8 ms·

Update: YouTube-dl reinstated thanks to EFF (2020)

430 points by ericdanielski 6y ago

rurban 6y ago
> more importantly, all the metadata (for example, issues and pull requests) that was posted on the platform by users, developers and maintainers. Such information is invaluable to a project, and a takedown of the entire repository with all this data can hurt a project very badly. That's why you regularly need to update your issues with `git bug bridge pull`. Then you have all the issues locally, and are not bound to slick but the unfree website UI. You can edit and add issues locally and push it eventually. Only problem is: corabolation on issues with such a temp. took down GH project relies on everybody interacting with it via git bug. But all the bug refs are pushed upstream, wherever that is. About lost pull requests: Regular remote branches are the standard workflow, and an issue can carry the description, if the commits are not descriptive enough. Problems: issues are not numbered, only have hashes. They can be merged out of order, there's no central truth. So references in docs or commits need to use the hash, like bug #4e327af, not just GH #403.
- jhauris 6y ago
  For those down voting, can someone comment on why this would not be a good idea? I hadn't heard of git-bug, are there other caveats one should be aware of, or is there a reason this isn't a problem worth solving?
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    Do they maybe want to be able to trust Github for the service they claim to provide? And do they maybe agree with the initial takedown?
- inetknght 6y ago
  > update your issues with `git bug bridge pull` $ man git-bug No manual entry for git-bug $ git bug git: 'bug' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. The most similar commands are log tag $ git --version git version 2.17.1 What is `git bug`?
  - michaelmure 6y ago
    See https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
  - antman 6y ago
    Seems to be this one: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug#bridges https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug#bridges
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
jrochkind1 6y ago
> There is one thing that has been and is always going to be counterproductive, especially in such situations: blind actionism. Many people flooded the Internet (read: forums, Reddit, bug trackers of projects), inciting panic and suggesting to move to some other “free” hosted platform. This is clearly not a solution. Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in court.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  In addition, there is huge benefit if you can persuade a large company to defend against this. GitHub/Microsoft is one of the few entities that actually has the financial and legal firepower to take on the recording and music industry. The smaller hosts may not have the financial and legal cushion to do anything but rollover if the music industry lawyers send them a notice.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  Any hosting platform in the US.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  > Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in court. Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do whatever they want until someone challenges them? While it's good that github eventually returned it, their willingness to comply with such a sham should make projects consider moving from them.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    > Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do whatever they want until someone challenges them? The takedown request didn't claim the project was an unauthorised post of copyright material. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure, and US law is sufficiently vague on that matter it really can't be said definitively one way or another if that's correct unless someone is willing to litigate it. Nobody does, in this case. Certainly, describing the request as "completely fraudulent" is wrong. It may or may not have been valid, but the legislation is sufficiently vague in most of the US and Europe that it's entirely possible this could go to court and the RIAA would win.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
reinstantiated? or reinstated? this is not news (2020)
- nicky0 6y ago
  It's of interest.
- musicale 6y ago
  It should probably be "reinstated" as you suggest. And the title has been labeled (2020) as you suggest. HN isn't up-to-the-minute "news" necessarily; the best date I've seen recently on HN was (516). ;-)
  - dang 6y ago
    I liked that date too :) - but I think the issue here is not the age of the article but the fact that there was a massive thread about this not long ago, which makes this post a dupe. Unless there's significant new info in there?
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago
  Further bulk of discussion from November: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726
wonder_er 6y ago
It sounds like the real "Lesson to be Learned" is: "When a large organization makes asinine threats with spurious reasoning, take a lawyer friend to lunch and help them draft a sternly-worded email about the offending organization." "Mail said letter to threatened party. No further action needed. Go back to solving meaningful problems."
louloulou 6y ago
Information doesn't want to be free - Cory Doctorow - Tech Forum 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA
aryehbeitz 6y ago
now sosumi is taken off snap store, probably due to pressure from apple
lmilcin 6y ago
Just a reminder, that for every reinstated project there is bunch of other that are going to die without public support. So no, the problem did not get resolved.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think the hope is that getting a few high profile counters out there will have a chilling effect on the RIAA being so cavalier with their notices - but I do agree that if the counters would, in perpetuity, take hours of lawyers' time then I'm uncertain if RIAA or the counter notices will scale better.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    Except that it keeps happening constantly and platform-owning companies just quietly "correct" the error and everything is fine. It is not a fair process if it requires you to get public outrage. Whenever I see a story of a kid which family succeeded to collect money for an expensive treatment thanks to public outcry, I always think about all those other kids who were not so fortunate to get public interested in them. Should we be happy that we got one of a thousand saved or should we be thinking there is something fundamentally wrong?
  - mattnewton 6y ago
    Why would this chill the RIAA? What were the consequences to their lawyers?
Matheus28 6y ago
Remember to donate to EFF if you support their work.
oehpr 6y ago
>Regarding GitHub, it is sad that they took down the repository at all. It’s a well-known pattern: platforms rather comply with such requests than risking litigation, requiring projects to invest time and money to fund lawyers themselves (or hope for an association such as the EFF to pick up their case). The moment they published the request and took down the repositories, many experts immediately raised concerns that the request itself is illegal. It remains questionable why GitHub’s legal team didn’t recognize this. ok... am I crazy? I thought when someone sends a DMCA request to you, the platform, that you are required to take the content down and wait for a counter notice from that contents author. The legality of the message is not your problem. You receive the DMCA, you take the content down, if you get a counter claim, you put it back up, the two parties go to court. If that's correct, then can you really criticize github for following an odious law? Whether we like it or not, they are bound by these requirements.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  You’re correct. However, you only have to take down valid claims. If I issue a take down for a music video owned by, say, WMG, Google doesn’t have to listen if they can see I don’t have the right to. That’s where people are coming from: they’re saying the takedown was never valid, so GitHub (Microsoft) didn’t have to listen to it. The big problem with that is: if GitHub refused to take it down but the RIAA prevailed in court, GitHub would lose their “safe harbor” protections. The DMCA is heavily tilted in favor of the supposed rights holder, and GitHub really did have no choice in that situation. It’s messed up, but it’s the reality of the laws of the land. There’s also the issue of people who are mistaken and think it was a section 512 notice (direct copyright infringement) when it wasn’t. It was a section 1201 one (DRM circumvention). We can argue all day about whether it’s DRM circumvention or not, but the fact of the matter is: there was obfuscation of some sort, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince a judge that that counts as DRM. GitHub erred on the side of caution here.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > If that's correct, then can you really criticize github for following an odious law? You can criticize them and you should.It is their choice to run GitHub in a US jurisdiction. Many other places in the world are not as repressive. (Plus, I'm betting there's at least some mechanism to reject frivolous DMCA takedown requests immediately.)
dang 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726
SixDouble5321 6y ago
This is why I donate every month. Not all heros wear capes.

