Have we already forgotten what happened to youtube-dl at the hands of GitHub?
I know GitHub were only following the DMCA but it shows they have the capability to not only remove the project but also all of its forks.
I know GitHub were only following the DMCA but it shows they have the capability to not only remove the project but also all of its forks.
This is just evidence that this particular slope isn't as slippery as some thought.
The repo is back up, but the project is dead. I suspect the developers got nasty letters from lawyers behind the scenes. I believe yt-dlp is the future of this project, but it's presently lesser known than youtube-dl so the lawyers got what they wanted in the end.
Copyright should just be a contract between seller and buyer. You promise not to redistribute this. If you didn't buy something, you have no contract with the seller and you can be free to download whatever you want or build whatever software or service you want.
The onus of finding who is the buyer breaking the contract and dragging them to court is on the seller.
We shouldn't have things like DMCA which allow you to censor anything tangentially related or being able to scare people off, but that's what you get when you have a corrupted government that does the bidding of Big Business.
Similarly, patents shouldn't be a thing.
You came up with something, you already have first mover advantage. If someone comes along and does the same thing better, too bad, they were better than you. If you have a manufacturing secret, protect it with contracts and sue for damage if they get broken.
Person A buys a movie and agrees to not distribute it, but goes ahead and does it anyway to Person B. Person B hosts it for everyone, and Persons C through Z get it and also host it. You're suggesting Person A is liable, but the cat's out of the bag and Persons B through Z can continue redistributing it forever because they never agreed to anything.
If this is the desired goal, you don't need copyright at all, you can already get Person A on violating Terms of Service or whatever.