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
    Understood, just waiting to see where the devs pop up. I imagine that someone will help them with a DMCA counterclaim also. RIAA has been beaten many times, they have a long history of creative interpretation that the courts do not always agree with, and US law is only valid in the United States and Australia (thats a joke, but do hope they get on the brick and road plan or stop acting like a US colony at some point).
  - hackerman123469 6y ago
    That would be true IF youtube-dl was all about downloading YouTube videos only, but it's not. It's used by people to download videos from like a thousand other websites too.
- zeusflight 6y ago
  I agree with your concept. The main problem though, is that each of those code hosting web app is a silo of its own. Any new contributor will have to create a new account for each of the self-hosted projects. Youtube-dl is one of those projects that can't survive in such an environment. Sourcehut is free from such requirements - but many complain about difficulty of email-based workflow. Another option is the upcoming federation protocol from gitlab.
deleted 6y ago
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okareaman 6y ago
I had a youtube-dl repository to fix a bug in Twitter video downloads, but I just checked and it's been removed.
Ansil849 6y ago
So the RIAA has tech folks just like any other organization. Some of those tech folks likely read HN. Question for you folks (use throwaways if you feel it could jeopardize your job): how do you ethically justify working for such an organization?
fsociety2020 6y ago
Should all just clone it and host it in every possible place and on servers outside the US and give them the big middle finger to go F themselves.
danmg 6y ago
Youtube-dl (2020) would be an easier case to present to the public than DeCSS (2000). Everyone knows what Youtube is. It's easy to understand the utility of being able to download a video from Youtube to save it on your computer. If they didn't already know this was possible to do, they'd immediately want to start using it as soon as you explained it was possible. DeCSS was exploiting a weak encryption scheme's weak key distribution scheme. Where the only final explanation for why this matters is that it can be used to rip off DVDs.
ikeboy 6y ago
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(b)(1). It almost certainly doesn't violate 1201(a)(2), which is for access controls. This is intended to be used by someone who already has access to Youtube, so no access controls are bypassed. R. CHRISTOPHER GOODWIN & ASSOCIATES, INC. v. SEARCH, INC., Dist. Court, ED Louisiana 2019: >While the user id/password combination required for access was surely a "technological measure" that controlled access to the works at issue, Pevny did not circumvent that measure. She validly accessed the system using her id/password combination while she was still an employee with Plaintiff. Even if the use that she made of that access is not something that Plaintiff would have authorized her to do, i.e., copy the materials at issue, it remains that Pevny's alleged abuse of her logon privileges does not rise to the level of descrambling, decrypting, or otherwise to avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing anything. As the district court observed in Digital Drilling Data Systems, LLC v. Petrolink Services, Inc., No. 4:15-CV-02172, 2018 WL 2267139, at *14 (S.D. Tex. May 16, 2018), many different district courts have held that using the correct username and password to access a copyrighted work, even without authorization to do so, does not constitute circumvention under § 1201(a) of the DMCA. Youtube-dl either involves access to files that don't require a login, or it uses your password / cookies to access the file, so it doesn't bypass access controls. The claim under 1201(b)(1), which is for copy controls, has more potential. There are the subsections: >(A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; >(B)has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or >(C)is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof. A and B clearly don't apply. The primary purpose of youtube-dl isn't to download copyrighted content, but simply to download Youtube videos, whether they're copyrighted or not. There's clearly more than limited legitimate uses (such as downloaded public domain videos.) The question here is about C - there's an arguable case that the examples in the repo that this letter cites are "marketing" usage for infringing purposes. I'm somewhat skeptical that counts as "marketing", however, and it could be easily remedied by removing those examples or replacing with public domain examples.
shiado 6y ago
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?
vermooten 6y ago
To misquote Richard E Grant: Let the forking begin!
maxo133 6y ago
Isn't DMCA working the way that if you disagree with dmca takedown and fill certain form, the side asking to take down content (RIAA) needs to get court order? That's the way how it works with google search.
brink 6y ago
Is there a decentralized version control system solution out there to host projects like this?
- fenwick67 6y ago
  Yes, it's called Git.
  - sschueller 6y ago
    This is such a snark reply, you know exact that git and github are not the same thing. Discovery and issue management is important and is not part of git.
    - jackbravo 6y ago
      That would be https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki a decentralized version control, issue management and wiki software. Discovery is not there though.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I suspect that the parent comment might have been a joke.
  - ojagodzinski 6y ago
    how git is decentralized?
    - josteink 6y ago
      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.
      - lucb1e 6y ago
        When people say decentralized they mean something like bittorrent or ipfs, often as opposed to http. Saying http is decentralized is... stretching the definition. With this logic a USB cable is decentralized because "you can use it against any target you like". USB mass storage dead drop devices can be connected to by anyone. And USB "is a protocol", just like the examples you mentioned. But I doubt anyone would claim USB is decentralized. Though git is also not really what people would usually mean by decentralized (as it doesn't, by itself, try to connect to a pool of servers, DHT network, or something like that), it's definitely closer to it than http. I'm also not sure "for real?" helps the conversation.
hprotagonist 6y ago
https://archive.org/details/github.com-ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-_2020-09-28_19-41-32 https://archive.org/details/github.com-ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-... if nothing else, today i finally actually used a bundle file: git clone ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-_2020-09-28_19-41-32.bundle youtube-dl
theobr 6y ago
This is a really sad moment for open source, especially for content creators and devs in media/content spaces. I've shipped youtube-dl for a user-facing (production) experience before. This sucks.
fandroid 6y ago
As it turns out, a few days ago, I was reminiscing with an old school DJ about sample-based music production. My argument was that all one needs is a DAW and youtube-dl. It seems that the timing of my argument was rather inauspicious.
dvt 6y ago
Oh the irony of cloning a banned repo from a Chinese git mirror... c:\Users\david\dev\git λ git clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git Cloning into 'youtube-downloader'... remote: Enumerating objects: 98560, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (98560/98560), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (30542/30542), done. remote: Total 98560 (delta 73037), reused 90045 (delta 66441), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (98560/98560), 49.86 MiB | 9.58 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (73037/73037), done.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  Were the developers in the habit of signing commits, or do we just have to assume that the gitee mirror is 100% legit?
  - __s 6y ago
    Cross check commit hashes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953
    - mimi89999 6y ago
      Maybe you would prefer https://github.com/rbrito/pkg-youtube-dl https://github.com/rbrito/pkg-youtube-dl ?
      - kzrdude 6y ago
        ah, so at least some copies of the code remains even on github.
- seotut2 6y ago
  I got the tarball from the official site, using Internet Archive.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    For now. Occasionally the Internet Archive is served with DMCA takedowns too.
ddingus 6y ago
Seems to me this is leading to contested cases that can be routed to a more corporatist friendly Supreme Court.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
resfirestar 6y ago
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-despite-mpa-threat-200520/ https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-code... [2] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-policy/dmca-takedown-policy https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...
- quotemstr 6y ago
  It's interesting how many Github counternotices (e.g., [1] [2]) seem completely justified yet link to repositories that are no longer on GitHub. I wonder what happened. [1] in https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-06-quizizz-hack-counternotice.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-0... someone forked a permissively-licensed project; the original author made the project-closed source, then issued a DMCA takedown against the fork. That's clearly bogus: you can't revoke an open source license. [2] in https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/11/2019-11-25-msft.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/11/2019-11-2... Microsoft DMCAd a project that did something with Windows local licensing keys. I can see how Microsoft would prefer that this project not exist, but I see no infringement. Not everything that a big company dislikes is an infringement of copyright.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
microcolonel 6y ago
Can we pool funds to turn this into a lawsuit?
nudpiedo 6y ago
It was clear that youtube-dl has always been used for its utility. And the deeper problem here is why aren’t we allowed to do whatever want to whatever is streamed onto our screens? TV shows could be vhs taped without issue as long as not redistributed. For sure we cannot take this fight against google with the American laws, but I think the software was morally correct and should be legally permitted.
andy_ppp 6y ago
I find this amazing, essentially Google has been scraping every piece of content they can get their hands on, when a few individuals decide to get data, that wasn’t even created by YouTube, they get take down notices. The more I think about it hypocrisy should be a defence against these things.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  This isn't google, it's the RIAA.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dang 6y ago
All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=5
ianlevesque 6y ago
Have they countered the claim per DMCA? So much ink spilled on this but there’s a process to fight erroneous removals like this.
weyland 6y ago
So, are they going to also issue a takedown for YouTube Premium next? Premium allows you to watch/listen without ads and also allows you to download videos for offline use. If I pay for YouTube Premium, there should be no problem with me using youtube-dl to timeshift the content I've already paid for. It's no different than using a DVR to record a show off a cable channel I pay to subscribe to.
- weyland 6y ago
  Really, the RIAA should be going after YouTube for better remuneration, rather than going after youtube-dl. Unless I'm missing something, they get paid no matter whether the view comes from a browser user-agent or youtube-dl user-agent. How is this any different than recording a song off the radio, which is, AFAIK, legal under fair use?
tgbugs 6y ago
This should serve as an example to people who want (for example) the GNU project to relax their contributor copyright assignment practices. It only takes a single moment of complacency and the vultures will swoop in. In this case it was because of sloppiness around which urls were used in a demo. Yeah, all urls are the same to the guy who is building a url slurping service (which is why the take down will likely be defeated), but there is an entire profession dedicated to nothing but nit picking, loophole hunting, and general levels of pedantry that we have just come to call it lawyering. Layers are like cliffs or handguns. Stay as far away from them as possible, they are facts of life, but you really don't want to have anything to do with them unless you have no other option.
openfuture 6y ago
It would be interesting to see who added the testcase that has the copyrighted video. Maybe honest mistake, maybe it was intentional to kill the project.
amatecha 6y ago
Web browsers download the video too. Take down web browsers! Heck, outlaw operating systems! Hard drives are infringing on our right to profit! ... Actually, I should stop giving them ideas for their next takedown notices...
ravenstine 6y ago
This is lousy! I depend on youtube-dl to archive videos for later use. Nothing MAFIAA would be interested in; just stuff from topical channels that I want to have around for personal use in case they get deleted. I really hope this doesn't stand, because what it's basically saying is that you can't even tell someone how to download something that might be copyrighted. Not only that, but this was brought forth by a murky technicality. Pray to god this never happens to NewPipe.
rla3rd 6y ago
and yet the code is still in pypi for any developer to use...
ordo_inf 6y ago
Everybody, go to PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files Download the whl. Download the tar.gz. ???? Profit. Also, a recommendation for the youtube_dl crew is to use a self-hosted solution (if GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge wont do). Find a cheap Linux hosting provider and run Gitea on it: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea It's the best tips I can give for now.
- benn_88 6y ago
  I wonder if a) PyPI will get a DMCA notice and b) PyPI honours such notices.
  - ordo_inf 6y ago
    As others have mentioned, I believe that the main problem here is that youtube_dl is "showing intent" to violate DMCA. If they modify the readme, they might be able to prove that the intention of the software is not necessarily to violate DMCA, but maybe just being a general purpose code or one for educational purposes. Regardless, it's possible to host PyPi wheels yourself if necessary. The installation process wont be as straight-forward as "pip install youtube_dl", but it's still doable with one command.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  I was also able to apt install it on my distro, but the version I got was too old to actually work. So I cloned one of the git repos mentioned in this thread (Chinese copy) and ran it from there.
  - ordo_inf 6y ago
    It could be a good idea to diff it against this version though.
throwaway4good 6y ago
I don't understand exactly how this works. Github receives a letter from a private organisation RIAA and then takes down the repository. How does Github know that this request is proper and youtube-dl is illegal? Just because it comes from RIAA? Did Github give the repository owners a chance to migrate to another service willing to host their content?
- qw3rty01 6y ago
  From the DMCA repository: > It only means that we received the notice on the indicated date. It does not mean that the content was unlawful or wrong. It does not mean that the user identified in the notice has done anything wrong. We don't make or imply any judgment about the merit of the claims they make. We post these notices and requests only for informational purposes. (IANAL) Github follows US copyright law (and probably other countries' copyright laws too), so they're required to take it down upon receiving a DMCA takedown request. If it's not a proper request, the repository owner can file a counterclaim, but that would open the repository owner to lawsuits.
neonate 6y ago
Could you just make a fork, take out the offending samples, and call it youtube-ld?
cuckgangster5 6y ago
Fuck riaa, I'm going to open an offshore youtube-dl, and another one: a decentralised and blockchain hosted based youtube-dl. Good luck.
aestetix 6y ago
https://www.cryptocats.me https://www.cryptocats.me is now uploading the source code of youtube-dl to the gpg keyservers.
intricatedetail 6y ago
RIAA should take example from hip hop artists. Instead of worrying about people copying their songs they just talk over the entire piece
AkumaNoTsubasa 6y ago
>Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos Well, then please also Block all Browsers, SSH, Tunnel, etc. too, because you can use those too to easily download copyrighted material.
- fyrabanks 6y ago
  this is honestly the first Hacker News article in a few years that made me yell at my computer. pure insanity.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    It's the same for me. Computers, networks, and mice are all used by "criminals" to download copyrighted material without permission, I'm not sure how youtube-dl is any different. I think github simply doesn't want to fight this because basically they weren't making any money off youtube-dl, so they took it down. They'll pry my trackball mouse from my cold-dead hand though. F the RIAA and MPAA.
  - tawm 6y ago
    I'm going with that this whole thread is extremely astroturfed and that the shills are out in full force. For the sake of my own sanity. FUCK the RIAA.
jijji 6y ago
why would youtube-dl reference copyrighted material as examples in their documentation/website.... doh!
- rnd0 6y ago
  Or host their project on a site owned by a media company (as Microsoft has been in the past)
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Discussion elsewhere: test suite addressed specific edge / problem cases.
blitblitblit 6y ago
Time to revive GitTorrent? https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
Dahoon 6y ago
Yet another reason you should host outside the US no matter the legality.
iameli 6y ago
Do you think GitHub automatically enforces these against forks? I wonder how long this will stay up. https://github.com/iameli/youtube-dl https://github.com/iameli/youtube-dl
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
So if you did not fork youtube-dl but instead had cloned it, changed the repo to be the private nootube-dl and pushed it there - would github detect it was the same code and also take it down?
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  Yeah I’m interested to know too. Let’s hope not, it would be really 1984
Shared404 6y ago
I have Linux and Windows binaries. If anyone wants them, feel free to shoot me an email.
Aeolun 6y ago
I don’t follow, the argument seems to be along the lines of: Guns can be used to shoot people, they’re explicitly advertised as being for shooting people, shooting people is a crime. We request you stop selling guns. It’s all just a tad misplaced.
musicale 6y ago
Why do I always find out about cool and useful things as soon as they are about to be shut down? ;-(
kazinator 6y ago
Can someone PM me the location of a repo that still has this up somewhere? I might be able to clone it and host it.
- justinclift 6y ago
  There are several already mentioned in comments here. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953
Aeolun 6y ago
Also note that forking a repository on github is not enough to make it your code. All the connected forks have also been disabled. Better to clone and re-push if you ask me.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Radicle[1] can't come soon enough. Git already works over I2P[2] (TOR alternative) btw ;) The more often this happens, the more we'll learn about reproducible builds, decentralized (and/or anonymous) code hosting, and setup tools and software that uses this more. I'm sure the distributed tar.gz is next on the list for this DMCA and we can't rely on things hosted on the clear web anymore. [1]: https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ [2]: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git
bArray 6y ago
I would like to add to the discussion that there are many perfectly legal uses of YoutubeDL: * Downloading a video you uploaded and no longer have stored locally. * Downloading a video to create a fair-use response video. * Downloading video/music that is free commons (or some other non-restrictive license). * (Gray) Downloading content to archive it. * Downloading content you have already purchased and have in your possession. * (Dark gray) Downloading content you have a paid subscription to view, but don't have reliable internet. All of these anti-piracy measures need to answer one simple question - what stops somebody from just screen recording your material? At the point in which somebody can view your material on another device, you've lost a lot of control. P.S. This clone seems legit: `git clone https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git`
- iruoy 6y ago
  That server is a little busy since it's been mentioned here. I've copied that repo to these locations: https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl If a maintainer would like top aquire these orgs just message me. If anyone has an up to date repo of the github pages repo that'd be great too.
  - bArray 6y ago
    > If anyone has an up to date repo of the github pages repo > that'd be great too. The webpage seems to be still up [1], it should be possible to grab those resources. The releases can be rebuilt from the tags - the only other thing is the issue tracking. It would be a super pain to lose 3.3k issues (and the discussions they contain) [2]. [1] https://yt-dl.org/ https://yt-dl.org/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144509/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144509/https://github.co...
- nitrogen 6y ago
  what stops somebody from just screen recording your material? The end game is every device having a watermark detector. The PS3 wouldn't play BDs with pirated in-theater movies for example, due to audio watermarking.
how2draw 6y ago
Here's what you can do: 1. Clone the repository. Make an insignificant change to the initial commit in order to change all commit hashes. Push to github as a new repository. 2. Create a password "protected" zip file (or smaller volumes) containing the repository. Use a password that's easily found in common wordlists. Commit it to another project and push to github. Microsoft GitHub may be centralized, but it's not omniscient. RIAA may be a control freak, but it's not omnipotent. Let information be free for all.
- tux1968 6y ago
  This isn't really much of a help. There is no danger of losing access to the archive; it's popular enough that's it's essentially impossible to wipe from the internet. The issue is that now there is no central place where developers can pool their efforts to keep the code working. And it does need constant updates to address changes in the websites it downloads from.
sweetlucipher 6y ago
Can't I just FORK it and change the Readme and/or tests to not include references to what could be constituted as infringing acts, and purposely state that the purpose of MY FORK is to download YouTube videos that are in the public domain? If it's been taken down I am sure it will pop up on some torrent. The authors and all those who have contributed to it have copies. How can a court tell me not to publish generally useful software with a legitimate intent?
mhandley 6y ago
You can use Chrome to download from Youtube - you just need to know the temporary URL. One way to get this is to play the Youtube video in VLC - the media information window will tell you the temporary URL, and then you can use Chrome to download the content. So maybe the RIAA should issue a takedown request against the company that makes Chrome?
riclad 6y ago
What does it matter if I watch a song on YouTube or just dl the video. Mp4 and watch it, The riaa might say the reasons the videos are on YouTube is they promote the artist like old videos on MTV and someone gets paid ad revenue , In theory someone could just use a pc dl 1000s of videos put em on a pc and avoid watching ads Also video streams count to get a song in the charts and the riaa employs lawyers so they have to do something to justify their wages even if it will have no effect on the music marketplace or the behavior of the average music fan
theknocker 6y ago
How do I notify the RIAA that they can keep their private property out of my computer's temp folder then?
riclad 6y ago
Courts have ruled betamax Vcrs were legal, its legal to record tv shows and movies to watch them at a later date. Even though in theory Vcrs could be used for the purposes of piracy. Just because a device might be used to pirate content does not mean its can be banned. Like bittorrent is used by many non profits to distribute Open source software like Linux distro iso, s
ineedasername 6y ago
Even if the examples in the source code point to the code as deliberately enabling copyright infringement, I thought the DMCA takedown process was for actual copywritten content. Even if they are found, in a napster-like way, to be "illegal", it doesn't seem like a DMCA takedown notice is a valid mechanism to enforce the law here.
doompilot 6y ago
Anybody has a fork on the dark web we can all start using? (tor, i2p, whatever)
musicbizsucks 6y ago
I doubt there will be many pro-RIAA perspectives here so as someone familiar with their leadership and goals, I might as well add some perspective. Imagine yourself stumbling upon some incredible technology breakthrough. Let's say, it's some magical script you wrote that automatically improves the efficiency of any container by 70%+. You've worked for years on this specific problem, went broke a couple of times trying to figure it out, and finally struck gold. You form a company, issue that IP to the company, and start getting rich. Then one day, literally Google comes along and posts your script to some website they own, without your permission. They did this illegally, without your permission, by using this other neat script called gofyourself-dl. You have a problem now. Every is improving their containers or whatever for free. Your company loses revenue every day because why would anyone pay you for tech they can get for free from Google? What can you do? Sue Google? Good luck with that! No, you would complain to a regulator, which is the only real power (sort of) against that kind of money. You would try and convince that regulator to stop Google from stealing your IP and getting rich from it because it is YOUR IP and YOU should get rich from it. In the meantime, since gofyourself-dl is the way people are stealing your IP, you naturally try to get that taken down because IT IS BEING USED TO STEAL YOUR IP. Stealing IP is exactly what YouTube is - and has been - doing, for years. There is this weird idea that the major record labels (who fund the RIAA) have unlimited money and are just as evil as blah blah blah, in reality the entire music economy is a minuscule fraction of Google's market cap, power, size, influence, everything, and large tech companies have no real incentive to deal with them in the standard cases because why would an elephant concern itself with an ant. It sucks to do this to an open source repo, but everything they are saying in this memo is true - this technology is obviously being used to STEAL IP. Its primary focus is the THEFT OF IP. DMCA is a shitty blunt instrument that no one likes, don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism, but what else are they supposed to do? What would you do if it was someone stealing your proprietary code and posting everywhere after having stolen it from you?
- akalsz 6y ago
  Your proprietary code analogy is incredibly weird. Why would anyone need gofyourself-dl to download your container code? And what does Google have to do with the creation of youtube-dl, which is used to download stuff hosted on Google's website? And you talked about publishing code, but where does youtube-dl publish the videos it downloads? Or are you just implying that not executing all of Google's code and not watching a gazillion ads to download and view videos is some sort of "theft of IP"? Or is it that youtube-dl doesn't automatically delete the video after watching? I seriously don't get it. > don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism What would they prefer doing? Arrest people who are using youtube-dl to listen to music? Go after people who are rehosting music from youtube on their website?
Paianni 6y ago
Unless the RIAA is actually going to take the owner of youtube-dl's domain to court, there's nothing (for now) stopping yt-dl from setting up another development platform of some sort. DMCA takedowns are cause for concern but they're not quite the be all and end all of a dispute.
johnisgood 6y ago
So... what is going to happen to youtube-dl? Will it get renamed considering it supports ~1155 websites (based on docs/supportedsites.md)? If it does get renamed, how are we going to know its name? Where do the developers going to push their changes, where is the development being continued?! Fuck everyone who complies with such retarded laws. Corruption is sometimes good, in cases such as these. :)
Pxtl 6y ago
Does YouTube embed any copyright metadata on the videos? An improved product could check for that first and prompt the user with a legal confirmation that they have the right to download the content if it was marked as copyrighted.
cwkoss 6y ago
Stuff like this is why I consider it unethical to pay for recorded music, unless distributed directly by the artist. Haven't bought music from a major distributor since I was a teenager. I don't want my money funding this sort of overreaching censorship.
maledorak 6y ago
I found few forks with full history and tags from yesterday (10/23/2020) https://github.com/marzzzello/youtube-dl https://github.com/marzzzello/youtube-dl https://github.com/koalp/youtube-dl https://github.com/koalp/youtube-dl https://github.com/r4rdsn/youtube-dl https://github.com/r4rdsn/youtube-dl https://git.osuv.de/star/youtube-dl https://git.osuv.de/star/youtube-dl https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
dredmorbius 6y ago
Strategically / tactically, the most interesting aspect of the RIAA attack on youtube-dl to me is that it puts Microsoft on the spot to show its true colours. Is it Friend of Free Software, or Copyright Maximalist?
