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Comment by adeelk93 | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone remember when Github took down youtube-dl?

I would blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by the law (Github)

The law also permits content to be restored immediately upon receipt of a counternotice. Somehow the data silos never get around to supporting that.

twitch actually does do that IIRC, not sure about others

GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is in their favour, because legally it's a hot water. This is not your ordinary copyright DMCA Complaint, this is the section 1201 concerning circumvention, which is held to a different standard. This is essentially RIAA telling GitHub "if you're not stopping this, we'll see you (not the YT-DL developers) in court".

> GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is in their favour

Public support on which grounds?

I can’t see any evidence a counter notice was filed until the EFF got involved, at which point GitHub immediately reinstated YouTube-dl.

Did GH ignore a counter notice?

Laws need teeth to be enforced. It used to be illegal to harbor runaway slaves, or to be a Catholic priest in Protestant England. So people built cleverly hidden Priest Holes[1] in houses to hide. But you can't really build the equivalent of a Priest Hole within Github, because Github is not your house, but rather your lord's castle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_hole

> blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by the law (Github)

What about those abusing [a misrepresentation of] the law (the RIAA) and the members who pay their dues (Microsoft)?

It was an unfortunate situation. I don't entirely know how GitHub handled things before the Microsoft acquisition but it also wouldn't surprise me if Microsofts legal department is more risk adverse compared to GitHub internal.

> I would blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by the law (Github)

It seems even in the context of US-based companies that some companies are a little more "trigger-happy" with DMCA and other claims compared to others.

Especially because they worked to try and make sure this wouldn't happen again.

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