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> did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. They had no alternative other than not having tests for that

by nullc 6y ago

> did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. They had no alternative other than not having tests for that particular functionality. The tests were testing youtube-partner specific functionality: the procedure needed to download content from some youtube partners is different. Moreover, the tests just throw away the downloaded material... it would be entirely reasonable for a court to conclude that there is no copyright interest involved in that activity at all and would be extraordinarily unlikely that any court would find it to be anything but fair use if they did conclude a copyright was involved at all. If it hadn't been the test cases the RIAA probably would have dug up some old forum post advocating infringement by some occasional contributor. They were always going to argue something.

filmgirlcw 6y ago
The fact that they had to have tests set to get around certain partners — partners who, it could be argued, had different provisions to try to limit the download of their content - works against them. In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo. ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Not really, it's important that yt-dl be able to download partnered content to allow for their fair use. Plus, the unit test IIRC only downloaded a 100KB (thus less than one second) chunk.

by nullc 6y ago

filmgirlcw 6y ago

The fact that they had to have tests set to get around certain partners — partners who, it could be argued, had different provisions to try to limit the download of their content - works against them. In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo. ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Not really, it's important that yt-dl be able to download partnered content to allow for their fair use. Plus, the unit test IIRC only downloaded a 100KB (thus less than one second) chunk.