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  Yes. And since Microsoft and the RIAA are both in the contrived/artificial scarcity business, it’s pretty obvious to me what it’s going to be. The propertied classes won’t let this crisis pass without using it as an opportunity to further enclose and plunder the commons even more for the working classes.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    it’s pretty obvious to me what it’s going to be8 In which case we know, and the "but it's a NEW Microsoft" crowd can pound sand. I see ... an outside ... case Microsoft's not in the engineered-scarcity racket. I wwouldn't bet the farm, but it could be an interesting side wager.
- a_imho 6y ago
  Agreed, I'm interested to see if there is any merit to the new Microsoft hearts open source.
cblconfederate 6y ago
There is a lot of CC0 content on youtube that exists so you can download it, like stock video, sounds, background videos etc. How are we going to dowload those now? Also couldn't the youtub-dl team claim that the whole "drm video download test" was a security test?
psds2 6y ago
Tldr all these comments - youtube dl got in trouble because they link to copyrighted material in the readme which from a legal perspective shows intent to circumvent copyright. If they had just linked to videos they had uploaded themselves as examples everything would be fine.
lsiebert 6y ago
I just installed it from archive.org using the url homebrew uses. It's a simple matter to run brew install -d youtube-dl plug the url that into archive.org, download the archive, cp it to the dl location (minus the .incomplete) that brew expects, and then run it again without the -d so it thinks it is already downloaded. I wouldn't have installed if they hadn't done this, and I'll probably never use it, but this rubbed me the wrong way.
dredmorbius 6y ago
This isn't a DMCA takedown. It's a cease and desist letter citing the DMCA. The difference matters. GitHub is required to honor DMCA takedowns. Other legal requests are granted on a case by case basis. -- /u/telionn @ reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtubedl_just_received_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa/g9syfde/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtube... As I understand, takedown is a 17 USC 512 (copyright infringement) safe-harbour, but not a required or indemnifying protection under 17 USC 1201, anti-circumvention: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 Lumen (Chilling Effects) is silent on this point in their FAQ: https://lumendatabase.org/topics/14 https://lumendatabase.org/topics/14
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nimbius 6y ago
Most of the comments so far are ignoring the bigger picture: this isnt something new, its just the RIAA playing whack-a-mole with the DMCA hammer. Theyve been doing it for 20 years, and in those 20 years the most they have managed to accomplish is building a better, more resilient mole. Napster was followed by bittorrent, bittorrent by popcorntime, and youtube-dl. in the past 20 years the industry has quietly capitulated and delivered some content users really want like streaming audio services, but in the grande cosmos of the DMCA-related war on piracy the industry itself continues to do more to smite its own face than it does to offer a more reasonable and accessible product to their audience. There is nothing to keep me from writing something now that scrapes puseaudio for content triggered by mpv. the only real factor thats of concern is that this new backflip would be even harder for the RIAA to prosecute.
ezoe 6y ago
So, according to the RIAA's claim, it's > (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. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2... (i) is strange claim as youtube-dl simply implements various streaming protocols public to anyone, most commonly used protocol is HLS which is just a simple list of URIs of small portion of video files in text file over HTTP/HTTPS. No technological protection whatsoever. (ii) can be easily avoided by simply removing or changing the example usage.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Welcome to the USA where the court system isn't about the law or justice. It's about who has the most money and resources to win a war of attrition in court.
ColanR 6y ago
So it looks like the takedown notice has nothing to do with the actual developer of youtube-dl. I.e., the developer could distribute their code somewhere else and the RIAA would be left playing whack-a-mole.
oleg131 6y ago
I couldn't find a copy for a binary on gitea, so I tried Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://github.com/ytdl-org/yo... E.g. the first snapshot redirects you to https://web.archive.org/web/20200923163719/https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/1039520/4d7f8100-fb3d-11ea-81a5-f6765f344302?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20200923%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200923T163611Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=4ecb9a6c88f2606975b4ccb394a06b0eee8298d8ebd31dc612454533814c1f86&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&key_id=0&repo_id=1039520&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dyoutube-dl&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream https://web.archive.org/web/20200923163719/https://github-pr... and it works.
ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
OKAY OKAY MEAT & MEAT... Let's supress the cutlery... for the danger it brings! And you'll look so well... eating like a savages! :Ð
porjo 6y ago
I guess it was only a matter of time, the more popular it became. I have Youtube Premium and still use this utility every day for legitimate reasons (converting talk videos to audio file that I can listen to offline). Sad day for youtube-dl but I expect there will be many contenders to fill the void.
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l0b0 6y ago
I tried cloning the various forks mentioned in these threads. Summarized, I did this: $ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl $ cd youtube-dl $ git remote rename origin salsa-debian-org $ git remote add -f code-hackerspace-pl https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f git-technik-io https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f ytld-org https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f gitea-eponym-info https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git $ git remote add -f gitee-com https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git Basically, it looks like https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git is the most up to date. The start of the log looks like this: $ git log --all --decorate --graph -n2 * commit 416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f (gitee-com/master) | Author: Sergey M․ <dstftw@gmail.com> | Date: Fri Oct 23 21:31:37 2020 +0700 | | [ytsearch] Fix extraction (closes #26920) | * commit 48c5663c5f7dd9ecc4720f7c1522627665197939 (ytld-org/master, gitea-eponym-info/master, git-technik-io/master, code-hackerspace-pl/master) | Author: Toan Nguyen <davidnguyen1501@gmail.com> | Date: Thu Oct 22 19:15:05 2020 +0700 | | [afreecatv] Fix typo (#26970) The salsa.debian.org repo seems to have diverged a long time ago (commit db29af6d36b3d16614355dac70f22c4f2d8410d2 in 2016??).
awwaiid 6y ago
"We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us." Quick call Pop, Timberlake, and Swift to end this!
m0zg 6y ago
Thanks to this takedown, hundreds of thousands of people will find out they can actually _download_ YT videos. Thanks, RIAA!
sushshshsh 6y ago
I can also use OBS or a Google Pixel to capture material from youtube but I don't see anyone going after them
- iso1210 6y ago
  Give it time for OBS. Google are safe of course, they're a large corporation, the law doesn't apply to corporations.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    Sad but true! At least at the OBS level, it's an application running on an operating system instead of in a browser controlled by a corporation (ok Windows is becoming more walled too...)
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ijcd 6y ago
The extractors directory had 765 extractors in it, only one of which is YouTube. The facts seem cherry-picked to support their case (well duh). Hopefully that will matter. Given that youtube is a tenth of a percent of the extractors maybe there's hope. FWIW, it's easy to find the code on Google. The release tarballs have the format youtube-dl-YYYY.MM.DD.tar.gz and one can look in the Homebrew Cellar, for example and see there was a release on 2020.09.20. ;)
- akersten 6y ago
  Even if YouTube was the only extractor, it shouldn't make a lick of difference - not everything on YouTube is owned by the RIAA as they'd like to believe!
amatecha 6y ago
Considering YouTube allows Creative-Commons licensed videos[0], how exactly do they suggest we "reuse and edit" videos, as per their own documentation? I'm not seeing any "Download video" button on a CC-licensed video's page, so... am I missing something here, or is one not forced to use a 3rd-party video download utility like youtube-dl to actually "reuse and edit" a CC-licensed video? [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
xvilka 6y ago
They can just move the project to IPFS[1] then, it has support for Git repositories [2]. [1] https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/ https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/
xvilka 6y ago
They could also try to setup a mirror at https://gitee.com/ https://gitee.com/ which is more user friendly than GitHub, as this case confirms.
scastillo 6y ago
This is not youtube-dl please don't fork it or send pull requests back. Don't click this link: https://github.com/scastillo/not-youtube-dl https://github.com/scastillo/not-youtube-dl
easton 6y ago
I'm sure someone's already said it, but if you want the source tree with no history, it's still available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files
vram22 6y ago
As a technical aside (to the main topic of this HN thread), I had written a blog post some years ago, describing some uses of youtube-dl, and some commentary giving an overview of what its source does: youtube-dl, a YouTube downloader in Python: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/03/youtube-dl-yourube-downloader-in-python.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/03/youtube-dl-yourube-downl...
- vram22 6y ago
  And here are a few other posts about youtube-dl or YouTube on my blog: pafy - Python API for YouTube: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/06/pafy-python-api-for-youtube.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/06/pafy-python-api-for-yout... youtube-dl, Python video download tool, on front page of Hacker News (2014): https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/11/youtube-dl-python-video-download-tool.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/11/youtube-dl-python-video-... How to download PyCon US 2013 videos for offline viewing using youtube-dl: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-download-pycon-us-2013-videos.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-download-pycon-us...
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eshack94 6y ago
Even if youtube-dl doesn't get re-hosted on GitHub, is it likely that it will show up again on another site such as GitLab or a self-hosted repo by the maintainer?
dredmorbius 6y ago
ZDNet reports this is part of a larger action: "RIAA blitz takes down 18 GitHub projects used for downloading YouTube videos" aand isn't a DMCA 512 takedown: Although GitHub classified the RIAA letter as a DMCA takedown request, it is not one. As Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer pointed out today on Twitter, RIAA isn't alleging the library infringed on its rights, but that the library is illegal in itself. This isn’t really a DMCA request. I don’t see an assertion that youtube-dl is an infringing work. Rather the claim is that it’s illegal per se https://t.co/vQ16nVleCf https://t.co/vQ16nVleCf — John Bergmayer (@bergmayer) October 23, 2020 https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-github-projects-used-for-downloading-youtube-videos/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-githu...
Iv 6y ago
Delenda RIAA The whole copyright industry is based on toxic premises that do not hold true anymore in the internet age. By now, different models have been proven to work. Make them the norm. Abolish copyright. Or turn them back into what they were supposed to be: a TEMPORARY protection of a work since first publication (originally 21 years IIRC). Old Disney characters, superheroes invented in the 40s and 50s, even the "more recent" Starwars are part of culture now just like Othello or Moby Dick are. Allow to use them as such.
- anticensor 6y ago
  Originally 28 years in the US, perpertual but voluntary in the UK.
- Eli_P 6y ago
  > Abolish copyright If they did, it'd be still complicated. A real example, a modder makes some content for an old abandoned game. He needs some voice over, so he contacts the original voice actors, but they deny to do that job on the grounds of being a member of org like this[1] which strictly prohibits to take side jobs. And to make it even more complicated, consider tools like for making deep fakes; if somebody makes a neural network that emulates the original voice, should it be sub-licensed or copyrighted? Can a voice be copyrighted? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA
austincheney 6y ago
Strange that email made it through. I delete any email in my inbox that begins with: Dear Sir or Madam as it looks like spam.
anovikov 6y ago
Super surprising that software like this could exist in the legal space and with known creators. I mean, it's obviously a pirating app, it makes every effort to circumvent download protection right?
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  It just takes a video stream and saves it. There is no DRM bypassing or anything
- kristopolous 6y ago
  No it's not at all. It's infrastructure. Mpv uses it, ffmpeg can use it. It's a generalized tool just like a hammer, the dreaded murder or construction weapon depending on intent.. The DMCA has always been a way of forbidding tools, as if that's the kind of nanny state we want: trusted with assault rifles but not trusted with a python script. Alright chill, makes total sense
antonzabirko 6y ago
What a shocker
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koyao 6y ago
Where can I clone the youtube-dl repo, err.. for educational purposes?
palashkulsh 6y ago
download it here before its gone from there too https://web.archive.org/web/20201015213331if_/https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/1039520/52dccb80-fb3d-11ea-938d-f7f62f4747a6?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20201015%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20201015T213330Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=260e2562a36587f4554cce9ecafca22a3db718e3f4cdb8103450d36c439319ca&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&key_id=0&repo_id=1039520&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dyoutube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream https://web.archive.org/web/20201015213331if_/https://github...
gorgoiler 6y ago
Does a DMCA takedown usually use phrasing “we ask that you do XYZ”? I’ve never scrutinized one before. I would have assumed it would be of the form “under the terms of the DMCA you are REQUIRED to etc etc”
Kliment 6y ago
Can we, as a community, cause damage and annoyance to RIAA executives and their member company executives? Here are some ideas: - Ban them from dating sites - Ban their kids from instagram/tiktok/whatever - Have web shops show all items as out of stock for them - Refuse to do business with them or their families, in general - subscribe them to real life spam - send their office envelopes of glitter I'm sure others can think of other methods. Maybe it's just vindictiveness on my part, but maybe it will make them reconsider their life choices if said choices came at a cost of permanent inconvenience.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  Don't do this. This is how gamergaters destroyed people's lives. It starts with a little bit of doxxing and it ends with well meaning humans (who you happen to disagree with) hiding on their high school friend's couch, two states away from their families.
  - Kliment 6y ago
    I get that, and yeah it's bad. But there's also a deep frustration with how these fuckers can do this stuff and get away with it. So how does one push back?
    - taywrobel 6y ago
      If they’re willing to fight it, help pay their legal fees. Win in court, set a better precedent. That is how change happens in the world, not by trying to ruin the lives of individuals emblematic of a flawed system but quite likely perfectly decent people in and of themselves.
  - sneak 6y ago
    What GG did was illegal, everything GP suggested is harmless (and legal). You should not conflate the two. Creating negative consequences for poor choices in society is a great and effective tool that should be used more often.
mola 6y ago
Shameful
hkt 6y ago
Maybe it is time to host the project outside of the US?
Bellamy 6y ago
Where can I find youtube-dl now? I'm ready to be a sponsor for the project to live further.
- names_are_hard 6y ago
  Search in this thread (across multiple pages), a number of people have posted mirrors. You can clone, rehost, and share. It would be ironic if this backfires on them because of the Streisand effect.
choeger 6y ago
This fight against software is growing into bizarre forms. What's next? cURL? I really wish there was some kind of retribution in the typical OSS licenses. You censor free software, free software censors you. I think these organization would think twice to take down a project if they would immediately lose access to Linux, Apache, Python, et. al.
hadcomplained 6y ago
I sometimes imagine how wonderful it'd be if there were a viable alternative to the Web that is decentralized and infeasible to censor, only to realize that how great it is for the freedom, is the exact reason why it doesn't exist. It's just too inconvenient for those in power. That might be why Tor was funded by the government. Its primary functionality is to strengthen the existing Web, rather than to be some competing force to the Web.
rhabarba 6y ago
Ahh, centralized version control. Such a good idea.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Anyone working on ytdl will have a full copy of the history at home, undisturbed, so distribution is working as it should. There is no single point of failure.
  - rhabarba 6y ago
    Then why does the takedown matter? See, the infrastructure still revolves around one master repository.
arafsheikh 6y ago
Here’s the source code encoded as two images: https://twitter.com/galacticfurball/status/1319765986791157761 https://twitter.com/galacticfurball/status/13197659867911577...
nolim1t 6y ago
Time to use gittorrent! https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent
names_are_hard 6y ago
Some time in the last few hours the devs have updated their site (https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/) with a notice about the takedown and removed the broken github links. You can now download the latest executables again. I'm looking forward to seeing their new home.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
I guess this means Brew formula for youtube-dl stops working - mines already installed and I'm not uninstalling to check but it's interesting.
jimnotgym 6y ago
I can't find reference to who is going to defend this? Is EFF going to pick it up? Can we donate?
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
So recently I asked if Unix v6 is the "To Kill a Mockingbird" of computer science, then what is the Huckleberry Finn. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856047 This thing with YouTube-dl makes me consider that one quality that a "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" of computer science should possess is having been banned. Of course YouTube-dl might not be the Huckleberry Finn, but maybe it is something like The Satanic Verses (which I was never a fan of).
dredmorbius 6y ago
The more I look at the RIAA's complaint, the stranger it seems. I'm not even sure that the RIAA has standing to sue or could demonstrate injury: - The claimed anti-circ method is not the RIAA's, it is Google's (via YouTube). - As a user agent, youtube-dl is simple an alternate Web access method which runs code from the YouTube website as a necessary part of the process of accessing and playing content ... meant to be accessed and downloaded. - Youtube-dl has substantial non-infringing use. 17 USC 1201(a)(2)(B) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 See 17 USC 1203: Civil remedies: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1203 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1203
mugivarra69 6y ago
time to move to gitlab.
- hackerman123469 6y ago
  That won't make much of a difference since both are American companies.
anta40 6y ago
The latest version is: 2020.09.20, yes? I already grabbed the source code days ago, but forgot the grab the Windows binary. Anyone keep the binary, or perhaps simply have to compile it? :D
- muterad_murilax 6y ago
  https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/
iamnot_fussy 6y ago
Have we heard anything from the youtube-dl developers yet? Have they made some sort of statement? Are they really going to get sued? Is it possible to support them (other than through the EFF: https://eff.org/donate/ https://eff.org/donate/)? Has github made a statement yet? (Oh and don't think for one moment that the RIAA's actions have anything to do with supporting the struggling artist.)
panpanna 6y ago
We need a rouge git server. Like silk road but for your open source fixes...
sj_krueger 6y ago
I have created the youtube-dl repo at Darktea, feel free to create your anonymous accounts and join the project, until we find a better/decentralized place. For now this should be sufficient: http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzhvyd.onion/sj.krueger/youtube-dl http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzh... I will give the main contributors the neccessary access for reviewing/merging/etc.. or will entirely hand over the project if you can prove you are the maintainer.
arendtio 6y ago
...and I always though youtube-dl was the tool someone built so that Youtube was in compliance with the GDPA and let us export our videos ;-) scnr
richardARPANET 6y ago
Very pathetic that Github took this repository down. I was about to move our company code over to Github from self hosted Gitlab, this move has put the a the brakes on that.
- zeusflight 6y ago
  If anyone thinks that Github had no choice but to follow the legal notice, I want to mention that youtube-dlc [1], a community fork of youtube-dl, is also taken down. This fork is not even mentioned in the DMCA notice [2]. Github is complicit in this. [1] https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
Havoc 6y ago
Better take down wget too just to be sure
mosselman 6y ago
Damn this sucks. Luckily I just recovered a tar from the homebrew cache with the source code. Lets hope someone will create a creative-commons-dl or something soon.
med_abidi 6y ago
This is shit!
dr_dshiv 6y ago
I remember during the Napster days dressing up as an RIAA agent for Halloween, with combat gear and a blowtorch to burn CDs
htrap 6y ago
Saw this coming. We are working on https://dgit.sh https://dgit.sh for the last couple of months. Dgit is a decentralized code collaboration platform where we harness the power of git for versioning and arweave blockchain for permanent data storage. We also have a Dgit community on https://community.xyz https://community.xyz where the stakeholders take all decisions transparently via a vote. Dgit will be available for use after its launch on 2nd November. If you are interested in what we are doing feel free to join our discord and chat with us https://bit.ly/dgitchat https://bit.ly/dgitchat
laplacedemon 6y ago
This makes me want to stop using GitHub. I especially feel bad because I have a paid GitHub account, and I don't like the idea about my money sponsoring censorship activities like this one. I wonder what a good alternative would be?.. Bitbucket perhaps?
vms20591 6y ago
This was bound to happen with proprietary services like GitHub. It's better to use self-hostable services like GitLab & Gitea, where we can have regular backups of everything - code, issues and any other metadata. So, the service can be up shortly. Sure, GitHub like features offer more than just a space to host our code. It has become a goto site for example, finding new and interesting repos to contribute to. It's important that the devs or community that develop a software think about the potential censorship it might have to encounter from thugs like DMCA, based on what is it that they develop and evaluate the choice of hosting.
neves 6y ago
BTW, I just installed it using `choco install youtube-downloader`. Nice to have while they don't find a new location. It also showcases a marvelous advantage of using git as a VCS, they automatically have multiple backups and can easily transport the project. And it showcases that all the other project info, like issues and comments should also be under version control and downloaded in developers machines. You can't depend on an external service for your project. BTW, is it possible to use GitHub features in a distribute way? E.g.: create issues in my machine and pushing it to the server?
noobermin 6y ago
Just a couple of days ago, I replied[0] to a comment about how the RIAA/MPAA won. Looks like I was right. They just made peace with youtube and now have them enforce their rights, despite the silliness of this "takedown"
hubbabubbarex 6y ago
Youtube you suck! You spy cheat and lie... Sell privacy of users to 3rd party.. Just like buggy Facebook.
johnisgood 6y ago
This is going to be difficult to find the authors' comments if there are any. I am still curious where will the development continue because downloading from YouTube often breaks and requires some fixing, i.e. update youtube-dl and it works! :/
URfejk 6y ago
Already at number 4 on all-time list: http://www.hntoplinks.com/all http://www.hntoplinks.com/all
bonoboTP 6y ago
Even Google Research themselves use youtube-dl when assembling computer vision datasets. The only way to work on their data and reproduce the results is through youtube-dl, as video datasets are often only distributed as URLs and timestamps, and even the example codes use youtube-dl. I wonder how this will impact the AI research community if there's some FUD around this tool. Generally scraping is a gray area. I know researchers who scraped Google street view for large areas to train AI models without Googles approval and got hired by Google for their impressive AI skills instead of threatened. I know researchers are a tiny group compared to consumers, but it's still interesting I think.
pseudosavant 6y ago
There are multiple extensions in Google's own Android Chrome stores for downloading videos from YouTube and everyone else. I just used a few to download and HLS stream that was having severe buffering issues. It would seem hard to argue that Google is completely against it when they could be considered a contributor to the "problem". Providing apps that violate their own TOS. Not just source code, but actual apps/extensions.
TLightful 6y ago
I'll download what I want, when I want.
kemonocode 6y ago
I'd think the RIAA and Google are well acquainted with the Streisand effect by now... I'm just hoping the takedown will prompt a whole bunch of people to contribute to youtube-dl out of spite, as I know it had been lagging behind due to simply not having enough contributors. I'd even go ahead and throw down the glove.
amelius 6y ago
I used YouTube-dl to watch videos, not to download and store them. Are user-agents illegal now?
gadders 6y ago
This takes me right back to those heady days of DeCSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
readme 6y ago
If you still have youtube-dl on your system (at least the version distributed on homebrew) your youtube-dl file is compressed. You can get the full source code by chopping the shebang line off the top and unzipping the file.
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
Counter sue for a bunch of money for wasting your time.
7ewis 6y ago
Someone uploaded the source to Twitter inside an image: https://twitter.com/GalacticFurball/status/1319765986791157761 https://twitter.com/GalacticFurball/status/13197659867911577...
daodedickinson 6y ago
This is just the next terrifying development on Planet China. YouTube-dl went unmolested for years. About week ago, I was party to an online conversation a week ago about how youtube-dl is an important tool for archiving videos of public officials before they can be disappeared. Coincidence? After the RIAA won a case against Limewire in 2010, the next significant legal action I can find in a bit of looking is that the US Supreme Court ruled against the RIAA in Allen v. Cooper (March 23, 2020). Here are the opinions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-877#writing-18-877_OPINION_3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-877#writing... I have a lot to look into...
Stephen304 6y ago
Add github/dmca to the list of mirrors: https://github.com/github/dmca/archive/416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f.zip https://github.com/github/dmca/archive/416da574ec0df3388f652... ;)
apetresc 6y ago
I've been hoarding significant YouTube channels for years, at a cost of many terabytes of HDD space. Even though they were always available for free, I was always betting on the fact that YouTube's status as being incredibly easy to archive would not last forever. I feel vindicated, but also sad that the end of this particular era has finally arrived :(
kelvin0 6y ago
You could use your rifle/pistol/firearm to shoot unlawful transpasser, but since it's also able to shoot down innocent children in our neighborhood, please cease and desist.
xtat 6y ago
How is the RIAA still a thing? They came after me in the early 00s for running an indie napster server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNap
shmerl 6y ago
So what's the latest update on it. Did they counter claim? Did anyone set up a fork repo?
weetniet 6y ago
This is a heavy blow for the community, regardless of where forks show up.
francisperron 6y ago
They should take down all browsers and Internet we can use it too download stuff... this is so stupid. Don't want your stuff to be downloaded, don't put it online.
anseed 6y ago
Good
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dpumpshitlord 6y ago
RIAA is outta pocket, tell em to eat your ass
dpumpshitlord 6y ago
Let them pay to take you to court—
dpumpshitlord 6y ago
Music industry died when distribution changed, just die already