430 points by ericdanielski 6y ago

> more importantly, all the metadata (for example, issues and pull requests) that was posted on the platform by users, developers and maintainers. Such information is invaluable to a project, and a takedown of the entire repository with all this data can hurt a project very badly. That's why you regularly need to update your issues with `git bug bridge pull`. Then you have all the issues locally, and are not bound to slick but the unfree website UI. You can edit and add issues locally and push it eventually. Only problem is: corabolation on issues with such a temp. took down GH project relies on everybody interacting with it via git bug. But all the bug refs are pushed upstream, wherever that is. About lost pull requests: Regular remote branches are the standard workflow, and an issue can carry the description, if the commits are not descriptive enough. Problems: issues are not numbered, only have hashes. They can be merged out of order, there's no central truth. So references in docs or commits need to use the hash, like bug #4e327af, not just GH #403.

jhauris 6y ago
For those down voting, can someone comment on why this would not be a good idea? I hadn't heard of git-bug, are there other caveats one should be aware of, or is there a reason this isn't a problem worth solving?
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  Do they maybe want to be able to trust Github for the service they claim to provide? And do they maybe agree with the initial takedown?
inetknght 6y ago
> update your issues with `git bug bridge pull` $ man git-bug No manual entry for git-bug $ git bug git: 'bug' is not a git command. See 'git --help'. The most similar commands are log tag $ git --version git version 2.17.1 What is `git bug`?
- michaelmure 6y ago
  See https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
- antman 6y ago
  Seems to be this one: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug#bridges https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug#bridges
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

jrochkind1 6y ago

> There is one thing that has been and is always going to be counterproductive, especially in such situations: blind actionism. Many people flooded the Internet (read: forums, Reddit, bug trackers of projects), inciting panic and suggesting to move to some other “free” hosted platform. This is clearly not a solution. Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in court.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
In addition, there is huge benefit if you can persuade a large company to defend against this. GitHub/Microsoft is one of the few entities that actually has the financial and legal firepower to take on the recording and music industry. The smaller hosts may not have the financial and legal cushion to do anything but rollover if the music industry lawyers send them a notice.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
Any hosting platform in the US.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
> Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in court. Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do whatever they want until someone challenges them? While it's good that github eventually returned it, their willingness to comply with such a sham should make projects consider moving from them.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  > Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do whatever they want until someone challenges them? The takedown request didn't claim the project was an unauthorised post of copyright material. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure, and US law is sufficiently vague on that matter it really can't be said definitively one way or another if that's correct unless someone is willing to litigate it. Nobody does, in this case. Certainly, describing the request as "completely fraudulent" is wrong. It may or may not have been valid, but the legislation is sufficiently vague in most of the US and Europe that it's entirely possible this could go to court and the RIAA would win.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

