Hacker News Reader

Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

> 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

View on HN

When the RIAA sued me for operating Aurous a few years ago they nailed me for exactly this. Using copyrighted album art and song names to advertise my FOSS meant to stream music from sources like YouTube didn't exactly win me any points in court.

Did they win the rights to the source code?

Are the case's files on Recap and are you willing to share the name/results of the case?

Edit: I've googled and found relevant articles. I didn't realize how high profile this was.

If I remember correctly, PopcornTime's screenshots and examples were all carefully selected to contain only public domain movies for this reason.

It wasn't in the repo's README: it was part of the test suite for better or worse.

See: youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py line L557

I doubt there's any "for better" in that. It's an easy bit for the RIAA to latch onto to make their case, and I expect a judge or reasonable person on a jury would make make a distinction between the two, but not enough to matter.

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.

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.

Copyrighted content with a notoriously litigious industry group behind it, no less.

Yeah, an example downloading a video of Elephant's Dream or a tech conference talk would have worked just as well and imply the tool has primarily legitimate uses

So, someone could fork it, change the readme and other files to remove all references to copyrighted content. No problem?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com