4240 points by phantop 6y ago

vernie 6y ago

Ha I'd nearly forgotten about the RIAA, thanks for reminding me to re-up my EFF donation.

bergstromm466 6y ago

I’m so glad that Github is owned by Microsoft and that they don’t immediately comply with the takedown... /sarcasm

esalman 6y ago

FWIW, I'm forking youtube-dl right now.

alexfromapex 6y ago
Just so you know, they expressly mention that’s not a good idea in the notice. Also, I'm just the messenger so please don't shoot/downvote me
- jaspergilley 6y ago
  Why wouldn't it be? Does this claim have any substance?
  - esalman 6y ago
    A claim like this is also a threat to the open-source software ecosystem.
- 3np 6y ago
  And I hereby expressly mention that it is, so there you have it.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  Still a better idea than DRM
- icandoit 6y ago
  They didn't like people buying VCRs either.
mgbmtl 6y ago
Stating the obvious: but hopefully to a place other than Github, since forks would automatically be removed as well.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tanseydavid 6y ago
Any links to a repo that is still standing would be appreciated -- I would also like to clone the source.
- esalman 6y ago
  Source available on PyPl: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
heavyset_go 6y ago
Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872959

Lammy 6y ago

> 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#readme https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md.... > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown. How, exactly? This is why I dislike GitHub's "Fork" button, since a takedown of the original takes yours too.

jchw 6y ago

Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an example of that: > We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies: They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be. This doesn't circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don't understand what leg they have to stand on here. This feels like DeCSS all over again. P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it's not listed. [1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn't in the readme, but in the test cases. See extractor/youtube.py. To me this seems even more tenuous, but IANAL.

alexfromapex 6y ago
It’s probably a case of fair use but it’ll have to go to court to decide that
- jchw 6y ago
  IANAL but I don't even think DMCA applies. It's not like YouTube-dl is breaking copy protection schemes, at most it is handling anti-abuse schemes. After all, it's not like you can go and bypass Widevine with youtube-dl.
  - rmrfstar 6y ago
    Unfortunately, it is making a copy. These guys also fucked up by "marketing" it for use in circumventing such controls. They should have showed how to pull OCW lectures. (a)(2)(C) is the part. IANAL but that's my take. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
    - 6y ago

dheera 6y ago

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl > Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown. (a) Are there mirrors? (b) Are there Github equivalents in e.g. Russia where the RIAA doesn't have jurisdiction or extradition power?

slezyr 6y ago
In Russia they've banned whole github multiple times and have their own "RIAA" that helped to create the firewall.
- dheera 6y ago
  Not looking for Github specifically, but a Github-equivalent where the entire contents of the repo could be pushed to for continued development. If not Russia, any other country that has more freedom than the USA in software, doesn't take crap from the US, AND doesn't block Youtube.
nguyenkien 6y ago
Chinese gitee, or self-hosted some where -- edit found one: https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader
esalman 6y ago
https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/
doublerabbit 6y ago
You can grab from the web archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20201018120927/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018120927/https://github.co...

Santosh83 6y ago

How can a program be in violation of DMCA? Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? How ridiculous.

kelnos 6y ago
> How can a program be in violation of DMCA? The DMCA contains provisions that criminalize circumvention tools. The plaintiff only has to prove that a tool is mainly designed to aid in copyright infringement and/or that's the most common use. It's a super super bad law, but has unfortunately been used quite successfully over the past 20 years by the likes of the RIAA and MPAA and others. > Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? Many jurisdictions in the US consider carrying a hidden knife beyond a certain length as illegal carry of a concealed weapon.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
> Is a knife in violation of the criminal justice system because some people use it to kill and therefore no one can use it anywhere, ever? I mean, guns are banned in many countries using precisely the same reasoning. And I might totally be wrong about this but I heard that in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knives.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > in the UK you need to be over 18 to buy even just kitchen knives There's a "Challenge 25" (formerly "Think 21!" IIRC) policy which covers these kinds of situations - although it is just a voluntary agreement from the major retailers. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers/sale-of-knives-voluntary-agreement-by-retailers https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sale-of-knives-vo...
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  In New York, you need to be over 18 to buy Sharpies and spray paint.

stingraycharles 6y ago

I’ll admit that I’m ignorant of US law specifics here, and I’m not sure about YouTube’s DRM and/or policy regarding downloading videos is. So I’ll ask: is this DMCA request justified? Why would the RIAA be going after YouTube-dl, rather than Google? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the RIAA to go after YouTube instead?

evan_ 6y ago
YouTube licenses the music.
itake 6y ago
I wonder why they don't go after Chrome and Firefox as well.
- gorbachev 6y ago
  Give them time.
burkaman 6y ago
The RIAA's logic is that a youtube-dl user is equivalent to someone in a movie theater with a video camera. The situation they're concerned about is somebody downloading a music video that they've authorized to be on Youtube. They make money on Youtube views, but they're losing precious fractions of a cent when you download it and watch it offline. This is obviously not ethically justified, but I have no idea if it's legally justified.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  The problem with their argument is that youtube-dl is a video camera. The US has already rules that video cameras, VCRs, DVD recorders, etc are all devices with legitimate uses, and you can't stop them from being made or sold. A movie theater is within its rights to ask patrons using video cameras to leave, and Google would be within its rights to lock down Youtube. The RIAA is fishing, and all the precedents are against them pulling up even a minnow.

robgibbons 6y ago

As long as the source code in the repo itself does not infringe on their copyrights, this seems like a plainly frivolous lawsuit.

shmerl 6y ago

They should have counter claimed this nonsense instead of taking down the repo. RIAA is an abusive troll.

tanseydavid 6y ago
>> RIAA is an abusive troll That is one of nicer things that one say about the Recording Industry Association of America.
gorbachev 6y ago
Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice. It's then on the owner of that content to file a counter claim to restore it. Even if the content is not in violation of DMCA, your files will be gone for a day or two, or longer depending on how slow the publishing platform operators are to process the counter claim and how long it takes to file the counter claim.
- gouggoug 6y ago
  Has anyone tried sending automated DMCA for the entirety of Github? Once half of github is under bogus DMCA, maybe that'll make them think for a minute. I'm halfway serious.
  - kadoban 6y ago
    You as a random person would be committing what's essentially (or actually?) perjury and I'd expect you'd either be ignored or prosecuted. Big companies seem to get freebies on this, doubt you would.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Github is obligated to take down the "offending" content as soon as they receive a DMCA notice. No, they aren't obligated to do anything. Github is immunized from any liability they would otherwise have to the complaining party for hosting the material affected by the notice if they comply within the parameters of the DMCA safe harbor provision (which requires action "expeditiously" rather than "immediately") when they receive a notice.

orliesaurus 6y ago

> We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies IMHO this wasn't the best move, I mean... the use of copyrighted music as an example DIRECTLY stated in the repo, as an example to show what you can download with the tool

userbinator 6y ago
If I remember correctly, PopcornTime's screenshots and examples were all carefully selected to contain only public domain movies for this reason.
paulgb 6y ago
Copyrighted content with a notoriously litigious industry group behind it, no less.
deelowe 6y ago
So, someone could fork it, change the readme and other files to remove all references to copyrighted content. No problem?
hysan 6y ago
Does anyone have a local copy of the repo? I’m curious when that particular mention was merged into the repo. Thought - It’s possible that someone in association with the RIAA made a code contribution that included that change for the purpose of creating evidence to file a DMCA.
- cipherboy 6y ago
  The videos mentioned in the takedown notice are part of the test suite and not part of the README. Definitely not made by a RIAA member. See youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py line 588 in HEAD. Video was originally added in f7ab6cbe160afbba60537c7a830a4c65c6f0b3ea back in '13, to the file test/tests.json.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

Github has received a takedown request for the youtube-dl repo and forks, not youtube-dl itself, correct?

jonathan-neil 6y ago

They've learned absolutely nothing from two decades of failed wars vs torrenting.

neiman 6y ago

But it can also be sued for downloading uncopyrighted material. It's like submitting DCMA for Office Word because people can use it for creating pirate copies of Harry Potter.

tertius 6y ago
To be fair, more like "Harry Potter Copier Word".
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  To be fair, more like Microsoft® Office® OneNote™; it has a camera feature and an automatic OCR feature and a “copy text from image” convenience feature.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - CJefferson 6y ago
    Also, using copying an entire Harry Potter book as the basic tutorial.
    - wizzwizz4 6y ago
      Which youtube-dl didn't do…?
  - tertius 6y ago
    If also connected to the db for all fiction ebooks on Amazon.
aidenn0 6y ago
It's not because Word doesn't: 1. Advertise that it is intended to aid in copyright infringement 2. Include some tools to circumvent DRM used in harry potter e-books.

