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Comment by themusicgod1 | Hacker News Reader

This development should not be going on in github anyway.

Doesn't matter. Repos can be cloned and easily moved to another git service. The attempt to take down yt-dl itself showed that. A misguided attempt at it shutting spawned countless forks across multiple git hosting services that cannot possible all be taken down. A techy Streisand-effect if you will.

Yeah, I remember that. That was a day to remember, a victory for the open source. The explosion in forks across many other git services, was so widespread and loud that github (apparently under pressure from google) had to pull back on their decision to shut it down.

How did Googs put pressure on Microsoft to have Github change their mind? What concern was it of Goog's?

Google owns Youtube and youtube-dl doesn't serve google ads?

wow, total brain fart. of course. makes mental note to not be so quick to post right before bed

youtube-dl users probably are tiny drop among the adblock users who also do not see ads. And Google does not care about adblock.

I assume google cares about people who block ads because a month or so ago, google figured out how to show ads even though I am using a content blocker on iOS and macOS.

Will probably work on manifest v3 chrome then too

I don't think so. Disabling ads on youtube requires injecting JavaScript. It's not forbidden in manifest v3 (and it would be absurd to forbid it, as 99% extensions exist because of this).

For reference: I don't see ads on youtube using hand-crafted JS which was inspired by uBlock origin, so I think that uBlock origin should work as well.

Not really. The thing that makes youtube-dl useful is that it has one large dedicated community that can find ways to circumvent the changes youtube adds to prevent scraping. Basically, every few months or so youtube-dl becomes useless, and a huge distributed team has to kick in and find a way around it. When one of them does, they commit the change to one centralized place and it gets disbursed to everyone.

Without one centralized place, propagation of patches would take a lot longer, and youtube-dl would spend a larger percentage of time not working for most people. This is something the anti-piracy folks would be quite OK with, as it would lead to attrition among users even if not total eradication.

git is a decentralized vcs

the actual motivation of hitting people with legalese and takedowns isn't to literally take the software down, it's to drive up the cost of development, and to get people who maintain it to quit, which is probably why we're in this thread

given that software like youtube-dl basically needs to be permanently fixed to even work slowing down development is enough.

I think there should be new legislation to prevent such targeted nuisance takedowns, in a similar way to nuisance lawsuits.

Current legislation doesn't permit that specific takedown anyway, the procedure to remove a copyright infringing tool requires a court order. I still don't understand why anyone paid attention to it at all. The best I could find on it was that the RIAA was arbitrarily claiming they had the right.

> the actual motivation of hitting people with legalese and takedowns isn't to literally take the software down, it's to drive up the cost of development, and to get people who maintain it to quit, which is probably why we're in this thread

This only does anything useful to them if the software and all of the forks stop being maintained, regardless of whether the people doing it now are the same people who were doing it before. Which is one of the reasons why it's important to replace them, to deter this kind of attack. But they have been.

> given that software like youtube-dl basically needs to be permanently fixed to even work slowing down development is enough.

Not really. The demand for having youtube-dl or equivalent work is orders of magnitude higher than the amount of effort required to make it work.

Attacks like this also fortify development efforts because of the Streisand effect and the increased effort people are willing to put into something once it becomes a matter of pride to spite the attackers.

Sorry if I can't tell if you're telling the truth because I haven't been able to use yt-dl since the last non-github repo broke months ago.

That's rather a separate issue. Also, why? I'd certainly have a backup after the last takedown, but I doubt that any commercial host will be much better.

Maybe laws don't apply on gitee ? (Chinese GitHub)

Did I just read that correctly? WAT!

Try hosting code on gitee that mentions Winnie the Pooh, tank man, or _____________.

I think that comment was referring to Western IP laws.

It's funny that all of these type of comments mention Winnie the Pooh when I'm pretty sure this is a reddit injoke they've convinced themselves is important. Does anyone in China know they're supposed to be epically owned when you say that?

It doesn't really matter what the offense is, but if the CCP feels offended, say bye bye.

Sure, but has it offended the CCP so far? If not, celebratory posting as if you’ve been censored when you haven’t sort of makes you a poser.

> Sure, but has it offended the CCP so far?

Images of Pooh and his Chinese name have been censored in mainland China, the movie Christopher Robin wasn’t allowed to release there, and a South Park episode about it got the whole show banned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Censorship_in_...

On sr.ht at least the issues would stay distributed in contributor's email inboxes in the event of a takedown. Maybe they'd even keep it up despite questionable takedown notices, like youtube-dl.org's host did (not surprisingly unlike the MS-owned repo host, given it's an RIAA member).

Another solution to issue loss would be embedding the issues in the repo, as some already extant tools do.

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