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> 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 wa

> 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.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure The takedown notices do not apply to DRM circumvention measures, only copyright material. I agree it's completely possible that a court case could rule against youtube-dl, but the only method for taking down a DRM circumvention tool is to get a court order.
  - Mindwipe 6y ago
    DRM circumvention measures don't have a takedown provision as such, but the hoster becomes jointly liable as soon as they are notified, which was the point of the letter.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      If this were true, it would make no sense for github to have reinstated youtube-dl. I assume such legal liability would need the start of a lawsuit to be valid.
      - Mindwipe 6y ago
        > If this were true, it would make no sense for github to have reinstated youtube-dl. Github took a punt that the RIAA weren't going to take it to court, because they don't want to risk establishing that the circumvention provisions are more limited in a court case. They got a lot of free PR out of it with little risk, that's why they did it. As I said at the time, I wouldn't want to litigate on either side of this case. The law is badly drafted, there's little precedent, and I think it's a genuine 50/50. Any lawyer on both sides would advise you not to do so. I suspect the main reason is that the RIAA can now go back to Google and say they are in breach of contract for not preventing downloads on YouTube using technical protection measures, and push them to switch to Widevine on everything with any music in it.
wonder_er 6y ago
Based on how easily the EFF resolved the problem by sending that notice to GitHub, it feels like this could be an easy problem to solve in the future.. The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a handful of really interesting blog posts. I would say this entire story is something to celebrate, because it shows how easily a single person could stop this. Mitchell L. Stoltz, Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF signed this letter, which probably took no more than handful of man hours to compile. Pretty great roi.
- stretchcat 6y ago
  Not every project will have a sufficiently high profile for the EFF to notice. Relying on the EFF like this doesn't scale, isn't future proof, and doesn't address the long tail of the problem.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    I think it'll most likely come down to a question of cost per incident - while a couple of lawyer hours is certainly relatively cheap if that same cost is required for every similar RIAA take down request then you'd need to look at how many hours it takes for RIAA to identify a good target and produce a take down notice. The effortlessness of this particular incident gives me hope that if the volume of take downs increased then maybe the EFF or someone else could essentially put together a form reply.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  >The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a handful of really interesting blog posts. It's not clear that the RIAA needed to spend any real lawyer man hours making the request, I don't think a designated agent needs to be a lawyer but even if they do they just send a form letter.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Even if the RIAA payed 1.5 lawyer hours to the EFF’s 1, this is a bad trade IMO. And I doubt the RIAA is spending significant time on these cases based on their record of general sloppyness (ex- the time the RIAA sued charter for infringement on songs they didn’t have the copyright to, after making the same mistake with Cox https://abovethelaw.com/2020/03/riaa-realizes-it-sued-charter-over-a-bunch-of-songs-it-doesnt-hold-the-copyrights-for/ https://abovethelaw.com/2020/03/riaa-realizes-it-sued-charte...)

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.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
>. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure The takedown notices do not apply to DRM circumvention measures, only copyright material. I agree it's completely possible that a court case could rule against youtube-dl, but the only method for taking down a DRM circumvention tool is to get a court order.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  DRM circumvention measures don't have a takedown provision as such, but the hoster becomes jointly liable as soon as they are notified, which was the point of the letter.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    If this were true, it would make no sense for github to have reinstated youtube-dl. I assume such legal liability would need the start of a lawsuit to be valid.
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      > If this were true, it would make no sense for github to have reinstated youtube-dl. Github took a punt that the RIAA weren't going to take it to court, because they don't want to risk establishing that the circumvention provisions are more limited in a court case. They got a lot of free PR out of it with little risk, that's why they did it. As I said at the time, I wouldn't want to litigate on either side of this case. The law is badly drafted, there's little precedent, and I think it's a genuine 50/50. Any lawyer on both sides would advise you not to do so. I suspect the main reason is that the RIAA can now go back to Google and say they are in breach of contract for not preventing downloads on YouTube using technical protection measures, and push them to switch to Widevine on everything with any music in it.

wonder_er 6y ago

Based on how easily the EFF resolved the problem by sending that notice to GitHub, it feels like this could be an easy problem to solve in the future.. The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a handful of really interesting blog posts. I would say this entire story is something to celebrate, because it shows how easily a single person could stop this. Mitchell L. Stoltz, Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF signed this letter, which probably took no more than handful of man hours to compile. Pretty great roi.

stretchcat 6y ago
Not every project will have a sufficiently high profile for the EFF to notice. Relying on the EFF like this doesn't scale, isn't future proof, and doesn't address the long tail of the problem.
- munk-a 6y ago
  I think it'll most likely come down to a question of cost per incident - while a couple of lawyer hours is certainly relatively cheap if that same cost is required for every similar RIAA take down request then you'd need to look at how many hours it takes for RIAA to identify a good target and produce a take down notice. The effortlessness of this particular incident gives me hope that if the volume of take downs increased then maybe the EFF or someone else could essentially put together a form reply.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
>The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a handful of really interesting blog posts. It's not clear that the RIAA needed to spend any real lawyer man hours making the request, I don't think a designated agent needs to be a lawyer but even if they do they just send a form letter.
mattnewton 6y ago
Even if the RIAA payed 1.5 lawyer hours to the EFF’s 1, this is a bad trade IMO. And I doubt the RIAA is spending significant time on these cases based on their record of general sloppyness (ex- the time the RIAA sued charter for infringement on songs they didn’t have the copyright to, after making the same mistake with Cox https://abovethelaw.com/2020/03/riaa-realizes-it-sued-charter-over-a-bunch-of-songs-it-doesnt-hold-the-copyrights-for/ https://abovethelaw.com/2020/03/riaa-realizes-it-sued-charte...)