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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

I think some people are missing a major point about youtube-dl's takedown. The purpose of this DMCA claim wasn't just to prevent people from downloading videos, it was to set a legal precedent for the RIAA and similar organizations to troll Github and anyone hosting public repositories with it, by linking them to "illegal downloads".

By agreeing to this without any public opposition, Github has become similar to Youtube itself, in that it will be expected to immediately comply with à la carte takedown requests by RIAA and other copyright trolls from now on. It doesn't matter that the actual reason to take down your large repository is political or it simply bothers certain company for miscellaneous reasons, since all it takes is some "illegal content".

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GitHub is already expected to comply with DMCA takedowns just like they have to comply with counter notifications. That's how they maintain a safe harbor, though the latter is a bit harder to truly enforce (see the recent Twitch kerfuffle).

I am sorry...but what would the RIAA troll Github for exactly?

Sorry if it was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The RIAA can now call Github out whenever they have an argument for them enabling downloads of copyrighted content through their repositories. And Github is expected to fix it for them.

I'm not sure how this is any different than how it's been for years now. GitHub has been complying with DMCA takedown requests since 2011[1]. What precedent needed to be set here? The RIAA could always do this and GitHub has been complying with it (because they legally have to).

1: https://github.com/github/dmca/

A lot of the things listed on the DMCA repo (if not most of them) are not software that could be used to download content, but the literal content you could obtain using them, such as textbooks, proprietary fonts, and so on.

By taking down youtube-dl, Github has opened a window for copyright trolls to speculate about what a repository is used for, and take it down if one of its use cases involves downloading copyrighted content.

I can see how it's legitimate to take down a repository with the sole, explicit goal of downloading copyrighted content, but youtube-dl is widely used by journalists to preserve uncopyrighted content.

> youtube-dl is widely used by journalists to preserve uncopyrighted content.

How? Virtually all content is copyrighted; the journalists would need to be restricting themselves to some very narrow topics like "government documents".

It is perfectly legal to watch copyrighted youtube videos.

Not if you circumvent DRM to do so. (which is crazy, but true)

I can see how it's legitimate to take down a repository with the sole, explicit goal of downloading copyrighted content, but youtube-dl is widely used by journalists to preserve uncopyrighted content.

Youtube-dl is used by some journalists. Generally, most journalists at a real newspaper or media organization would ask for the original video, not a copy from youtube.

Even your local evening news will use the original video unless they are specifically discussing the online version of the video, in which case they will either record footage of the screen using one of the hundreds of cameras they have lying around or just share their screen view directly.

The only time journalists use youtube-dl for reporting is when it is not possible to get a copy of the original.

> Generally, most journalists at a real newspaper or media organization would ask for the original video, not a copy from youtube.

In earlier HN threads about this youtube-dl takedown, it was pointed out that sometimes authors of videos used youtube-dl to download their own videos, because they don't keep their own original; treating YouTube as a repository for their data, much like people use Google Drive, or GitHub.

So even when a real newspaper or media organisation asks for the original, those authors needs youtube-dl to retrieve that original. Or maybe they'll just tell the media organisation to download it themselves as there's no difference.

Github hosts tonnes of bittorrent clients - should those be taken down too? After all, bittorent can be used for downloading content illegally!

The supposed claim wasn’t that it could be used for piracy (despite many here parroting that claim), but that they advertise that it could be. I haven’t read the actual claim, but it seems they’re basing their argument on a block of test code that uses a video containing RIAA copyrighted music. It’s sketchy at best, but there’s a reason BitTorrent clients make no mention of piracy sites at all; The MPAA and RIAA are extremely litigious and will use any opportunity they get.

Perhaps bittorrent clients don't mention specific sites but there's no end of related projects that do, e.g. expand the three "Supported ___ Trackers" lists on https://github.com/Jackett/Jackett

I'm not aware of any notices filed against that specific project.

What? GitHub has handled DMCA like this for years.

No they haven’t. This is NOT a traditional DMCA take-down. It relies on a new legal argument using a different section of the law which has a much more perverse impact.

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