3np 6y ago

It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying. It's not that far from targeting wget or curl, were it not for the widespread use of them in industry.

gruez 6y ago
>It's outrageous indeed that GH/MS is complying. Because there's no upside and only downside. If they refuse to comply and it turns out that youtube-dl did infringe, then they won't have DMCA safe harbor status and could be liable for damages.
NobodyNada 6y ago
IANAL, but as far as I know GitHub has to comply with DMCA requests. Otherwise, they would lose their safe harbor protection and become liable for all distributions of copyrighted content through their service. However, GitHub is also required to reinstate `youtube-dl` if the creator files a DMCA counter-notice.
- mindslight 6y ago
  This is not a valid DMCA takedown request, as the claimant has not asserted copyright ownership of anything in the repository. This notice is a conflation of two separate aspects of the DMCA, the copyright takedown process and technological circumvention devices. If the RIAA wishes to claim that youtube-dl is a circumvention device, the proper route is to sue the authors of youtube-dl. This notice is an abuse of process, and highlights the need for a penalty for fraudulent DMCA requests.
  - vhold 6y ago
    This is a good point, but I think ultimately Github has to comply with it to maintain their legal immunity, it's not their responsibility to determine if a copyright claim is valid. Similarly, youtube-dl can issue a counter-notice, and Github will have no responsibility to determine the validity of that either. They simply restore access unless they have been notified that a lawsuit is in progress.

crazygringo 6y ago

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 user can view anyways, and the "reproduce and distribute" feels like a stretch -- there's no inherent distribution. This isn't anything like a pirating or a torrenting tool. It feels more akin to when movie studios sued VCR manufacturers for being able to record TV back in 1984 -- and lost [1]. (Also, side note but I have never in my life seen a story upvoted so quickly on HN. 130 points in just 7 minutes so far.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
The entire IP concept is really hard to make sense of with the web: a browser works by making a local copy of a remote resource and then making that local copy available to the user. I don’t see why, from the server’s perspective, the precise client matters: if I use curl + pandoc to read your webpage, is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome?
- superkuh 6y ago
  > is that really meaningfully different from using Firefox or Chrome? In the USA legally it is because the vast majority of the judges that have ruled on these things think anything that isn't a browser is a hacking tool. Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web resources.
  - ReaLNero 6y ago
    > Using wget is enough to get you thrown in federal prison for accessing public web resources. Example?

cft 6y ago

This needs free legal assistance from EFF and needs to go to court if RIAA is actually ready to litigate this

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> This needs free legal assistance from EFF Legal assistance isn't free; it's just paid for by other donors: [0] [0] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/30for30--S https://supporters.eff.org/donate/30for30--S
jedberg 6y ago
I don't think Microsoft needs the EFFs help.
- cft 6y ago
  Youtube-dl is not a Microsoft's project. If they send a counter-notice to GitHub (they should), per DMCA Youtube-dl is exposed for liability when GitHub restores the repository (but GitHub is shielded from liability after they restore)

jaspergilley 6y ago

You can download the most recent version of the YouTube-DL code from Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co... Fuck the RIAA

viro 6y ago
ok so I might just be stupid but how does that link let me clone the repo?.....
- 29_29 6y ago
  click code, download zip
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload.github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/zip/master https://web.archive.org/web/20201018130325/https://codeload.... is a ZIP containing the repo.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Wow I didn't think they'd host ZIP files of every commit of every repo. Where the hell do they have that much hard disk space, and who is funding them?
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      Archive.org https://archive.org/about/credits.php https://archive.org/about/credits.php
    - qwerty456127 6y ago
      We are funding them together: https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/

whatsmyusername 6y ago

This will do nothing. The tool will instantly be hosted outside the US. Even if the developer is American it's just going to get instantly scooped by someone else.

Conan_Kudo 6y ago

This is the first time I've read a DMCA notice that also references EU Directives and German law too (admittedly it's a thin note saying it's materially equivalent to U.S.C.). Is that even meaningful in a DMCA takedown notice?

varispeed 6y ago
It is like your abusive partner brings up all the things they think you did wrong when they don't have any logical argument.
- ferdek 6y ago
  I believe the way you put it describes this part in the DMCA takedown notice the best way possible. Bringing up European laws on intellectual property and mixing it with US "copyright" is comical to me, especially after reading this [0] article on French law recently: > France doesn’t have copyright. Sorry for US readers, your “copyright” is nonsense that doesn’t apply here, though the word “copyright” can be seen misused verbatim once in a while. I believe this interpretation of "copyright" is all similar around Europe. US copyright law is all about "right to make copies", be it software or music/video and it just doesn't make any sense on the other side of the globe. In the country where I live I can purchase a music or video file and legally make unlimited copies for my personal use. It is also legal to download it from any other source as long as I can prove that I paid for it some time ago in the past. Torrents are illegal as the protocol forces me to share the file, and sharing part is illegal. Downloading is fine xD. [0] https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-license-to-be-inapplicable-in-french-copyright-court/ https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-lice...
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > Torrents are illegal I assume this only applies to "copyrighted" content? Is it illegal to torrent a Linux distro or some such thing? Either way, this seems much more reasonable than the US's current system.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

That's pretty stupid. You don't takedown technologies that could be used maliciously or we wouldn't have anything. I'm worried about Newpipe now, it's been a life changer.

ddavis 6y ago

This is really dumb. By the logic of the letter all that needs to be done is change the README file.

erk__ 6y ago

This is not a new thing, DMCA was also used to take down specific plugins on Streamlink (tool to download livestreams) https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/1493 https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink/issues/1493

keyme 6y ago

How is this not perjury again? They need to be punished for this harshly.

larrik 6y ago
What about this is perjury? The readme actually did encourage downloading copyrighted material...
- 15155 6y ago
  Great! Then they should have sued the responsible party. Circumvention devices are not something the quintessential "DMCA takedown" process allows for or covers: these claims need to go to court where an injunction may be granted.
chrisshroba 6y ago
How is this perjury? No one's under oath.
- chjj 6y ago
  DMCA takedowns are filed under penalty of perjury: "Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet."
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    I think you'd need to find evidence they intentionally launched this complaint with bad faith, which would require a discovery process.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Perjury may or may not be the right term here, but it's definitely bad faith. EU and German legal definitions hold no weight on a US law. The repo contains no copyrighted material.

rgovostes 6y ago

YouTube-dl is a great tool that I've found use for a dozen times, and not once to download music or music videos. (Note that it works on sites beyond YouTube.) This takedown interferes with a number of legitimate uses that are completely independent of the RIAA's objectives.

mikece 6y ago
Agreed. Once I discovered that "it also works outside of YouTube" when I want to archive something I'll just point it at a page and set it loose. It's also handy for archiving an entire podcast by feeding it only the RSS feed URL and turning it loose.
snuxoll 6y ago
It’s also a valuable tool for making fair use of content from YouTube without further degrading quality with an additional re-encoding further ruining quality. Of course, little surprise the RIAA would ever admit these tools could be used for anything but piracy.
FactCore 6y ago
I think a rebrand would and a healthy amount of not-with-a-10-foot-pole-itis in their attitude towards any mention of youtube or music downloading would be helpful. Like a secret menu item at a resturaunt you could use <generic>-dl to download youtube videos, but don't specifically endorse it.

em3rgent0rdr 6y ago

Isn't there a 1st-amendment exception for code? The code isn't violating any copyright.

Nextgrid 6y ago
I remember books (with the code inside) being used as a workaround for cryptography export controls. I wonder if the same could apply here (if this notice holds up to begin with), either as a book with code, or as a book with instructions in English language that are equivalent to what the code does.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  This is a very underrated workaround. I had no idea this was used.
  - em3rgent0rdr 6y ago
    A book. Or any other medium of expression protected by 1st amendment, such as t-shirt [1], poetry [2], music [3]. And more broadly, any way of encoding a number in an artform via steganography [4]. [1] https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt/ https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS_haiku [3] https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/138581-decss-midi/ https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/138581-decss-midi/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
kzrdude 6y ago
In particular, the website has been taken down as well. If not the code, then at least that, should be a free speech violation; DMCA should not be used to silence websites (even if the code is taken down!)

dfsegoat 6y ago

Funny this happens right as everyone is scrambling to save JRE episodes, before he goes to Spotify.

boogies 6y ago

Hope this motivates a few more free software devs to move away to a free host, at least apart from GH mirrors for exposure. IUUC importing this to GitLab would have taken ~½dozen clicks and saved the open issues, etc.?

topkai22 6y ago
GitLab also has to comply with DMCA complaints. A quick search brought up their procedure: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/operations/abuse/dmca-removal-requests.html https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/security/opera... They'll still take down a repo and block the user if it is hosted. And self hosting something isn't free, plus quite possibly puts more legal exposure on the team. This isn't a problem with technologies or the platform. There fundamentally needs to be a narrowing of DMCA, a presumption of innocence rather than guilt, and penalties for issuing unjustified takedowns.
- boogies 6y ago
  But ~anyone can host it. Re: your edits, yes, DMCA reform is also important, and quite arguably more so. But decentralizing from GitHub would still slow takedowns down, and have other benefits.
- caleb-allen 6y ago
  What about https://sr.ht https://sr.ht?
  - jefftk 6y ago
    In general, general purpose hosts are going to want you to fight your own legal battles.

lousken 6y ago

anyone hosting mirror?

nguyenkien 6y ago
https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader Or download from https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703/https://github.co...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

VikingCoder 6y ago

I frequently use YouTube-dl, and have never once used it to download music videos and sound recordings owned by member companies of the RIAA.

diffeomorphism 6y ago

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?

qw3rty01 6y ago
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 copyright claims on YouTube are not DMCA takedown requests. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-lawsuit-shows-just-how-far-copyright-trolls-have-go-theyre-stopped https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/youtubes-new-lawsuit-s...
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 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.
  - qw3rty01 6y ago
    While this is true, I was responding to a post about abusing DMCA takedowns, which have the assumption that they're using it to knowingly misrepresent infringement. And even though most abusive DMCA takedowns end up without any counter action, the law does provide a way to fight them, which is the disincentive from "simply send a takedown for anything they don't like no matter whether it is legal or not"

jordigh 6y ago

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, my ability to partake in culture will be severely limited.

crazygringo 6y ago
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.
- oefrha 6y ago
  $ 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-org.github.io/youtube-dl/update/LATEST_VERSION Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 HTTP/2 404 content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 server: GitHub.com etag: "5f777b31-239b" content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; style-src 'unsafe-inline'; img-src data:; connect-src 'self' x-github-request-id: 170E:2B71:1A0B5DC:1B8177E:5F933973 accept-ranges: bytes date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT via: 1.1 varnish age: 85 x-served-by: cache-hnd18722-HND x-cache: HIT x-cache-hits: 1 x-timer: S1603484104.479172,VS0,VE0 vary: Accept-Encoding x-fastly-request-id: a7128dab84232184052e51f07eb6263f5c88ab7e content-length: 9115
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    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.

Kenji 6y ago

This is an example of why you shouldn't use a bug tracker that does not store its data on machines you control.

CivBase 6y ago

> this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be Why stop there? I can use my browser to illegally download content, so I guess we better issue a DMCA takedown that too. But who even needs a browser? Let's issue a takedown for the GNU Project while we're at it because I could use wget to do the same thing. In fact, I could write my own program to illegally download content, so we better just get rid of computers altogether. Stop attacking useful tools just because they can be used to do bad things! Youtube-dl should obviously change their README to get rid of the copyright-infringing example, but this DMCA takedown is otherwise rotten from the core.

perardi 6y ago
cURL could be used to download pornography. Think of the children!
- azinman2 6y ago
  It’s about primary purpose.
  - teej 6y ago
    You could make a case that the primary purpose of the internet is to download porn.
    - marv3lls 6y ago
      Avenue Q already has! https://youtu.be/kV7ou6pl5wU https://youtu.be/kV7ou6pl5wU
  - fche 6y ago
    "purpose" this is the "inverse teleological fallacy", q.v.
  - korijn 6y ago
    In that case, let's see what we can do with a gun...

blumomo 6y ago

Many (thousands, if not tens of thousands) YouTube videos are being deleted right now, crazy censorship taking place. If tools like those get banned then it gets harder to keep copies of videos before they will be banned from YouTube.

rochak 6y ago
That’s what we get for unrestricted proliferation of a platform offered by a big company. Is it even surprising anymore? Just saddens me but we can’t do anything.

jedberg 6y ago

I'm not sure with the RIAA hopes to accomplish here. I suspect this will be fixed in a day, and just be hosted elsewhere. And also, isn't this like when the studios sued the makers of VCRs?

karmasimida 6y ago

I am not buying this. Does this mean bittorrent client can be taken down as well? Who is drawing the line here?

kzrdude 6y ago
Copyright lobby has been pushing the line tighter every year, every decade.
proffan 6y ago
IMHO the biggest problem here is the US government is policing the world with DMCA: you have to comply even you are not with physical US jurisdiction. Like the world's biggest cyber-troll, just dressed in business suits.
lelandbatey 6y ago
It's much dumber even than. A youtube web page contains everything necessary to view a youtube video. The concrete action the RIAA is 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 youtube-dl implementation, and it turns out the Youtube's "rolling cipher" 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874111

ffpip 6y ago

I'm surprised they haven't gone after browsers. They would surely have asked Google to display certain messages when a user visits known piracy sites This website is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice. The website you are trying to access hosts copyrighted content. Please contact support, or seek the copyright holder's permission to access the content.

m4rtink 6y ago
Don't they ? It might not be really obvious, but take a Walled garden platform like iOS for example. Already third party developers can't build their own browsers and all are efectively a skin over the Safari web engine. What this means is that iOS is effectively one lawsuit (ore even major bribe) away from RIAA or other similar unscrupulous group dictating what sites you can access and what you do with the browser. And you can't just sideload another browser due to the walled garden! And it's not just iOS as there are unfortunately many Walled garden platforms these days - smart TVs, game consoles, browser extensions for some browsers, etc. Even Android limits what you can do with a ROM that is not rooted - and some high profile apps will refuse to run on a rooted one!

nickjj 6y ago

Things like this make no sense from the notice: > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube Using this logic then OBS or any desktop recording tool is also violating the same measures because you could press record while a Youtube video is playing and wind up with your own locally recorded copy of the video. Since we're here, let's also say any smart phone is also in violation since they could technically record a Youtube video playing on another device.

kelnos 6y ago
It makes perfect sense to the people who design these twisted legal machinations. A tool like OBS is designed for generic desktop recordings, while youtube-dl is designed specifically to enable the copying of copyrighted works. Or at least that's what the RIAA will say, and unfortunately a judge will likely be very sympathetic to that claim.
- nickjj 6y ago
  Yep. I wonder where this will go defensively in court if it gets there. I guess what the RIAA is really saying is that murder is legal depending on what was used to kill someone. A hunting knife could be used to kill someone but it could also be used to slice a pizza pie. A pizza cutter was designed to slice pizza but it could also kill someone without too much effort. If it's not ok for youtube-dl to create an mp3 of a music video but it is ok for OBS to do the same then it must also be ok to decapitate someone with a pizza cutter[0]. [0]: Do not try this. I'm not a lawyer.
  - sjy 6y ago
    In that analogy, the RIAA is saying “hunting knives are illegal, because they’re primarily designed or marketed for hunting, which is illegal” and you are saying “that’s unfair because I use my hunting knife to cut pizza.” The analogy breaks down because hunting knives aren’t illegal, but copyright circumvention devices are.

ffpip 6y ago

You can't even search for it? https://github.com/search?q=youtube-dl https://github.com/search?q=youtube-dl

justinclift 6y ago
For me, that gives "3,676 repository results" with the standard GitHub UI for drilling into them. Is it different for you?
- ffpip 6y ago
  They seem to have fixed it. Searching for 'youtube-dl' didnt give any results 10 hours ago. But searching for 'youtube-d' showed many.

getpolarized 6y ago

What I think is hilarious is how many takedown notices they've received! https://github.com/github/dmca https://github.com/github/dmca

gurpreetsatwal 6y ago
This person's classmate copied and re-posted their exam as their own: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-22-Exam.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
jfax 6y ago
Won't disclouse which, but I'm among them!
- z3j4e 6y ago
  As affected repository or sender of a complain?

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago

As a good internet citizen I have only one question: Where can I find a mirror to fork to preserve this piece of software?

NegativeLatency 6y ago
git clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874660

Thaxll 6y ago

If the README stated that you can download free to use video such as: https://www.youtube.com/c/VideoLibraryNocopyrightFootage/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/VideoLibraryNocopyrightFootage/vid... You're out of troubles?

aquova 6y ago

While its good to get a backup of the source code, youtube-dl is one of those projects that quickly becomes useless as Google mixes stuff around within YouTube, which they like to do. Without an active developer base, the project will quickly become less and less effective, which is one of the big concerns IMO about this lawsuit.

yamrzou 6y ago
What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
- jaspergilley 6y ago
  In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a build as anything cryptographic actually
  - paina 6y ago
    Yes, we do need this. I feel that the first step would be to move ytdl to a self hosted repository. But even this has the potential for takedowns.
    - actuator 6y ago
      If we rename it and add some open license video as an example instead of music videos, can they still ask for a takedown?
      - godshatter 6y ago
        They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be used to download copyrighted content, post it to github, and see what happens.

varispeed 6y ago

What if I remember the song I listened to on YouTube and I can remember any copyrighted material? Are they going to serve me with DMCA to disable part of my brain? These organisations are ridiculous.

jaspergilley 6y ago

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

dakron 6y ago
+1
jitendrac 6y ago
+1, This was the first thing came in mind after reading the article.
snuxoll 6y ago
Keybase, outside of the distributed bit along with the question of their future, provides zero-knowledge git repositories (they’ve literally got no idea what is in your repositories, including metadata).
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I doubt any of Keybase's features from flailing around to see what will stick will last much longer now that they've been bought by Zoom.
  - Avamander 6y ago
    It's on life-support, yes. Incredibly sad, it did IM very well and on top of it all, it had a bunch of very innovative features. And no, nothing really competes with it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bob1029 6y ago
IMO, Git+blockchain is a pretty good match on paper.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SoylentYellow 6y ago

The only way to fight DMCA abuse is through a lawsuit. Hopefully they setup a legal fund, because I would certainly donate.

mikece 6y ago

This is like issuing a DMCA takedown on Microsoft Word because it's possible to use it as a means to defame someone.

bkmeneguello 6y ago
I think a better analogy is to forbid an OCR software because they COULD be used to reproduce a book.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Yeah, anyone using it to save books for future generations instead having them rot to nothing should burn in hell! (sarcasm)
  - Avamander 6y ago
    I have kept an eye on a massive amount of content and it's truly horrifying how much content is lost each month. It's not even clear violation of copyright, it's just that nobody small has the energy to fight for fair use. There should be no DMCA, all ligitation should cost the person suing a percent of income. The tyranny big players have is disgusting.

fivre 6y ago

Is there any legislative or regulatory work that is trying to address the gigantic mess that is music (or media in general) copyright and licensing in the US? The DMCA is over 2 decades old, and seemingly nothing useful has come up since. The current system seems to do not much other than provide a big stick for the RIAA and MPAA to wield whenever they get bored and try to extract rent using law that still seems stuck in some mire of player piano era logic. The last sane system I encountered was when I was doing college radio, where you had a license to play music, were required to log what music you played, and were assured that some clearinghouse would sort out the royalties that needed paying out of the aggregate license fees. There seems to be mass confusion over what's legal on modern services like Twitch, where music is used in the same spirit as radio (background music chosen at the whim of the DJ/streamer), but isn't legal because it runs up against licensing schemes designed for including music in TV and film productions with massive budgets. There doesn't seem to be any clear way to handle shit as any sort of small content creator, as the rightsholders seem to want to preserve some weird fantasy land where they're both entitled to complex negotiated rights deals (which make sense if you're say, some massive entity a la NBC, and want to include music in a new big budget show) while also not providing anything for the rest of society (if you're not NBC- or CBS-sized, the people who negotiate rights contracts won't give you the time of day). If you're not one of the mammoth-class media conglomerates, your options appear to be "do not use music ever" or "use music casually, and then be on the receiving end of a massive legal bludgeon". You can't get the time (or music) of day, but if you do somehow manage to get it, then you _do_ get the time of day, but in the form of massive retroactive fees or whatever that you "should" have paid had the licensing cthulu been willing to engage with you before you determined that the rightsholders weren't interested in dealing with you. Right ol' kafkaesque nightmare, it is.

bleepblorp 6y ago
The DMCA was intended to give large content publishers a big stick to extract rent from third parties without needing to do any work. It is functioning as intended and is very unlikely to be reformed to favor the public interest. If anything, the next DMCA will be tilted even further towards publisher interests. The latest EU publisher payout copyright 'reform' -- which, among other things, banned photography of buildings and skylines -- is the most likely model for the next US copyright 'reform' measure. Congress only passes laws that large piles of money pay for[0], so the only prospect of copyright reform is if someone puts up a billion dollars in campaign contributions (bribes). Further money may be needed to re-stack the judiciary to ensure a reform will survive the wide-eyed fanatics on the USSC. This scenario is deeply unlikely as piles of money large enough to afford to spend a billion dollars purchasing legislation are very happy with the law as it stands. [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

pengaru 6y ago

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.

curtis3389 6y ago
Someone should issue DMCAs for the Chromium and Firefox repos. Fight fire with fire.
- Raymonf 6y ago
  That is extremely illegal.
  - fenwick67 6y ago
    How is it illegal to file a DMCA takedown request if you believe you have legal standing to do so? EDIT: The DMCA doesn't require that you have a law degree to submit a takedown request, it just requires that you truly believe it is infringing.
    - ripdog 6y ago
      You also need to either own the copyright or have permission from the owner.
      - efreak 6y ago
        My understanding is that it only requires you send the notice in good faith, meaning that if you think you own a copyright but don't (because, say, you own too many copyrights to keep track of them) you're still in the clear.
  - thescriptkiddie 6y ago

olliej 6y ago

They literally recommended downloading copyrighted material, which seems like a beacon of "this is primarily for copyright infringement"

SteveNuts 6y ago

Youtube itself should be taken down because it may be used to upload copyrighted content

gobogobohey 6y ago

I'm a lurker, made this account just to say this: I am not using NewPipe or youtube-dl or other tools like them to by-pass the DRM/whatever the fuck you call this shit on "content" from RIAA/SuckADICKIA etc, because, let's be honest, it's garbage. Yeah, there you go, I said it, hate me if you want but be honest, it's just fucking garbage. On and on and on with shitty super-hero movies, that fucking tribal dance music with some skimpy women twerking their asses, hip-hop from mega-rich "stars" barely able to connect two words together but seemingly able to sing a whole tear-jerker about how bad they have it, yeah, all of that and more, GARBAGE. no. I download original content which Youtube and the rest of the American leeches, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on and on pray upon to make their money cause let's face it, that's about the only thing these American companies are good at doing. Making money. Not generating original content, not original ideas, heck, most of the shit they use nowadays are stuff they stole when they pushed other companies off the market and bought them for nothing. But I digress. I download them just because of retards like you RIAA, and like you Google/Youtube. Remember when you were threatening to ban hacking content because you don't like the fact that knowledge is the great equalizer and then you went "ha ha we were kidding"? Ha, ha fuck you, we have retroshares and full i2P archives of those videos now, thanks to you, so go fuck yourselves, yeah? I still watch them on youtube, not because I care about you fucking leeches, but to give some pennies to the poor fucks which create the content you leech on like the fucking cancer you people and your corporations are, but if you ever decide to take videos down I will have a backup and there's nothing you can do, so again: fuck riaa, fuck youtoube and facebook and hollywood and twerking garbage and pretty much 99% that comes nowadays from the country of the fat entitled boomers. Thank you American original content creators, software creators, scientists, engineers, EFF and everyone else that is trying to make the world a better place in spite of these worms.

hexo 6y ago

As we can see again having github as a sole distribution mechanism was a bad idea. I hope they have backups and will be back online soon.

toyg 6y ago
YouTube-dl is actually in pypi and other places, GitHub is not the sole distributor. However, it is their sole development hub, as far as I can see, and that should change. After all, Git is distributed by nature. I suspect they’ll have to investigate a bunch of those new tools that try to do issue-tracking on top of pure git, and the main developers will have to go underground. It’s DeCSS all over again.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

camnora 6y ago

How about we serve the DMCA to the original media source. Attacking the tools does not make any sense. Which tool is going to be next?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

proffan 6y ago

Maybe someone send an email to https://github.com/jessephus https://github.com/jessephus to get more information?

nullc 6y ago

Because of how github works these moves are much more damaging than you might expect: In addition to revoking your access to the supposed "infringing" work, you also lose access to all your pull request comment traffic and issues -- which, unlike the source code, aren't continually replicated to the systems of all developers.

Cederfjard 6y ago
Those things are however exposed via their API, so anybody who’s worried about a similar situation may perhaps do well to utilize it and take regular backups.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Looks like fossil does replicate them ? https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/bugtheory.wiki

andrey_utkin 6y ago

Who needs Peertube when there's Youtube, some people asked yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855183

yoz-y 6y ago
If peertube instances started to host RIAA affiliated content they might get a DMCA notice as well.
- andrey_utkin 6y ago
  The instances yes, but not client apps.

smashah 6y ago

This really needs to stop happening

tpoacher 6y ago

Great. Alternatives to github please.

bergstromm466 6y ago
SSB-NPM (orig. Git-SSB)

02020202 6y ago

in other words, the data that you download from the network called internet does not belong to you. THE DATA ITSELF.

pdimitar 6y ago

I feared this day for a long time. Yet I am still disappointed that it had come. I wonder if the project can defend itself?

qwerty456127 6y ago

Is there still no safe alternative to GitHub?

mmaunder 6y ago

Who is the defendant here? Do they have resources to take this to court? If not, is there any movement on raising a legal defense fund and finding competent counsel? Anyone from the ACLU team here, and interested in weighing in or at least bringing this to your leadership for consideration?

noodlesUK 6y ago
I would be willing to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to support any defence effort. Is the EFF involved?

codecamper 6y ago

fork

bonsi 6y ago

Its quite irrelevant - seems like "forbidding knifes because they can be used as a weapon" or "banning port scanners because of security reasons".

reggieband 6y ago

It is a bit of a tough question. How would I feel about someone borrowing a book from a library and then photocopying it to keep a local copy? If the intent was to re-distribute then I would not feel comfortable allowing it. However, if the proposed remedy was to ban personal ownership of photocopiers I would not even consider that a valid approach. But would I expect I could keep my own photocopied version instead of paying retail price for the book? And what if a purpose built photocopier was designed and marketed for the express purpose of photocopying books from the library? My personal feeling, and obviously not a legal opinion or even morally infallible in any sense, is that storing a local copy of digital content that has been consumed should be allowed. Where it becomes grey (or my feeling tends towards disallowing) is if I share or re-broadcast that content in any form. That is, I feel the DMCA is in the wrong here. Unless they can prove intent to re-distribute it feels wrong that they can ban my ability to maintain a copy for myself. I believe it ought to be a right to store such content locally.

vaccinator 6y ago
Mix tapes of copyright content are legal... not sure why youtube-dl you be illegal even if only used to copy copyright content
tlburke 6y ago
I don't think anybody really disagrees that redistribution is a copyright violation and the youtube-dl software doesn't provide any facilities for uploading or re-broadcasting content. This takedown is completely frivilous.
m4rtink 6y ago
Aren't books kinda a special case ? Given all the past (and even current!) cases of censorship and book burning, shouldn't we strive to never allow that ever again and to protects books for future generations ? Finally we have a way to preserve books in perfect form forever digitally yet people somehow try to shackle this new technology with paper book technology limitations. The same limitations that coat us so much ideas, knowledge and stories as books would burn, rot or turn to dust. Frankly any form of technology trying to prevent digital book distribution and archiving really is a digital equivalent of the inquisition book burning (or helping make that happen again).

RealStickman_ 6y ago

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.

CivBase 6y ago
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.
- Drdrdrq 6y ago
  It can be done, the search keywords are "git rewrite history".
- alias_neo 6y ago
  Git history, just like human history, can be rewritten, if you only know how. (It gets a bit harder of it's cryptographically signed) EDIT: To whomever is downvoting, I'm not making a remark about some specific event, is a tongue in cheek poke at "history is written by the Victor". Chill.

codecamper 6y ago

gitlab ftw

trhway 6y ago

can RIAA be hit back? - to me it looks like the RIAA actions to take down software intimidate the authors of the software and obstructs the authors from exercising and enjoying of the copyright of their software.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Microsoft are in a strategically very interesting position, one which could render the RIAA's actions suicidal. Microsoft could pursue alternative copyright or music regimes which undermine the RIAA's stranglehold. Notably, the Microsoft Store online marketplace dropped books and music in 2017 (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367), meaning the RIAA has minimal leverage here. At the same time, an unencumbered alternative could provide an opening against two of Microsoft's biggest rivals, Apple (music), and Amazon (books). Possibly Google (both, plus, obv., video) and Netflix (video) as well. A large-corporate-backed Creative Commons media service would be a game-changer. https://tildes.net/~tech/suf/youtube_dls_github_repository_has_become_inaccessible_due_to_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa#comment-5rp0 https://tildes.net/~tech/suf/youtube_dls_github_repository_h... Microsoft claim to have staked their future on Free Software. https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3584911/how-microsoft-went-from-linux-is-a-cancer-to-microsoft-loves-linux.html https://www.idginsiderpro.com/article/3584911/how-microsoft-... How believable this is can be argued, of course. The company paid $7.4 billion for GitHub in 2018, a $5.4 billion premium over the service's 2015 valuation. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-github-deal-acquisition-complete https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-githu... https://fortune.com/2015/07/29/github-raises-250-million-in-new-funding-now-valued-at-2-billion/ https://fortune.com/2015/07/29/github-raises-250-million-in-... https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105087121976979704 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105087121976979704

int_10h 6y ago

I'm not saying anything but there's a gitlab source clone of this on debian's repo :) https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl

skottk 6y ago

Not a lawyer, software guy working in licensing & copyright for 20+ years. Was paid for a few years to talk about this stuff with tech and publishing people. They're requesting the takedown under 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201] It's a few paragraphs of the actual law at stake here. There's no much to it. Essentially, they're arguing that Youtube's normal stream distribution technology is "effectively control[ling] access to a work." Given 3A & B from the link above, that will take a fair amount of arguing - there's no encryption, there's nothing that requires information under the authority of the copyright holder (like a key) to descramble the information. Unless the repo has code that's breaking browser-based DRM, in which all bets are off - breaking DRM is by definition circumventing a technical protection. Doesn't matter if it was easy to break-- you break encryption, there's no more argument over whether you're circumventing. Decryption is right there in the text of the law. Github agreed to the takedown because they don't want to be distributing a circumvention tool, and they don't feel like going to court over whether this is a circumvention tool or not. There are a lot of repos out there, you can't go to court over every single one. I'd be surprised if it stayed up on GitLab for much more than a New York minute, either. The EFF might fight this, because there's a pretty good argument around the noninfringing uses; however, they also might not, because there's not much of an argument around whether it violates the Google Terms. Some us are mentioning that there are use cases for this software that don't infringe copyright. That goes back to Sony v Universal, the VCR/Betamax case, which permitted the production and sale of technologies with "substantial noninfringing uses." In the case of the VCR, the particular noninfringing use was time-shifting of broadcast television, taping shows to watch later. The noninfringing uses here are around downloading works that are in the public domain or Creative Commons, and definitely around offline use. Easily a colorable argument. The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some lines around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses. However, both products promoted their products as offering free access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing use outside the trial. IOW, if you're providing a dual-use technology for noninfringing use that is also capable of infringing use, you absolutely cannot promote the infringing uses to the exclusion of others. Not only do you draw unwanted attention to yourself, you may actually (as in Napster and Grokster) invalidate the most important defense that you have for your activities.

bob1029 6y ago

Assuming youtube-dl is dead and the web APIs become hopelessly obfuscated, how hard would it be to talk to youtube as if I were a samsung smart tv? Perhaps the next iteration of this project can leverage google's own insatiable greed against them. Embedding youtube into every "smart" device on the face of the planet probably requires that google maintain a fairly consistent private API which all of these devices can communicate with. If someone were to reverse engineer one of these devices or just throw wireshark on the WLAN, it probably wouldn't take long to emulate the same approach... What is stopping someone from using these types of internal interfaces instead of the public ones?

GlitchMr 6y ago
YouTube TV is a web page, albeit one you can't simply open with a web browser. Google could easily obfuscate it too.

avodonosov 6y ago

What is the simplest way to store source code repos in some decentralized file system? Like store git repo in IPFS folder, would others be able to clone it and submit pull requests?

slim 6y ago
it's already decentralized. now developers just need to setup a different remote. as in git remote add whatever. the problem is how to publish the software.
- avodonosov 6y ago
  What will server as the 'whatever'? I'm speaking exactly about decentralized publishing. Where the repository is mirrored in content addressed network, so there is no specific location(s) to take down. (I realize it is problematic, because even with content addressed mirroring, the people who actually host the replicas of the content, can be accused of distributing prohibited content, but still it's more difficult to censor, and maybe those problems are solvable). Just curious.
  - avodonosov 6y ago
    Just now on the HN front page: GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub (2015) (printf.net): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874994 While in the current topic my comment adout decentralization is downvoted to the bottom of the multi page comment thread.

google234123 6y ago

This tool literally recommendeds downloading copyrighted material. This is a good take down.

Avamander 6y ago
It literally doesn't. It isn't a good takedown.
kristopolous 6y ago
With what flag? I've got a copy right here

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

Maybe a stupid question but can the repository just be hosted in a server outside US jurisdiction and everyone carries on as before? Why do I need to be denied access to a repo if I'm outside the US?

q3k 6y ago

Git mirror: https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl This is master on 4eda10499e8db831167062b0e0dbc7d10d34c1f9, retrieved from gitee.com, and is the last known hash from Google Webcache [1]. Clone, verify and rehost. [1] - https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o7ilf8kWUQsJ:https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:o7ilf8...

Kim_Bruning 6y ago

Lesson learned: always use Creative Commons licensed data to demo your multimedia tools. Else people get the wrong idea. Some examples for youtube-dl might be: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ Big buck bunny * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ Sintel * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY Spring In fact, youtube actually allows you to filter by CC, so there's never a reason not to!

throwawaylolx 6y ago
I think to take your lessons from the pretexts is like judging a war by its casus belli.
defen 6y ago
The smart thing would have been to always filter by CC. And then anyone who can type # could just modify their source code a bit to adjust the filters.
grishka 6y ago
In the case of youtube-dl, they couldn't do that. At least VEVO videos have an additional layer of "protection" — the direct links to video files require a signature of some sort IIRC. Downloading a non-DRM-ed video is as easy as making a request to https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=aqz-KE-bpKQ https://www.youtube.com/get_video_info?video_id=aqz-KE-bpKQ and then following a link to the format you need, but with those music videos, that won't work. So the test cases were a necessity.
- Kim_Bruning 6y ago
  Hmm, are you sure that link is correct? In firefox and chromium that gets me about 122K of not-very-easy-to-parse text.
  - grishka 6y ago
    Yes, it's correct and it should return that. The top-level serialization format is simply a URL query string aka application/x-www-form-urlencoded. No idea why but probably historical reasons.

sakoht 6y ago

Setting aside the evils of the DMCA itself: Seems clearly that if youtube authorizes downloads, then people shouldn't put things on youtube they don't want downloaded? The takedown notices should be going to youtube. But of course they want to use youtube to promote themselves.

pteraspidomorph 6y ago
If the video is viewed directly on youtube, the majority of viewers will also be served ads which generate revenue that is shared with the copyright holder (note how youtube identifies the music in the video and who the copyright holder is below the description of the video). So it's not about not wanting it downloaded, it's about not wanting the ads circumvented.

black_puppydog 6y ago

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.

marcosdumay 6y ago
> at least not if you're doing anything that smells of copyright issues Or lets people communicate. Or broadcasts news. Or can filter messages or news. Or directly applies encryption to anything. Or is related to accounting. Or can be indirectly linked to health services. Or, well, you get the idea.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  Or in plainer terms: 1. You should not have your development process on a centralized platform, period.
Deely123123 6y ago
Should we count country and government as 'centalized platform'?
orthecreedence 6y ago
Yes, I'm watching https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ with great anticipation.
cblconfederate 6y ago
there will never be a safe country. The robust option is to mirror them in hostile countries. Divide them and conquer
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I'm sure the developers have the whole thing on their local machines and it would be terrible if it was uploaded somewhere in a country that doesn't give a squat about DMCA.

grawprog 6y ago

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.

marcosdumay 6y ago
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.
- grawprog 6y ago
  What is the percentage of content hosted on youtube actually under control of the RIAA vs other content? If less than the majority of content on youtube is theirs, what gives them the right to have a tool removed for downloading content from a service that's not theirs and which they don't own the majority of the hosted content? Why does the tool being hosted on an American website make any difference? YouTube's content doesn't all belong to them, they don't even own the majority of the content on there and a huge number of users and creators on youtube do not live in or fall under American jurisdiction which means neither does the content they create, so again, why should the RIAA have the ability to do this?
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I am guessing they'll find a country with more respect for freedom than the USA and host it there. All the devs will obviously have the full repo and history to put it elsewhere.
fireattack 6y ago
Because GitHub is also American?

mikece 6y ago

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

m4rtink 6y ago
Pagure is a git forge you can self host, where every repo contains not just project source code but also all related metadata (wiki, issues, etc.): https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure This makes it very easy to backup and move all project data as needed. In comparison most other forges hold project metadata in an instance wide database, making it much harder to extract & import when needed.

krob 6y ago

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.

baldfat 6y ago

I warned everyone The Fight Club Rule needed to be in effect. There is no Youtube-dl

zeppelin101 6y ago
Very true, but it was inevitable. The tool worked way too well to remain under the radar for too long. What will be interesting to watch will be where the forked versions of Youtube-dl will end up.

cute_boi 6y ago

Even Meme will be DMCAed in future. Future is dark :(

fabiomaia 6y ago

Wow even release downloads were taken down $ brew install youtube-dl ... ==> Downloading https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz ... curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons Error: Failed to download resource "youtube-dl" Download failed: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz

tbabej 6y ago

The removal of youtube-dl is a loss to the open source community. I hope this does not set a precedence going forward and that authors re-establish themselves (and the bug tracker, which had immense amount of information). At the same time, this lead me to browse the Github's DMCA repo, which has some real gems. For example, this DMCA takedown of repo with copied course assignment of a different student and did not comply with the Apache 2.0 Licence [1]. [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-22-Exam.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...

tbabej 6y ago
Removal of repositories like youtube-dl seems to have been happening for a while though, here are couple of examples: Removal of Udemy-dl (2015,2017): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015/2015-08-12-Udemy.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2015/2015-08-12-U... https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-11-13-Udemy-2.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2017/2017-11-13-U... Removal of linuxacademy-dl (2018): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2018/2018-09-24-linuxacademy.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2018/2018-09-24-l... Removal of Instagram-API (2020): https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-22-facebook.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/01/2020-01-2...
- R0b0t1 6y ago
  py-kms (https://github.com/SystemRage/py-kms https://github.com/SystemRage/py-kms) was taken down briefly but remains up, so there is hope. These projects are just instructions, it's like selling a kit for a radio that is illegal to put together and use. The kit itself isn't illegal.
dyingkneepad 6y ago
I remember back in 2008 I read a research paper on what to not do when publishing/advertising peer-to-peer networks in order to avoid stuff such as RIAA. Showing copyright-protected work in your website/screenshots/etc was a big thing. Sadly I cannot find the paper anymore and I don't remember all the advice :( If someone here with a good research-paper-search-fu can find the paper, it would help help our community a lot. All I remember is that it was from some peer-to-peer conference, and I read it in 2008.

rektide 6y ago

How quickly does Microsoft usually HTTP Response Code 451 (#rfc77525 [1]) sites that get DMCA notices? They acted very fast on this one. [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7725

johnnyapol 6y ago

We're going to need another flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag

resynth1943 6y ago

There are some mirrors here FYI :: https://resynth1943.net/articles/youtube-dl-takedown/ https://resynth1943.net/articles/youtube-dl-takedown/ Self-plug, I know. But I'll update it if anything new comes in.

arno1 6y ago

Seems like a fresh mirror here https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl to fork and start it over somewhere else. Gitea is a great project. Now we need someone to fork and publish it over Tor or something. Decentralized solution would be a next step. Diff between that mirror and the one from the web.archive.com looks good. I.e. no hidden/evil things inside. Looks safe to start over. ``` $ git log --oneline -3 48c5663c5 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) [afreecatv] Fix typo (#26970) <=== https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl 7d740e7dc [23video] Relax _VALID_URL (#26870) <=== https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl 4eda10499 [utils] Don't attempt to coerce JS strings to numbers in js_to_json (#26851) <=== https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703if_/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144703if_/https://github... ``` https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/4855/is-it-possible-to-have-a-hidden-git-service https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/4855/is-it-possible-...

