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> Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a v

> Probably the lawyers will move on when the thing becomes hard enough to use and gets contained few techies showing off to their few friends and calling it a victory. youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways, and they specifically took down the code repository. On top of that youtube-dl is a commandline tool. This is not your typical "google how do I netflix" end-user. You can bootstrap an application that is hosted on tor or i2p with a short bash script: 1. download and start tor/i2p, 2. download the application, 3. run it. youtube-dl already has a built-in updater (youtube-dl -U). You'd just change that to use tor/i2p as well. Anyone who can't get such a script to run wouldn't have been able to use youtube-dl anyways.

mrtksn 6y ago
There’s nothing stopping you from writing your own downloader too. It’s not about making video downloads impossible, they are probably gunning to disrupt the development of the project so it would not be able to keep up with the changes of the video websites, make it painful to use, thus eventually insignificant.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
> youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes. For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc. I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else". [1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM
- ric2b 6y ago
  Those tools are built by developers, which will have no issue with getting access to youtube-dl in more technical ways.
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    Presumably the point of the action is to disrupt the ongoing development of youtube-dl, not delete the code from the internet. I don't know much about the codebase, but I assume that YouTube could put time into breaking compatibility if it was known that the project had lost momentum and couldn't keep up. It takes a lot of effort to keep up with a well funded organisation - see NewPipe, etc. Of course you don't need GitHub to run an open source software project, you could conceivably do it with IPoAC[1] if you really wanted to. But in the real world, being kicked off the most popular platform of its kind, and losing the community and integrations that come with it, is going to slow the project down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

mrtksn 6y ago

There’s nothing stopping you from writing your own downloader too. It’s not about making video downloads impossible, they are probably gunning to disrupt the development of the project so it would not be able to keep up with the changes of the video websites, make it painful to use, thus eventually insignificant.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

> youtube-dl is a tool mostly used by techies anyways This is just speculation, but I think that there may have been a tipping point reached where it is no longer being just used by CLI "techies". It has been incorporated into other tools which appeal to a much wider userbase - many of whom will never know they are using it behind the scenes. For example, there is: a user-friendly front-end for it in Kodi [1], an easy to use web interface [2], a polished desktop app [3], etc. I suspect it's not so much the original CLI which they care about, but the lowering of the barrier to entry for "everyone else". [1] https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl https://github.com/ruuk/script.module.youtube.dl [2] https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube https://github.com/Rudloff/alltube [3] https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM https://github.com/ingbyr/VDM

ric2b 6y ago
Those tools are built by developers, which will have no issue with getting access to youtube-dl in more technical ways.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  Presumably the point of the action is to disrupt the ongoing development of youtube-dl, not delete the code from the internet. I don't know much about the codebase, but I assume that YouTube could put time into breaking compatibility if it was known that the project had lost momentum and couldn't keep up. It takes a lot of effort to keep up with a well funded organisation - see NewPipe, etc. Of course you don't need GitHub to run an open source software project, you could conceivably do it with IPoAC[1] if you really wanted to. But in the real world, being kicked off the most popular platform of its kind, and losing the community and integrations that come with it, is going to slow the project down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers