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Comment by aquova | Hacker News Reader

While its good to get a backup of the source code, youtube-dl is one of those projects that quickly becomes useless as Google mixes stuff around within YouTube, which they like to do. Without an active developer base, the project will quickly become less and less effective, which is one of the big concerns IMO about this lawsuit.

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What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.

In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a build as anything cryptographic actually

Yes, we do need this. I feel that the first step would be to move ytdl to a self hosted repository. But even this has the potential for takedowns.

If we rename it and add some open license video as an example instead of music videos, can they still ask for a takedown?

They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be used to download copyrighted content, post it to github, and see what happens.

they could create a youtube channel and upload some test/example videos to that

> some open license video

Perhaps 'Copying Is Not Theft'[1]?

https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4

Well, there's git over SSB (Secure Scuttlebutt) and got over IPF (Interplanetary Filesystem)... That should be distributed uncensorable git...

keybase.io provide decentralized crypto solution, it's better to open source community to move on to such crypto soluion

I too thought of this, but keybase is bulky, software-wise. I'm not a fan of having to run its service just to access public git repos.

They got bought by Zoom. Hard pass.

Keybase is extremely centralized, and they were bought by Zoom a few months ago.

Stop using Keybase.

Since git is already decentralized, this definitely seems doable.

My thought exactly. It even incorporates functionality for turning any local git repo into a shared git repo.

Mainly what they need besides that is a place to co-ordinate, collaborate and track tickets. Solutions abound.

The RIAA's actions are annoying but won't kill the project.

Git-on-the-Blockchain?

https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs#readme is pretty close, I think

Git seems like a great candidate for hosting through TOR; it's super low bandwidth. I often find myself wondering why DMCA'd fan projects don't just switch to anonymous TOR hosting. Obviously it's not bulletproof, but if it's just copyright holders you have to worry about and not state actors then it seems like a great solution.

> a great candidate

Not just a candidate. Torsocks + Git works perfectly. There's no mainstream free Tor Git hosting I know of, so that's a market ripe for picking.

Sure, youtube-dl could be hosted on TOR, but how many of its users will follow it to TOR?

The RIAA would score a great victory if it could essentially force youtube-dl development to go underground.

Check out Radicle https://radicle.xyz/

> What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.

But decentralisation would also make it harder to verify the code is legitimate.

Would you trust a copy of something like this from an anonymous server?

Well, git commits can be signed by they're authors, verifying authenticity.

This would prove if malicious commits have been added to a mirrored repository.

Despite the project name, "youtube-dl" is a nearly universal video downloader. It contains hundreds of special cases for specific websites, which will gradually break without maintenance. It would be a huge loss.

I imagine someone can re-publish it on Github without it being taken down if they rename it, change the README and/or add some disclaimer saying this tool shouldn't be used to download copyrighted works.

Collaboration to keep it up to date hopefully follows soon after.

This would definitely be a good time for a rebranding, the tool is now very far from its original "youtube-dl" purpose.

They should rename it to 'please-ignore-this-letter-it-is-fake'.

Regarding this, does anyone know where the best place to hear from the main developers is?

Youtube is bound to make a breaking change any day now, and as-is I have no idea where to look for updates to the project once this happens.

> Regarding this, does anyone know where the best place to hear from the main developers is?

Sure, their website https://youtube-dl.org/

But they don't seem to have updated it yet

Website has since been updated with new download links and a notice about the takedown, so I'd keep my eye on it for future updates.

I have wondered why Real Player never seemed, over a period of years (some years ago, at least), to need updates to cope with downloading from YouTube, and yet youtube-dl seemed to need regular updates every few months.

* https://www.real.com/uk/features ("download web videos from popular sites like YouTube and Vimeo")

It's an architectural difference, but it is unclear what it is. It cannot be because RealPlayer Downloader is a browser extension that provides a "download" button within the WWW page itself and youtube-dl works from URLs given on a command line, because other YouTube downloaders like iTube are also able to download a video given only a YouTube page URL.

* https://itube.aimersoft.com/free-mac-youtube-downloader.html ("free download YouTube videos to Mac in a Click.")

Or maybe it isn't a difference nowadays. This was some years ago. But there does not seem to be much talk about having to update these downloaders frequently like youtube-dl.

I would go so far as to say the source code of youtube-dl is less relevant than its existence as a rallying point. The project can be disrupted by attacking its centralized points, but I doubt the general effort can be suppressed long-term.

Youtube is far from the only thing ytdl is useful for. I have a particular hate for youtube and basically don't go there, but still make plenty of use of youtube-dl.

Where do you use it? I didn't realize it works on other video websites as well...

Here's a list of sites that it supports (google cache link because the original seems down, potentially due to the DMCA). It would be difficult to find a reasonably sized site that it doesn't support.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0TGu...

I use it on Twitter a lot because tweets are so prone to getting deleted.

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