LockAndLol 6y ago
I would like to add that Git works over I2P which will render it anonymous https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git
andrew3 6y ago
I've created http://youtube-dl-sources.org/ http://youtube-dl-sources.org/ with links to a static torrent and IPFS content. It's not much but I would like the sources to be easily accessible.
vault 6y ago
the author of gittorrent recommends https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
sj_krueger 6y ago
Thank you. I have created the repo at Darktea, feel free to create your anonymous accounts and join the project, until we find a better/decentralized place. For now this should be sufficient: http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzhvyd.onion/sj.krueger/youtube-dl http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzh... I will give the main contributors the neccessary access for reviewing/merging/etc.. or will entirely hand over the project if you can prove you are the maintainer.

precommunicator 6y ago

I really hope the author will send a counter-notice.

josteink 6y ago

Sounds like it’s about time youtube-dl moves to IPFS.

banana_giraffe 6y ago

Ironically, I've heard of video takedown service that this has broken.

cphajduk 6y ago

On a technical side-note... Would it be possible to host a Git server on an IPFS distributed system?

siliconc0w 6y ago

Time to upload youtube-dl-legal a computer program created for the express purpose of downloading only videos with permissible licenses. The readme shall note that any use of youtube-dl-legal to download illegal videos is expressly forbidden and even thinking about using it in this way is thoughtcrime of the most serious degree.

ohyash 6y ago

Not just users, this is a good nightmare for a lot of projects that were relying on yt-dl (maybe for other features than downloading) And even a lot of unofficial libraries that allowed easier yt access. Dead in a go. Do we have a cli alternative that does everything of yt-dl except the video download part?

lelandbatey 6y ago

The actual content of the legal argument being made by the RIAA in this and associated documents is lying by omission at best, and arguably is straight up perjury. The only _concrete_ circumvention they level at youtube-dl is that it "circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher". I looked into this more, and before I go into how totally bulshit it is that they've apparently conned judges into believing this, you should read their full accusation (or just read the full DMCA letter from the RIAA): For further context, please see the attached court decision from the Hamburg Regional Court that describes the technological measure at issue (known as YouTube’s “rolling cipher”), and the court’s determination that the technology employed by YouTube is an effective technical measure within the meaning of EU 1 See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#readme. and German law, which is materially identical to Title 17 U.S.C. §1201 of the United States Code. The court further determined that the service at issue in that case unlawfully circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technical protection measure.2 The youtube-dl source code functions in a manner essentially identical to the service at issue in the Hamburg Regional Court decision. As there, the youtube-dl source code available on Github (which is the subject of this notice) circumvents YouTube’s rolling cipher to gain unauthorized access to copyrighted audio files, in violation of YouTube’s express terms of service,3 and in plain violation of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §1201. So that's what the RIAA is saying that youtube-dl is doing. However, they're referencing a document that I _presume_ was attached to their original email, the document from the Hamburg Regional Court, but we don't have that email, as Github didn't publish that document for us to see. So I went looking, and it turns out that the RIAA has used this exact same excuse to go after some other people, their documents are available, and we can see more of what they wrote. I'm referencing this[1] document which I found through this[0] blog post about a 2016 case where the RIAA went after an online service called TYMP3. Here are the links, and here's what the RIAA said: [0] - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160927/17062135646/can-someone-explain-to-riaa-that-sopa-didnt-actually-pass-it-doesnt-seem-to-know-that.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160927/17062135646/can-s... [1] - https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3114545/YTMP3-Complaint.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3114545/YTMP3-Com... < The following is found on page 8 of the PDF linked above > 39. Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on that basis allege as follows: YouTube has adopted and implemented technological measures to control access to content maintained on its site and to prevent or inhibit downloading, copying, or illicit distribution of that content. YouTube maintains two separate URLs for any given video file: one URL, which is visible to the user, is for the webpage where the video playback occurs, and one URL, which is not visible to the user, is for the video file itself. The second URL is generated using a complex (and periodically changing) algorithm - known as a “rolling cipher” - that is intended to inhibit direct access to the underlying YouTube video files, thereby preventing or inhibiting the downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files. < further down, on page 12, they lay out their accusation > Among other things, Plaintiffs are informed and believe, and on that basis allege, that YTMP3 employs a means to circumvent the YouTube rolling cipher technology described above, and other technological means that YouTube employs to protect content on its site. So, let's go see what the Youtube-dl source code actually is doing. The tl;dr version is that youtube does some slight rearranging of the characters in the URL of the remote resource, but they also supply you with the JS code to un-arrange that code into the actual working "signature" which you can use to request the video from youtube. So youtube-dl downloads the rearranged URL, and the JS that youtube provides, and uses a Python implementation of the JS interpreter to run YOUTUBE'S OWN JS THAT YOUTUBE SENT US IN CLEARTEXT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO. See the source code (hosted on gitlab for now, hopefully that stays up): https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py#L1399-1418 https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub... So to summarize, youtube creates two URLs: one that's a public video URL, and one that's the URL to the actual video content. The URL to the video content changes on a rolling basis, and is slightly rearranged. All that's true. However, what the RIAA is avoiding saying, and which completely changes the context of this discussion is: YOUTUBE SENDS YOU BOTH URLS IN CLEARTEXT, AND INCLUDES THE CODE FOR HOW TO DOWNLOAD THE VIDEO, SO YOU AND YOUR WEB BROWSER CAN DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS WITHOUT USING ANY ENCRYPTION/DECODING. So when a judge asks "how is it that you're getting around this 'rolling cipher' to access the video?" all you have to say is "Youtube told me where to download the video, so I followed Youtube's instructions and downloaded it from the URL that Youtube gave me." Frankly, I'm amazed that any judge, or any lawyer, would ever lay out or believe such bare faced lies as is being spouted by the RIAA in this document. FUCK THE RIAA

White_Wolf 6y ago

It's still up on gitee Warning: do a diff against the last archive.org copy to make sure it's clean.

dylan604 6y ago

hold on... brew update && brew upgrade phew. i'm all good.

dredmorbius 6y ago
Reports are that Homebrew is affected: https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319750021319852032#m https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319750021319852032#m
- dylan604 6y ago
  They can't claw it back though!! That's why I just ran the update && upgrade to make sure I have the latest
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I don't know. Micah's pretty reliable though. Any recent Homebrew commits?
    - dylan604 6y ago
      now i'm super glad that i ran it when i did, as it must have been before it got pulled. it updated without issue. i also followed the Micah provided to download the source. you know, just in case.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

JdeBP 6y ago

RealPlayer next? "Download Web Videos" "Keep your favorite web videos safe on your PC by downloading them. You can save videos from popular sites in one click – including YouTube." * https://www.real.com/uk/realplayer https://www.real.com/uk/realplayer

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

This should be about impossible to enforce? Every developer and everyone who has ever cloned the repo has the complete source tree with commits. I can think of a list of countries where United States laws are not a concern, I imagine that shortly this will be one of the most distributed repositories ever. It also shows again that while free services like Github are convenient, and truthfully their interface is the one to beat, it is better to use them as a mirror of something you self host then the primary. Some options: (I prefer gitea - easiest to install and maintain, very active development community, single binary, written in Go) https://gitea.com/ https://gitea.com/ https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb

tux1968 6y ago
It's not access to the current program that is at stake, it's the ongoing public updates to handle changes made by the Youtube site.
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  Understood, just waiting to see where the devs pop up. I imagine that someone will help them with a DMCA counterclaim also. RIAA has been beaten many times, they have a long history of creative interpretation that the courts do not always agree with, and US law is only valid in the United States and Australia (thats a joke, but do hope they get on the brick and road plan or stop acting like a US colony at some point).
- hackerman123469 6y ago
  That would be true IF youtube-dl was all about downloading YouTube videos only, but it's not. It's used by people to download videos from like a thousand other websites too.
zeusflight 6y ago
I agree with your concept. The main problem though, is that each of those code hosting web app is a silo of its own. Any new contributor will have to create a new account for each of the self-hosted projects. Youtube-dl is one of those projects that can't survive in such an environment. Sourcehut is free from such requirements - but many complain about difficulty of email-based workflow. Another option is the upcoming federation protocol from gitlab.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

okareaman 6y ago

I had a youtube-dl repository to fix a bug in Twitter video downloads, but I just checked and it's been removed.

Ansil849 6y ago

So the RIAA has tech folks just like any other organization. Some of those tech folks likely read HN. Question for you folks (use throwaways if you feel it could jeopardize your job): how do you ethically justify working for such an organization?

fsociety2020 6y ago

Should all just clone it and host it in every possible place and on servers outside the US and give them the big middle finger to go F themselves.

danmg 6y ago

Youtube-dl (2020) would be an easier case to present to the public than DeCSS (2000). Everyone knows what Youtube is. It's easy to understand the utility of being able to download a video from Youtube to save it on your computer. If they didn't already know this was possible to do, they'd immediately want to start using it as soon as you explained it was possible. DeCSS was exploiting a weak encryption scheme's weak key distribution scheme. Where the only final explanation for why this matters is that it can be used to rip off DVDs.

ikeboy 6y ago

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(b)(1). It almost certainly doesn't violate 1201(a)(2), which is for access controls. This is intended to be used by someone who already has access to Youtube, so no access controls are bypassed. R. CHRISTOPHER GOODWIN & ASSOCIATES, INC. v. SEARCH, INC., Dist. Court, ED Louisiana 2019: >While the user id/password combination required for access was surely a "technological measure" that controlled access to the works at issue, Pevny did not circumvent that measure. She validly accessed the system using her id/password combination while she was still an employee with Plaintiff. Even if the use that she made of that access is not something that Plaintiff would have authorized her to do, i.e., copy the materials at issue, it remains that Pevny's alleged abuse of her logon privileges does not rise to the level of descrambling, decrypting, or otherwise to avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or impairing anything. As the district court observed in Digital Drilling Data Systems, LLC v. Petrolink Services, Inc., No. 4:15-CV-02172, 2018 WL 2267139, at *14 (S.D. Tex. May 16, 2018), many different district courts have held that using the correct username and password to access a copyrighted work, even without authorization to do so, does not constitute circumvention under § 1201(a) of the DMCA. Youtube-dl either involves access to files that don't require a login, or it uses your password / cookies to access the file, so it doesn't bypass access controls. The claim under 1201(b)(1), which is for copy controls, has more potential. There are the subsections: >(A)is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; >(B)has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof; or >(C)is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title in a work or a portion thereof. A and B clearly don't apply. The primary purpose of youtube-dl isn't to download copyrighted content, but simply to download Youtube videos, whether they're copyrighted or not. There's clearly more than limited legitimate uses (such as downloaded public domain videos.) The question here is about C - there's an arguable case that the examples in the repo that this letter cites are "marketing" usage for infringing purposes. I'm somewhat skeptical that counts as "marketing", however, and it could be easily remedied by removing those examples or replacing with public domain examples.

shiado 6y ago

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?

vermooten 6y ago

To misquote Richard E Grant: Let the forking begin!

maxo133 6y ago

Isn't DMCA working the way that if you disagree with dmca takedown and fill certain form, the side asking to take down content (RIAA) needs to get court order? That's the way how it works with google search.

brink 6y ago

Is there a decentralized version control system solution out there to host projects like this?

fenwick67 6y ago
Yes, it's called Git.
- sschueller 6y ago
  This is such a snark reply, you know exact that git and github are not the same thing. Discovery and issue management is important and is not part of git.
  - jackbravo 6y ago
    That would be https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki a decentralized version control, issue management and wiki software. Discovery is not there though.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I suspect that the parent comment might have been a joke.
- ojagodzinski 6y ago
  how git is decentralized?
  - josteink 6y ago
    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.
    - lucb1e 6y ago
      When people say decentralized they mean something like bittorrent or ipfs, often as opposed to http. Saying http is decentralized is... stretching the definition. With this logic a USB cable is decentralized because "you can use it against any target you like". USB mass storage dead drop devices can be connected to by anyone. And USB "is a protocol", just like the examples you mentioned. But I doubt anyone would claim USB is decentralized. Though git is also not really what people would usually mean by decentralized (as it doesn't, by itself, try to connect to a pool of servers, DHT network, or something like that), it's definitely closer to it than http. I'm also not sure "for real?" helps the conversation.

hprotagonist 6y ago

https://archive.org/details/github.com-ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-_2020-09-28_19-41-32 https://archive.org/details/github.com-ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-... if nothing else, today i finally actually used a bundle file: git clone ytdl-org-youtube-dl_-_2020-09-28_19-41-32.bundle youtube-dl

theobr 6y ago

This is a really sad moment for open source, especially for content creators and devs in media/content spaces. I've shipped youtube-dl for a user-facing (production) experience before. This sucks.

fandroid 6y ago

As it turns out, a few days ago, I was reminiscing with an old school DJ about sample-based music production. My argument was that all one needs is a DAW and youtube-dl. It seems that the timing of my argument was rather inauspicious.

dvt 6y ago

Oh the irony of cloning a banned repo from a Chinese git mirror... c:\Users\david\dev\git λ git clone https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git Cloning into 'youtube-downloader'... remote: Enumerating objects: 98560, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (98560/98560), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (30542/30542), done. remote: Total 98560 (delta 73037), reused 90045 (delta 66441), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (98560/98560), 49.86 MiB | 9.58 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (73037/73037), done.

rmrfstar 6y ago
Were the developers in the habit of signing commits, or do we just have to assume that the gitee mirror is 100% legit?
- __s 6y ago
  Cross check commit hashes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953
  - mimi89999 6y ago
    Maybe you would prefer https://github.com/rbrito/pkg-youtube-dl https://github.com/rbrito/pkg-youtube-dl ?
    - kzrdude 6y ago
      ah, so at least some copies of the code remains even on github.
seotut2 6y ago
I got the tarball from the official site, using Internet Archive.
- jlokier 6y ago
  For now. Occasionally the Internet Archive is served with DMCA takedowns too.

ddingus 6y ago

Seems to me this is leading to contested cases that can be routed to a more corporatist friendly Supreme Court.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

resfirestar 6y ago

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-despite-mpa-threat-200520/ https://torrentfreak.com/github-reinstates-popcorn-time-code... [2] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-policy/dmca-takedown-policy https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

quotemstr 6y ago
It's interesting how many Github counternotices (e.g., [1] [2]) seem completely justified yet link to repositories that are no longer on GitHub. I wonder what happened. [1] in https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-06-quizizz-hack-counternotice.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-0... someone forked a permissively-licensed project; the original author made the project-closed source, then issued a DMCA takedown against the fork. That's clearly bogus: you can't revoke an open source license. [2] in https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/11/2019-11-25-msft.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2019/11/2019-11-2... Microsoft DMCAd a project that did something with Windows local licensing keys. I can see how Microsoft would prefer that this project not exist, but I see no infringement. Not everything that a big company dislikes is an infringement of copyright.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

microcolonel 6y ago

Can we pool funds to turn this into a lawsuit?

nudpiedo 6y ago

It was clear that youtube-dl has always been used for its utility. And the deeper problem here is why aren’t we allowed to do whatever want to whatever is streamed onto our screens? TV shows could be vhs taped without issue as long as not redistributed. For sure we cannot take this fight against google with the American laws, but I think the software was morally correct and should be legally permitted.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I find this amazing, essentially Google has been scraping every piece of content they can get their hands on, when a few individuals decide to get data, that wasn’t even created by YouTube, they get take down notices. The more I think about it hypocrisy should be a defence against these things.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
This isn't google, it's the RIAA.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

dang 6y ago

All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911&p=5

ianlevesque 6y ago

Have they countered the claim per DMCA? So much ink spilled on this but there’s a process to fight erroneous removals like this.

weyland 6y ago

So, are they going to also issue a takedown for YouTube Premium next? Premium allows you to watch/listen without ads and also allows you to download videos for offline use. If I pay for YouTube Premium, there should be no problem with me using youtube-dl to timeshift the content I've already paid for. It's no different than using a DVR to record a show off a cable channel I pay to subscribe to.

weyland 6y ago
Really, the RIAA should be going after YouTube for better remuneration, rather than going after youtube-dl. Unless I'm missing something, they get paid no matter whether the view comes from a browser user-agent or youtube-dl user-agent. How is this any different than recording a song off the radio, which is, AFAIK, legal under fair use?

tgbugs 6y ago

This should serve as an example to people who want (for example) the GNU project to relax their contributor copyright assignment practices. It only takes a single moment of complacency and the vultures will swoop in. In this case it was because of sloppiness around which urls were used in a demo. Yeah, all urls are the same to the guy who is building a url slurping service (which is why the take down will likely be defeated), but there is an entire profession dedicated to nothing but nit picking, loophole hunting, and general levels of pedantry that we have just come to call it lawyering. Layers are like cliffs or handguns. Stay as far away from them as possible, they are facts of life, but you really don't want to have anything to do with them unless you have no other option.

openfuture 6y ago

It would be interesting to see who added the testcase that has the copyrighted video. Maybe honest mistake, maybe it was intentional to kill the project.

amatecha 6y ago

Web browsers download the video too. Take down web browsers! Heck, outlaw operating systems! Hard drives are infringing on our right to profit! ... Actually, I should stop giving them ideas for their next takedown notices...

ravenstine 6y ago

This is lousy! I depend on youtube-dl to archive videos for later use. Nothing MAFIAA would be interested in; just stuff from topical channels that I want to have around for personal use in case they get deleted. I really hope this doesn't stand, because what it's basically saying is that you can't even tell someone how to download something that might be copyrighted. Not only that, but this was brought forth by a murky technicality. Pray to god this never happens to NewPipe.