reinstantiated? or reinstated? this is not news (2020)

nicky0 6y ago
It's of interest.
musicale 6y ago
It should probably be "reinstated" as you suggest. And the title has been labeled (2020) as you suggest. HN isn't up-to-the-minute "news" necessarily; the best date I've seen recently on HN was (516). ;-)
- dang 6y ago
  I liked that date too :) - but I think the issue here is not the age of the article but the fact that there was a massive thread about this not long ago, which makes this post a dupe. Unless there's significant new info in there?
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
Further bulk of discussion from November: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726

wonder_er 6y ago

It sounds like the real "Lesson to be Learned" is: "When a large organization makes asinine threats with spurious reasoning, take a lawyer friend to lunch and help them draft a sternly-worded email about the offending organization." "Mail said letter to threatened party. No further action needed. Go back to solving meaningful problems."

louloulou 6y ago

Information doesn't want to be free - Cory Doctorow - Tech Forum 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-or9aNnz-CA

aryehbeitz 6y ago

now sosumi is taken off snap store, probably due to pressure from apple

lmilcin 6y ago

Just a reminder, that for every reinstated project there is bunch of other that are going to die without public support. So no, the problem did not get resolved.

munk-a 6y ago
I think the hope is that getting a few high profile counters out there will have a chilling effect on the RIAA being so cavalier with their notices - but I do agree that if the counters would, in perpetuity, take hours of lawyers' time then I'm uncertain if RIAA or the counter notices will scale better.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  Except that it keeps happening constantly and platform-owning companies just quietly "correct" the error and everything is fine. It is not a fair process if it requires you to get public outrage. Whenever I see a story of a kid which family succeeded to collect money for an expensive treatment thanks to public outcry, I always think about all those other kids who were not so fortunate to get public interested in them. Should we be happy that we got one of a thousand saved or should we be thinking there is something fundamentally wrong?
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Why would this chill the RIAA? What were the consequences to their lawyers?

Matheus28 6y ago

Remember to donate to EFF if you support their work.

oehpr 6y ago

>Regarding GitHub, it is sad that they took down the repository at all. It’s a well-known pattern: platforms rather comply with such requests than risking litigation, requiring projects to invest time and money to fund lawyers themselves (or hope for an association such as the EFF to pick up their case). The moment they published the request and took down the repositories, many experts immediately raised concerns that the request itself is illegal. It remains questionable why GitHub’s legal team didn’t recognize this. ok... am I crazy? I thought when someone sends a DMCA request to you, the platform, that you are required to take the content down and wait for a counter notice from that contents author. The legality of the message is not your problem. You receive the DMCA, you take the content down, if you get a counter claim, you put it back up, the two parties go to court. If that's correct, then can you really criticize github for following an odious law? Whether we like it or not, they are bound by these requirements.

colejohnson66 6y ago
You’re correct. However, you only have to take down valid claims. If I issue a take down for a music video owned by, say, WMG, Google doesn’t have to listen if they can see I don’t have the right to. That’s where people are coming from: they’re saying the takedown was never valid, so GitHub (Microsoft) didn’t have to listen to it. The big problem with that is: if GitHub refused to take it down but the RIAA prevailed in court, GitHub would lose their “safe harbor” protections. The DMCA is heavily tilted in favor of the supposed rights holder, and GitHub really did have no choice in that situation. It’s messed up, but it’s the reality of the laws of the land. There’s also the issue of people who are mistaken and think it was a section 512 notice (direct copyright infringement) when it wasn’t. It was a section 1201 one (DRM circumvention). We can argue all day about whether it’s DRM circumvention or not, but the fact of the matter is: there was obfuscation of some sort, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince a judge that that counts as DRM. GitHub erred on the side of caution here.
einpoklum 6y ago
> If that's correct, then can you really criticize github for following an odious law? You can criticize them and you should.It is their choice to run GitHub in a US jurisdiction. Many other places in the world are not as repressive. (Plus, I'm betting there's at least some mechanism to reject frivolous DMCA takedown requests immediately.)

dang 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25111726

SixDouble5321 6y ago

This is why I donate every month. Not all heros wear capes.