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Comment by dwheeler | Hacker News Reader

I think the youtube-dl folks need to talk to a lawyer quickly.

Like many products, youtube-dl can be used for legal and illegal purposes (just like a baseball bat can be). However, it was foolish to include links in their documentation to works where infringing uses are more likely. They should have pointed to the MANY works released under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Here's one I posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC1g8FmFcUU

If this is a real DMCA takedown, then GitHub doesn't really have a choice, GitHub must take it down. youtube-dl should immediately file a DMCA counter-claim. A lawyer can help with this.

I think it's clear that youtube-dl has many non-infringing uses. I've posted many videos on Youtube where I own the copyright, & I really hope that people use youtube-dl to download and see those videos. But youtube-dl needs to do a better job making it obvious that it has many clearly legal uses.

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There were no such links in the documentation. Rather, various youtube partners like VEVO have special encoding schemes and the youtube-dl test suite includes tests for handling these schemes. Because the different styles are only used on partner content it isn't possible for those specific test case to use a CC-BY(-SA) work. Moreover, the test cases only download under 1 second of video and don't even store it.

AFAICT all the documentation examples are test videos uploaded by the youtube-dl authors themselves and ones by the Linux Foundation.

The complaint submitted to github was not a DMCA takedown (17 U.S. Code § 512), though it was superficially formatted like one. It was a complaint regarding 17 U.S. Code § 1201 anti-circumvention. There is no counter-claim (or takedown, for that matter) provision in that law because there is no safe harbor.

Moreover, your description of a §512 takedown is simply incorrect. Github is not obligated to take down a work when they receive a well formed DMCA notice: rather, they obtain an immunity from lawsuit for that particular infringement if they follow the procedure. In cases where there is transparently no infringement that immunity isn't worth much. In all cases it's simply a business decision to accept the liability or not vs the interruption in customer relationships, distrust, and loss of goodwill that can result from cutting off a user... no different than the decision to take on liability in any other business activity.

Maybe try avoiding such strong language when you haven't personally researched the subject in great detail?

It seems like yt-dl should move that functionality into a plug-in, so that maybe it can be fully supported but kept at an arm's length.

Changing something at this point feels like an admission of guilt. I can't imagine a better case for de minimis use than this.

Part of the value of youtube-dl is that its reliable. If it randomly didn't work on some URLs it would make it much less useful.

Moreover, there would be a risk that unethical actors would exploit the URLs that don't work in order to conduct unarchivable fraud.

It's not very reliable because it can't be, any of the sites can change on any particular day, but they really try their best.

Sorry, I did read the complaint and it appeared what I said earlier was correct. It sounds like I misunderstood things; thanks for the correction!

My main point still stands, though: They need a lawyer.

I did say, "If this is a real DMCA takedown...".

You are legally correct that GitHub in isn't obligated to take down a work if they receive a DMCA notice. But that would be very bad advice to take. GitHub handles millions of repos. GitHub could take a huge gamble by keeping the material posted after a DMCA request, or just take it down, wait for the DMCA counterclaim, and put it up after the counterclaim was filed. A CEO could easily get fired for risking the entire company when there was a no-risk alternative with the same result. The legal penalties are so stiff, and so easily avoided, that it would be improbable for a company to do anything else. This apparently isn't a DMCA takedown anyway, but I thought I should comment on your response.

Anyway, I'll repeat myself yet again: They need a lawyer.

Yet companies ignore DMCA complaints all the time.

Github is unusual in my experience in that they act on even transparently fraudulent DMCA notices (I am reminded of a few years ago where they took all of Mozilla's repost offline because of a obviously bogus DMCA complaint filed by a intern that was furious that their changes weren't merged or something along those lines).

And while copyright penalties look pretty stiff, they're pretty non-threatening compared to ordinary state product liability-- which is almost completely non-disclaimable. Liability is just one of the consequences of doing business.

I certainly wouldn't suggest that Github should be ignoring DMCA complaints as a general practice (though plenty of providers sure seem to do so), but in this case I think they could make a calculation that the risk might be worth it: I know quite a few parties that have moved off github as a result of this incident.

The infringing links were not in the documentation, they were test cases for different kinds of video download protection.

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