rla3rd 6y ago

and yet the code is still in pypi for any developer to use...

ordo_inf 6y ago

Everybody, go to PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files Download the whl. Download the tar.gz. ???? Profit. Also, a recommendation for the youtube_dl crew is to use a self-hosted solution (if GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge wont do). Find a cheap Linux hosting provider and run Gitea on it: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea It's the best tips I can give for now.

benn_88 6y ago
I wonder if a) PyPI will get a DMCA notice and b) PyPI honours such notices.
- ordo_inf 6y ago
  As others have mentioned, I believe that the main problem here is that youtube_dl is "showing intent" to violate DMCA. If they modify the readme, they might be able to prove that the intention of the software is not necessarily to violate DMCA, but maybe just being a general purpose code or one for educational purposes. Regardless, it's possible to host PyPi wheels yourself if necessary. The installation process wont be as straight-forward as "pip install youtube_dl", but it's still doable with one command.
names_are_hard 6y ago
I was also able to apt install it on my distro, but the version I got was too old to actually work. So I cloned one of the git repos mentioned in this thread (Chinese copy) and ran it from there.
- ordo_inf 6y ago
  It could be a good idea to diff it against this version though.

throwaway4good 6y ago

I don't understand exactly how this works. Github receives a letter from a private organisation RIAA and then takes down the repository. How does Github know that this request is proper and youtube-dl is illegal? Just because it comes from RIAA? Did Github give the repository owners a chance to migrate to another service willing to host their content?

qw3rty01 6y ago
From the DMCA repository: > It only means that we received the notice on the indicated date. It does not mean that the content was unlawful or wrong. It does not mean that the user identified in the notice has done anything wrong. We don't make or imply any judgment about the merit of the claims they make. We post these notices and requests only for informational purposes. (IANAL) Github follows US copyright law (and probably other countries' copyright laws too), so they're required to take it down upon receiving a DMCA takedown request. If it's not a proper request, the repository owner can file a counterclaim, but that would open the repository owner to lawsuits.

neonate 6y ago

Could you just make a fork, take out the offending samples, and call it youtube-ld?

cuckgangster5 6y ago

Fuck riaa, I'm going to open an offshore youtube-dl, and another one: a decentralised and blockchain hosted based youtube-dl. Good luck.

aestetix 6y ago

https://www.cryptocats.me https://www.cryptocats.me is now uploading the source code of youtube-dl to the gpg keyservers.

intricatedetail 6y ago

RIAA should take example from hip hop artists. Instead of worrying about people copying their songs they just talk over the entire piece

AkumaNoTsubasa 6y ago

>Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos Well, then please also Block all Browsers, SSH, Tunnel, etc. too, because you can use those too to easily download copyrighted material.

fyrabanks 6y ago
this is honestly the first Hacker News article in a few years that made me yell at my computer. pure insanity.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It's the same for me. Computers, networks, and mice are all used by "criminals" to download copyrighted material without permission, I'm not sure how youtube-dl is any different. I think github simply doesn't want to fight this because basically they weren't making any money off youtube-dl, so they took it down. They'll pry my trackball mouse from my cold-dead hand though. F the RIAA and MPAA.
- tawm 6y ago
  I'm going with that this whole thread is extremely astroturfed and that the shills are out in full force. For the sake of my own sanity. FUCK the RIAA.

jijji 6y ago

why would youtube-dl reference copyrighted material as examples in their documentation/website.... doh!

rnd0 6y ago
Or host their project on a site owned by a media company (as Microsoft has been in the past)
dredmorbius 6y ago
Discussion elsewhere: test suite addressed specific edge / problem cases.

blitblitblit 6y ago

Time to revive GitTorrent? https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

Dahoon 6y ago

Yet another reason you should host outside the US no matter the legality.

iameli 6y ago

Do you think GitHub automatically enforces these against forks? I wonder how long this will stay up. https://github.com/iameli/youtube-dl https://github.com/iameli/youtube-dl

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

So if you did not fork youtube-dl but instead had cloned it, changed the repo to be the private nootube-dl and pushed it there - would github detect it was the same code and also take it down?

bergstromm466 6y ago
Yeah I’m interested to know too. Let’s hope not, it would be really 1984

Shared404 6y ago

I have Linux and Windows binaries. If anyone wants them, feel free to shoot me an email.

Aeolun 6y ago

I don’t follow, the argument seems to be along the lines of: Guns can be used to shoot people, they’re explicitly advertised as being for shooting people, shooting people is a crime. We request you stop selling guns. It’s all just a tad misplaced.

musicale 6y ago

Why do I always find out about cool and useful things as soon as they are about to be shut down? ;-(

kazinator 6y ago

Can someone PM me the location of a repo that still has this up somewhere? I might be able to clone it and host it.

justinclift 6y ago
There are several already mentioned in comments here. eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953

Aeolun 6y ago

Also note that forking a repository on github is not enough to make it your code. All the connected forks have also been disabled. Better to clone and re-push if you ask me.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Radicle[1] can't come soon enough. Git already works over I2P[2] (TOR alternative) btw ;) The more often this happens, the more we'll learn about reproducible builds, decentralized (and/or anonymous) code hosting, and setup tools and software that uses this more. I'm sure the distributed tar.gz is next on the list for this DMCA and we can't rely on things hosted on the clear web anymore. [1]: https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/ [2]: https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/git

bArray 6y ago

I would like to add to the discussion that there are many perfectly legal uses of YoutubeDL: * Downloading a video you uploaded and no longer have stored locally. * Downloading a video to create a fair-use response video. * Downloading video/music that is free commons (or some other non-restrictive license). * (Gray) Downloading content to archive it. * Downloading content you have already purchased and have in your possession. * (Dark gray) Downloading content you have a paid subscription to view, but don't have reliable internet. All of these anti-piracy measures need to answer one simple question - what stops somebody from just screen recording your material? At the point in which somebody can view your material on another device, you've lost a lot of control. P.S. This clone seems legit: `git clone https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git`

iruoy 6y ago
That server is a little busy since it's been mentioned here. I've copied that repo to these locations: https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl If a maintainer would like top aquire these orgs just message me. If anyone has an up to date repo of the github pages repo that'd be great too.
- bArray 6y ago
  > If anyone has an up to date repo of the github pages repo > that'd be great too. The webpage seems to be still up [1], it should be possible to grab those resources. The releases can be rebuilt from the tags - the only other thing is the issue tracking. It would be a super pain to lose 3.3k issues (and the discussions they contain) [2]. [1] https://yt-dl.org/ https://yt-dl.org/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144509/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues https://web.archive.org/web/20201018144509/https://github.co...
nitrogen 6y ago
what stops somebody from just screen recording your material? The end game is every device having a watermark detector. The PS3 wouldn't play BDs with pirated in-theater movies for example, due to audio watermarking.

how2draw 6y ago

Here's what you can do: 1. Clone the repository. Make an insignificant change to the initial commit in order to change all commit hashes. Push to github as a new repository. 2. Create a password "protected" zip file (or smaller volumes) containing the repository. Use a password that's easily found in common wordlists. Commit it to another project and push to github. Microsoft GitHub may be centralized, but it's not omniscient. RIAA may be a control freak, but it's not omnipotent. Let information be free for all.

tux1968 6y ago
This isn't really much of a help. There is no danger of losing access to the archive; it's popular enough that's it's essentially impossible to wipe from the internet. The issue is that now there is no central place where developers can pool their efforts to keep the code working. And it does need constant updates to address changes in the websites it downloads from.

sweetlucipher 6y ago

Can't I just FORK it and change the Readme and/or tests to not include references to what could be constituted as infringing acts, and purposely state that the purpose of MY FORK is to download YouTube videos that are in the public domain? If it's been taken down I am sure it will pop up on some torrent. The authors and all those who have contributed to it have copies. How can a court tell me not to publish generally useful software with a legitimate intent?

mhandley 6y ago

You can use Chrome to download from Youtube - you just need to know the temporary URL. One way to get this is to play the Youtube video in VLC - the media information window will tell you the temporary URL, and then you can use Chrome to download the content. So maybe the RIAA should issue a takedown request against the company that makes Chrome?

riclad 6y ago

What does it matter if I watch a song on YouTube or just dl the video. Mp4 and watch it, The riaa might say the reasons the videos are on YouTube is they promote the artist like old videos on MTV and someone gets paid ad revenue , In theory someone could just use a pc dl 1000s of videos put em on a pc and avoid watching ads Also video streams count to get a song in the charts and the riaa employs lawyers so they have to do something to justify their wages even if it will have no effect on the music marketplace or the behavior of the average music fan

theknocker 6y ago

How do I notify the RIAA that they can keep their private property out of my computer's temp folder then?

riclad 6y ago

Courts have ruled betamax Vcrs were legal, its legal to record tv shows and movies to watch them at a later date. Even though in theory Vcrs could be used for the purposes of piracy. Just because a device might be used to pirate content does not mean its can be banned. Like bittorrent is used by many non profits to distribute Open source software like Linux distro iso, s

ineedasername 6y ago

Even if the examples in the source code point to the code as deliberately enabling copyright infringement, I thought the DMCA takedown process was for actual copywritten content. Even if they are found, in a napster-like way, to be "illegal", it doesn't seem like a DMCA takedown notice is a valid mechanism to enforce the law here.

doompilot 6y ago

Anybody has a fork on the dark web we can all start using? (tor, i2p, whatever)

musicbizsucks 6y ago

I doubt there will be many pro-RIAA perspectives here so as someone familiar with their leadership and goals, I might as well add some perspective. Imagine yourself stumbling upon some incredible technology breakthrough. Let's say, it's some magical script you wrote that automatically improves the efficiency of any container by 70%+. You've worked for years on this specific problem, went broke a couple of times trying to figure it out, and finally struck gold. You form a company, issue that IP to the company, and start getting rich. Then one day, literally Google comes along and posts your script to some website they own, without your permission. They did this illegally, without your permission, by using this other neat script called gofyourself-dl. You have a problem now. Every is improving their containers or whatever for free. Your company loses revenue every day because why would anyone pay you for tech they can get for free from Google? What can you do? Sue Google? Good luck with that! No, you would complain to a regulator, which is the only real power (sort of) against that kind of money. You would try and convince that regulator to stop Google from stealing your IP and getting rich from it because it is YOUR IP and YOU should get rich from it. In the meantime, since gofyourself-dl is the way people are stealing your IP, you naturally try to get that taken down because IT IS BEING USED TO STEAL YOUR IP. Stealing IP is exactly what YouTube is - and has been - doing, for years. There is this weird idea that the major record labels (who fund the RIAA) have unlimited money and are just as evil as blah blah blah, in reality the entire music economy is a minuscule fraction of Google's market cap, power, size, influence, everything, and large tech companies have no real incentive to deal with them in the standard cases because why would an elephant concern itself with an ant. It sucks to do this to an open source repo, but everything they are saying in this memo is true - this technology is obviously being used to STEAL IP. Its primary focus is the THEFT OF IP. DMCA is a shitty blunt instrument that no one likes, don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism, but what else are they supposed to do? What would you do if it was someone stealing your proprietary code and posting everywhere after having stolen it from you?

akalsz 6y ago
Your proprietary code analogy is incredibly weird. Why would anyone need gofyourself-dl to download your container code? And what does Google have to do with the creation of youtube-dl, which is used to download stuff hosted on Google's website? And you talked about publishing code, but where does youtube-dl publish the videos it downloads? Or are you just implying that not executing all of Google's code and not watching a gazillion ads to download and view videos is some sort of "theft of IP"? Or is it that youtube-dl doesn't automatically delete the video after watching? I seriously don't get it. > don't for a second think the RIAA is thrilled with that mechanism What would they prefer doing? Arrest people who are using youtube-dl to listen to music? Go after people who are rehosting music from youtube on their website?

Paianni 6y ago

Unless the RIAA is actually going to take the owner of youtube-dl's domain to court, there's nothing (for now) stopping yt-dl from setting up another development platform of some sort. DMCA takedowns are cause for concern but they're not quite the be all and end all of a dispute.

johnisgood 6y ago

So... what is going to happen to youtube-dl? Will it get renamed considering it supports ~1155 websites (based on docs/supportedsites.md)? If it does get renamed, how are we going to know its name? Where do the developers going to push their changes, where is the development being continued?! Fuck everyone who complies with such retarded laws. Corruption is sometimes good, in cases such as these. :)

Pxtl 6y ago

Does YouTube embed any copyright metadata on the videos? An improved product could check for that first and prompt the user with a legal confirmation that they have the right to download the content if it was marked as copyrighted.

cwkoss 6y ago

Stuff like this is why I consider it unethical to pay for recorded music, unless distributed directly by the artist. Haven't bought music from a major distributor since I was a teenager. I don't want my money funding this sort of overreaching censorship.

maledorak 6y ago

I found few forks with full history and tags from yesterday (10/23/2020) https://github.com/marzzzello/youtube-dl https://github.com/marzzzello/youtube-dl https://github.com/koalp/youtube-dl https://github.com/koalp/youtube-dl https://github.com/r4rdsn/youtube-dl https://github.com/r4rdsn/youtube-dl https://git.osuv.de/star/youtube-dl https://git.osuv.de/star/youtube-dl https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader

dredmorbius 6y ago

Strategically / tactically, the most interesting aspect of the RIAA attack on youtube-dl to me is that it puts Microsoft on the spot to show its true colours. Is it Friend of Free Software, or Copyright Maximalist?

bergstromm466 6y ago
Yes. And since Microsoft and the RIAA are both in the contrived/artificial scarcity business, it’s pretty obvious to me what it’s going to be. The propertied classes won’t let this crisis pass without using it as an opportunity to further enclose and plunder the commons even more for the working classes.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  it’s pretty obvious to me what it’s going to be8 In which case we know, and the "but it's a NEW Microsoft" crowd can pound sand. I see ... an outside ... case Microsoft's not in the engineered-scarcity racket. I wwouldn't bet the farm, but it could be an interesting side wager.
a_imho 6y ago
Agreed, I'm interested to see if there is any merit to the new Microsoft hearts open source.

cblconfederate 6y ago

There is a lot of CC0 content on youtube that exists so you can download it, like stock video, sounds, background videos etc. How are we going to dowload those now? Also couldn't the youtub-dl team claim that the whole "drm video download test" was a security test?

psds2 6y ago

Tldr all these comments - youtube dl got in trouble because they link to copyrighted material in the readme which from a legal perspective shows intent to circumvent copyright. If they had just linked to videos they had uploaded themselves as examples everything would be fine.

lsiebert 6y ago

I just installed it from archive.org using the url homebrew uses. It's a simple matter to run brew install -d youtube-dl plug the url that into archive.org, download the archive, cp it to the dl location (minus the .incomplete) that brew expects, and then run it again without the -d so it thinks it is already downloaded. I wouldn't have installed if they hadn't done this, and I'll probably never use it, but this rubbed me the wrong way.

dredmorbius 6y ago

This isn't a DMCA takedown. It's a cease and desist letter citing the DMCA. The difference matters. GitHub is required to honor DMCA takedowns. Other legal requests are granted on a case by case basis. -- /u/telionn @ reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtubedl_just_received_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa/g9syfde/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtube... As I understand, takedown is a 17 USC 512 (copyright infringement) safe-harbour, but not a required or indemnifying protection under 17 USC 1201, anti-circumvention: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 Lumen (Chilling Effects) is silent on this point in their FAQ: https://lumendatabase.org/topics/14 https://lumendatabase.org/topics/14

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nimbius 6y ago

Most of the comments so far are ignoring the bigger picture: this isnt something new, its just the RIAA playing whack-a-mole with the DMCA hammer. Theyve been doing it for 20 years, and in those 20 years the most they have managed to accomplish is building a better, more resilient mole. Napster was followed by bittorrent, bittorrent by popcorntime, and youtube-dl. in the past 20 years the industry has quietly capitulated and delivered some content users really want like streaming audio services, but in the grande cosmos of the DMCA-related war on piracy the industry itself continues to do more to smite its own face than it does to offer a more reasonable and accessible product to their audience. There is nothing to keep me from writing something now that scrapes puseaudio for content triggered by mpv. the only real factor thats of concern is that this new backflip would be even harder for the RIAA to prosecute.

ezoe 6y ago

So, according to the RIAA's claim, it's > (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. https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2... (i) is strange claim as youtube-dl simply implements various streaming protocols public to anyone, most commonly used protocol is HLS which is just a simple list of URIs of small portion of video files in text file over HTTP/HTTPS. No technological protection whatsoever. (ii) can be easily avoided by simply removing or changing the example usage.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Welcome to the USA where the court system isn't about the law or justice. It's about who has the most money and resources to win a war of attrition in court.

ColanR 6y ago

So it looks like the takedown notice has nothing to do with the actual developer of youtube-dl. I.e., the developer could distribute their code somewhere else and the RIAA would be left playing whack-a-mole.

oleg131 6y ago

I couldn't find a copy for a binary on gitea, so I tried Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/download/2020.09.20/youtube-dl https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://github.com/ytdl-org/yo... E.g. the first snapshot redirects you to https://web.archive.org/web/20200923163719/https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/1039520/4d7f8100-fb3d-11ea-81a5-f6765f344302?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20200923%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200923T163611Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=4ecb9a6c88f2606975b4ccb394a06b0eee8298d8ebd31dc612454533814c1f86&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&key_id=0&repo_id=1039520&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dyoutube-dl&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream https://web.archive.org/web/20200923163719/https://github-pr... and it works.

ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago

OKAY OKAY MEAT & MEAT... Let's supress the cutlery... for the danger it brings! And you'll look so well... eating like a savages! :Ð

porjo 6y ago

I guess it was only a matter of time, the more popular it became. I have Youtube Premium and still use this utility every day for legitimate reasons (converting talk videos to audio file that I can listen to offline). Sad day for youtube-dl but I expect there will be many contenders to fill the void.

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l0b0 6y ago

I tried cloning the various forks mentioned in these threads. Summarized, I did this: $ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl $ cd youtube-dl $ git remote rename origin salsa-debian-org $ git remote add -f code-hackerspace-pl https://code.hackerspace.pl/q3k/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f git-technik-io https://git.teknik.io/ytdl-org/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f ytld-org https://gitlab.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl $ git remote add -f gitea-eponym-info https://gitea.eponym.info/Mirrors/youtube-dl.git $ git remote add -f gitee-com https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git Basically, it looks like https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git https://gitee.com/mirrors/youtube-downloader.git is the most up to date. The start of the log looks like this: $ git log --all --decorate --graph -n2 * commit 416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f (gitee-com/master) | Author: Sergey M․ <dstftw@gmail.com> | Date: Fri Oct 23 21:31:37 2020 +0700 | | [ytsearch] Fix extraction (closes #26920) | * commit 48c5663c5f7dd9ecc4720f7c1522627665197939 (ytld-org/master, gitea-eponym-info/master, git-technik-io/master, code-hackerspace-pl/master) | Author: Toan Nguyen <davidnguyen1501@gmail.com> | Date: Thu Oct 22 19:15:05 2020 +0700 | | [afreecatv] Fix typo (#26970) The salsa.debian.org repo seems to have diverged a long time ago (commit db29af6d36b3d16614355dac70f22c4f2d8410d2 in 2016??).

awwaiid 6y ago

"We have a good faith belief that this activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us." Quick call Pop, Timberlake, and Swift to end this!

m0zg 6y ago

Thanks to this takedown, hundreds of thousands of people will find out they can actually _download_ YT videos. Thanks, RIAA!

sushshshsh 6y ago

I can also use OBS or a Google Pixel to capture material from youtube but I don't see anyone going after them

iso1210 6y ago
Give it time for OBS. Google are safe of course, they're a large corporation, the law doesn't apply to corporations.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  Sad but true! At least at the OBS level, it's an application running on an operating system instead of in a browser controlled by a corporation (ok Windows is becoming more walled too...)

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ijcd 6y ago

The extractors directory had 765 extractors in it, only one of which is YouTube. The facts seem cherry-picked to support their case (well duh). Hopefully that will matter. Given that youtube is a tenth of a percent of the extractors maybe there's hope. FWIW, it's easy to find the code on Google. The release tarballs have the format youtube-dl-YYYY.MM.DD.tar.gz and one can look in the Homebrew Cellar, for example and see there was a release on 2020.09.20. ;)

akersten 6y ago
Even if YouTube was the only extractor, it shouldn't make a lick of difference - not everything on YouTube is owned by the RIAA as they'd like to believe!

amatecha 6y ago

Considering YouTube allows Creative-Commons licensed videos[0], how exactly do they suggest we "reuse and edit" videos, as per their own documentation? I'm not seeing any "Download video" button on a CC-licensed video's page, so... am I missing something here, or is one not forced to use a 3rd-party video download utility like youtube-dl to actually "reuse and edit" a CC-licensed video? [0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en

xvilka 6y ago

They can just move the project to IPFS[1] then, it has support for Git repositories [2]. [1] https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/ https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/host-git-style-repo/

xvilka 6y ago

They could also try to setup a mirror at https://gitee.com/ https://gitee.com/ which is more user friendly than GitHub, as this case confirms.

scastillo 6y ago

This is not youtube-dl please don't fork it or send pull requests back. Don't click this link: https://github.com/scastillo/not-youtube-dl https://github.com/scastillo/not-youtube-dl

easton 6y ago

I'm sure someone's already said it, but if you want the source tree with no history, it's still available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files https://pypi.org/project/youtube_dl/#files

vram22 6y ago

As a technical aside (to the main topic of this HN thread), I had written a blog post some years ago, describing some uses of youtube-dl, and some commentary giving an overview of what its source does: youtube-dl, a YouTube downloader in Python: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/03/youtube-dl-yourube-downloader-in-python.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/03/youtube-dl-yourube-downl...

vram22 6y ago
And here are a few other posts about youtube-dl or YouTube on my blog: pafy - Python API for YouTube: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/06/pafy-python-api-for-youtube.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/06/pafy-python-api-for-yout... youtube-dl, Python video download tool, on front page of Hacker News (2014): https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/11/youtube-dl-python-video-download-tool.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/11/youtube-dl-python-video-... How to download PyCon US 2013 videos for offline viewing using youtube-dl: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-download-pycon-us-2013-videos.html?m=0 https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-download-pycon-us...

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eshack94 6y ago

Even if youtube-dl doesn't get re-hosted on GitHub, is it likely that it will show up again on another site such as GitLab or a self-hosted repo by the maintainer?

dredmorbius 6y ago

ZDNet reports this is part of a larger action: "RIAA blitz takes down 18 GitHub projects used for downloading YouTube videos" aand isn't a DMCA 512 takedown: Although GitHub classified the RIAA letter as a DMCA takedown request, it is not one. As Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer pointed out today on Twitter, RIAA isn't alleging the library infringed on its rights, but that the library is illegal in itself. This isn’t really a DMCA request. I don’t see an assertion that youtube-dl is an infringing work. Rather the claim is that it’s illegal per se https://t.co/vQ16nVleCf https://t.co/vQ16nVleCf — John Bergmayer (@bergmayer) October 23, 2020 https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-github-projects-used-for-downloading-youtube-videos/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-githu...

Iv 6y ago

Delenda RIAA The whole copyright industry is based on toxic premises that do not hold true anymore in the internet age. By now, different models have been proven to work. Make them the norm. Abolish copyright. Or turn them back into what they were supposed to be: a TEMPORARY protection of a work since first publication (originally 21 years IIRC). Old Disney characters, superheroes invented in the 40s and 50s, even the "more recent" Starwars are part of culture now just like Othello or Moby Dick are. Allow to use them as such.

anticensor 6y ago
Originally 28 years in the US, perpertual but voluntary in the UK.
Eli_P 6y ago
> Abolish copyright If they did, it'd be still complicated. A real example, a modder makes some content for an old abandoned game. He needs some voice over, so he contacts the original voice actors, but they deny to do that job on the grounds of being a member of org like this[1] which strictly prohibits to take side jobs. And to make it even more complicated, consider tools like for making deep fakes; if somebody makes a neural network that emulates the original voice, should it be sub-licensed or copyrighted? Can a voice be copyrighted? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA

austincheney 6y ago

Strange that email made it through. I delete any email in my inbox that begins with: Dear Sir or Madam as it looks like spam.

anovikov 6y ago

Super surprising that software like this could exist in the legal space and with known creators. I mean, it's obviously a pirating app, it makes every effort to circumvent download protection right?

Synaesthesia 6y ago
It just takes a video stream and saves it. There is no DRM bypassing or anything
kristopolous 6y ago
No it's not at all. It's infrastructure. Mpv uses it, ffmpeg can use it. It's a generalized tool just like a hammer, the dreaded murder or construction weapon depending on intent.. The DMCA has always been a way of forbidding tools, as if that's the kind of nanny state we want: trusted with assault rifles but not trusted with a python script. Alright chill, makes total sense

antonzabirko 6y ago

What a shocker

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koyao 6y ago

Where can I clone the youtube-dl repo, err.. for educational purposes?

palashkulsh 6y ago

download it here before its gone from there too https://web.archive.org/web/20201015213331if_/https://github-production-release-asset-2e65be.s3.amazonaws.com/1039520/52dccb80-fb3d-11ea-938d-f7f62f4747a6?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWNJYAX4CSVEH53A%2F20201015%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20201015T213330Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Signature=260e2562a36587f4554cce9ecafca22a3db718e3f4cdb8103450d36c439319ca&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&actor_id=0&key_id=0&repo_id=1039520&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3Dyoutube-dl-2020.09.20.tar.gz&response-content-type=application%2Foctet-stream https://web.archive.org/web/20201015213331if_/https://github...

gorgoiler 6y ago

Does a DMCA takedown usually use phrasing “we ask that you do XYZ”? I’ve never scrutinized one before. I would have assumed it would be of the form “under the terms of the DMCA you are REQUIRED to etc etc”

Kliment 6y ago

Can we, as a community, cause damage and annoyance to RIAA executives and their member company executives? Here are some ideas: - Ban them from dating sites - Ban their kids from instagram/tiktok/whatever - Have web shops show all items as out of stock for them - Refuse to do business with them or their families, in general - subscribe them to real life spam - send their office envelopes of glitter I'm sure others can think of other methods. Maybe it's just vindictiveness on my part, but maybe it will make them reconsider their life choices if said choices came at a cost of permanent inconvenience.

skrebbel 6y ago
Don't do this. This is how gamergaters destroyed people's lives. It starts with a little bit of doxxing and it ends with well meaning humans (who you happen to disagree with) hiding on their high school friend's couch, two states away from their families.
- Kliment 6y ago
  I get that, and yeah it's bad. But there's also a deep frustration with how these fuckers can do this stuff and get away with it. So how does one push back?
  - taywrobel 6y ago
    If they’re willing to fight it, help pay their legal fees. Win in court, set a better precedent. That is how change happens in the world, not by trying to ruin the lives of individuals emblematic of a flawed system but quite likely perfectly decent people in and of themselves.
- sneak 6y ago
  What GG did was illegal, everything GP suggested is harmless (and legal). You should not conflate the two. Creating negative consequences for poor choices in society is a great and effective tool that should be used more often.

mola 6y ago

Shameful

hkt 6y ago

Maybe it is time to host the project outside of the US?

Bellamy 6y ago

Where can I find youtube-dl now? I'm ready to be a sponsor for the project to live further.

names_are_hard 6y ago
Search in this thread (across multiple pages), a number of people have posted mirrors. You can clone, rehost, and share. It would be ironic if this backfires on them because of the Streisand effect.

choeger 6y ago

This fight against software is growing into bizarre forms. What's next? cURL? I really wish there was some kind of retribution in the typical OSS licenses. You censor free software, free software censors you. I think these organization would think twice to take down a project if they would immediately lose access to Linux, Apache, Python, et. al.

hadcomplained 6y ago

I sometimes imagine how wonderful it'd be if there were a viable alternative to the Web that is decentralized and infeasible to censor, only to realize that how great it is for the freedom, is the exact reason why it doesn't exist. It's just too inconvenient for those in power. That might be why Tor was funded by the government. Its primary functionality is to strengthen the existing Web, rather than to be some competing force to the Web.

rhabarba 6y ago

Ahh, centralized version control. Such a good idea.

kzrdude 6y ago
Anyone working on ytdl will have a full copy of the history at home, undisturbed, so distribution is working as it should. There is no single point of failure.
- rhabarba 6y ago
  Then why does the takedown matter? See, the infrastructure still revolves around one master repository.

arafsheikh 6y ago

Here’s the source code encoded as two images: https://twitter.com/galacticfurball/status/1319765986791157761 https://twitter.com/galacticfurball/status/13197659867911577...

nolim1t 6y ago

Time to use gittorrent! https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent

names_are_hard 6y ago

Some time in the last few hours the devs have updated their site (https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/) with a notice about the takedown and removed the broken github links. You can now download the latest executables again. I'm looking forward to seeing their new home.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

I guess this means Brew formula for youtube-dl stops working - mines already installed and I'm not uninstalling to check but it's interesting.

jimnotgym 6y ago

I can't find reference to who is going to defend this? Is EFF going to pick it up? Can we donate?

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

So recently I asked if Unix v6 is the "To Kill a Mockingbird" of computer science, then what is the Huckleberry Finn. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856047 This thing with YouTube-dl makes me consider that one quality that a "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" of computer science should possess is having been banned. Of course YouTube-dl might not be the Huckleberry Finn, but maybe it is something like The Satanic Verses (which I was never a fan of).

dredmorbius 6y ago

The more I look at the RIAA's complaint, the stranger it seems. I'm not even sure that the RIAA has standing to sue or could demonstrate injury: - The claimed anti-circ method is not the RIAA's, it is Google's (via YouTube). - As a user agent, youtube-dl is simple an alternate Web access method which runs code from the YouTube website as a necessary part of the process of accessing and playing content ... meant to be accessed and downloaded. - Youtube-dl has substantial non-infringing use. 17 USC 1201(a)(2)(B) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 See 17 USC 1203: Civil remedies: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1203 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1203

mugivarra69 6y ago

time to move to gitlab.

hackerman123469 6y ago
That won't make much of a difference since both are American companies.

anta40 6y ago

The latest version is: 2020.09.20, yes? I already grabbed the source code days ago, but forgot the grab the Windows binary. Anyone keep the binary, or perhaps simply have to compile it? :D

muterad_murilax 6y ago
https://youtube-dl.org/ https://youtube-dl.org/

iamnot_fussy 6y ago

Have we heard anything from the youtube-dl developers yet? Have they made some sort of statement? Are they really going to get sued? Is it possible to support them (other than through the EFF: https://eff.org/donate/ https://eff.org/donate/)? Has github made a statement yet? (Oh and don't think for one moment that the RIAA's actions have anything to do with supporting the struggling artist.)

panpanna 6y ago

We need a rouge git server. Like silk road but for your open source fixes...

sj_krueger 6y ago

I have created the youtube-dl repo at Darktea, feel free to create your anonymous accounts and join the project, until we find a better/decentralized place. For now this should be sufficient: http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzhvyd.onion/sj.krueger/youtube-dl http://it7otdanqu7ktntxzm427cba6i53w6wlanlh23v5i3siqmos47pzh... I will give the main contributors the neccessary access for reviewing/merging/etc.. or will entirely hand over the project if you can prove you are the maintainer.

arendtio 6y ago

...and I always though youtube-dl was the tool someone built so that Youtube was in compliance with the GDPA and let us export our videos ;-) scnr

richardARPANET 6y ago

Very pathetic that Github took this repository down. I was about to move our company code over to Github from self hosted Gitlab, this move has put the a the brakes on that.

zeusflight 6y ago
If anyone thinks that Github had no choice but to follow the legal notice, I want to mention that youtube-dlc [1], a community fork of youtube-dl, is also taken down. This fork is not even mentioned in the DMCA notice [2]. Github is complicit in this. [1] https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...

Havoc 6y ago

Better take down wget too just to be sure

mosselman 6y ago

Damn this sucks. Luckily I just recovered a tar from the homebrew cache with the source code. Lets hope someone will create a creative-commons-dl or something soon.

med_abidi 6y ago

This is shit!

dr_dshiv 6y ago

I remember during the Napster days dressing up as an RIAA agent for Halloween, with combat gear and a blowtorch to burn CDs

htrap 6y ago

Saw this coming. We are working on https://dgit.sh https://dgit.sh for the last couple of months. Dgit is a decentralized code collaboration platform where we harness the power of git for versioning and arweave blockchain for permanent data storage. We also have a Dgit community on https://community.xyz https://community.xyz where the stakeholders take all decisions transparently via a vote. Dgit will be available for use after its launch on 2nd November. If you are interested in what we are doing feel free to join our discord and chat with us https://bit.ly/dgitchat https://bit.ly/dgitchat

laplacedemon 6y ago

This makes me want to stop using GitHub. I especially feel bad because I have a paid GitHub account, and I don't like the idea about my money sponsoring censorship activities like this one. I wonder what a good alternative would be?.. Bitbucket perhaps?

vms20591 6y ago

This was bound to happen with proprietary services like GitHub. It's better to use self-hostable services like GitLab & Gitea, where we can have regular backups of everything - code, issues and any other metadata. So, the service can be up shortly. Sure, GitHub like features offer more than just a space to host our code. It has become a goto site for example, finding new and interesting repos to contribute to. It's important that the devs or community that develop a software think about the potential censorship it might have to encounter from thugs like DMCA, based on what is it that they develop and evaluate the choice of hosting.

neves 6y ago

BTW, I just installed it using `choco install youtube-downloader`. Nice to have while they don't find a new location. It also showcases a marvelous advantage of using git as a VCS, they automatically have multiple backups and can easily transport the project. And it showcases that all the other project info, like issues and comments should also be under version control and downloaded in developers machines. You can't depend on an external service for your project. BTW, is it possible to use GitHub features in a distribute way? E.g.: create issues in my machine and pushing it to the server?

noobermin 6y ago

Just a couple of days ago, I replied[0] to a comment about how the RIAA/MPAA won. Looks like I was right. They just made peace with youtube and now have them enforce their rights, despite the silliness of this "takedown"

hubbabubbarex 6y ago

Youtube you suck! You spy cheat and lie... Sell privacy of users to 3rd party.. Just like buggy Facebook.

johnisgood 6y ago

This is going to be difficult to find the authors' comments if there are any. I am still curious where will the development continue because downloading from YouTube often breaks and requires some fixing, i.e. update youtube-dl and it works! :/

URfejk 6y ago

Already at number 4 on all-time list: http://www.hntoplinks.com/all http://www.hntoplinks.com/all

bonoboTP 6y ago

Even Google Research themselves use youtube-dl when assembling computer vision datasets. The only way to work on their data and reproduce the results is through youtube-dl, as video datasets are often only distributed as URLs and timestamps, and even the example codes use youtube-dl. I wonder how this will impact the AI research community if there's some FUD around this tool. Generally scraping is a gray area. I know researchers who scraped Google street view for large areas to train AI models without Googles approval and got hired by Google for their impressive AI skills instead of threatened. I know researchers are a tiny group compared to consumers, but it's still interesting I think.

pseudosavant 6y ago

There are multiple extensions in Google's own Android Chrome stores for downloading videos from YouTube and everyone else. I just used a few to download and HLS stream that was having severe buffering issues. It would seem hard to argue that Google is completely against it when they could be considered a contributor to the "problem". Providing apps that violate their own TOS. Not just source code, but actual apps/extensions.

TLightful 6y ago

I'll download what I want, when I want.

kemonocode 6y ago

I'd think the RIAA and Google are well acquainted with the Streisand effect by now... I'm just hoping the takedown will prompt a whole bunch of people to contribute to youtube-dl out of spite, as I know it had been lagging behind due to simply not having enough contributors. I'd even go ahead and throw down the glove.

amelius 6y ago

I used YouTube-dl to watch videos, not to download and store them. Are user-agents illegal now?

gadders 6y ago

This takes me right back to those heady days of DeCSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

readme 6y ago

If you still have youtube-dl on your system (at least the version distributed on homebrew) your youtube-dl file is compressed. You can get the full source code by chopping the shebang line off the top and unzipping the file.

t0mmyb0y 6y ago

Counter sue for a bunch of money for wasting your time.

7ewis 6y ago

Someone uploaded the source to Twitter inside an image: https://twitter.com/GalacticFurball/status/1319765986791157761 https://twitter.com/GalacticFurball/status/13197659867911577...

daodedickinson 6y ago

This is just the next terrifying development on Planet China. YouTube-dl went unmolested for years. About week ago, I was party to an online conversation a week ago about how youtube-dl is an important tool for archiving videos of public officials before they can be disappeared. Coincidence? After the RIAA won a case against Limewire in 2010, the next significant legal action I can find in a bit of looking is that the US Supreme Court ruled against the RIAA in Allen v. Cooper (March 23, 2020). Here are the opinions: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-877#writing-18-877_OPINION_3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/18-877#writing... I have a lot to look into...

Stephen304 6y ago

Add github/dmca to the list of mirrors: https://github.com/github/dmca/archive/416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f.zip https://github.com/github/dmca/archive/416da574ec0df3388f652... ;)

apetresc 6y ago

I've been hoarding significant YouTube channels for years, at a cost of many terabytes of HDD space. Even though they were always available for free, I was always betting on the fact that YouTube's status as being incredibly easy to archive would not last forever. I feel vindicated, but also sad that the end of this particular era has finally arrived :(

kelvin0 6y ago

You could use your rifle/pistol/firearm to shoot unlawful transpasser, but since it's also able to shoot down innocent children in our neighborhood, please cease and desist.

xtat 6y ago

How is the RIAA still a thing? They came after me in the early 00s for running an indie napster server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNap

shmerl 6y ago

So what's the latest update on it. Did they counter claim? Did anyone set up a fork repo?

weetniet 6y ago

This is a heavy blow for the community, regardless of where forks show up.

francisperron 6y ago

They should take down all browsers and Internet we can use it too download stuff... this is so stupid. Don't want your stuff to be downloaded, don't put it online.

anseed 6y ago

Good

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dpumpshitlord 6y ago

RIAA is outta pocket, tell em to eat your ass

dpumpshitlord 6y ago

Let them pay to take you to court—

dpumpshitlord 6y ago

Music industry died when distribution changed, just die already