FWIW, I'm forking youtube-dl right now.

Just so you know, they expressly mention that’s not a good idea in the notice.

Also, I'm just the messenger so please don't shoot/downvote me

Why wouldn't it be? Does this claim have any substance?

Any links to a repo that is still standing would be appreciated -- I would also like to clone the source.

Note that RIAA is making this takedown because the software CAN be used to download copyrighted music and videos, and it uses examples in the ~~README~~(unit tests, see correction[1]) as an example of that:

We also note that the source code prominently includes as sample uses of the source code the downloading of copies of our members’ copyrighted sound recordings and music videos, as noted in Exhibit A hereto. For example, as shown on Exhibit A, the source code expressly suggests its use to copy and/or distribute the following copyrighted works owned by our member companies:

They could, of course, have asked for the code to have been changed. Instead, they attacked the project itself. IANAL, but this seems outrageous the same way DMCA'ing a Bittorrent client would be. This doesn't circumvent DRM like Widevine. I don't understand what leg they have to stand on here.

This feels like DeCSS all over again.

P.S.: They also took down youtube-dlc, even though it's not listed.

[1]: It turns out I am wrong. It wasn't in the readme, but in the test cases. See extractor/youtube.py. To me this seems even more tenuous, but IANAL.

It’s probably a case of fair use but it’ll have to go to court to decide that

IANAL but I don't even think DMCA applies. It's not like YouTube-dl is breaking copy protection schemes, at most it is handling anti-abuse schemes. After all, it's not like you can go and bypass Widevine with youtube-dl.

Unfortunately, it is making a copy. These guys also fucked up by "marketing" it for use in circumventing such controls. They should have showed how to pull OCW lectures.

(a)(2)(C) is the part. IANAL but that's my take.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

What if I use youtube-dl like

  mpv <(youtube-dl youtube.com/video-url)

or similar. Then no permanent copy is made. I agree that they could have been cleverer in their marketing.

I was thinking the same thing: The next step following this line of thinking would be trying to ban all torrent clients, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted material.

This is crazy.

Now that 4chan is behind bars, it's time to sue the Internet!

Why stop with torrent clients? They should ban all browsers, because they CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!

Browsers?

We need to ban radios with tape decks and TVs with VCRs! The audio cassette and the VHS are bringing the downfall of the music industry with how easily they can be used to create unauthorized copies!

Oh wait.

Why stop with browsers? With enough creativity you can use any network protocol to download copyrighted material, so they should just ban computer networks.

Any input or output device

No joke -- if they could get the legislation signed into law they would be thrilled.

They could care less about side-effects and collateral consequences for adjacent technologies and use cases.

Because the law doesn't take kindly to "well, technically" arguments.

Well, following their logic behind DMCA compliant, I guess fiddling long enough with developer's console on Chrome or Firefox would allow you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube the same way youtube-dl does.

sed s/youtube-dl/firefox/g and voilà, DMCA for Firefox ready to submit...

Let's go further! Let's DMCA the Linux kernel because it runs Firefox/youtube-dl/curl/wget!

The Linux kernel does not have "youtube" in its name–it isn't advertised as a way to download videos.

So if youtube-dl had a different name it'd be ok?

The logic behind the DMCA complaint is that youtube-dl is “marketed … for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work” [1], not that it “allows you to download potentially copyrighted material from youtube.”

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

But it wasn't. This was just a unit test.

A unit test is an example of how the program is intended to run. It's the intention.

The hell it isn't. A unit test is a bench test for one particular functional unit. It's a check function. If you accept that tests as carrying intent, then I demand every weapons researcher or biologist to be arrested this instant. Clearly they are only out to murder people. That is patently ludicrous.

We need to ban oxygen. It CAN be used to download copyrighted materials!

What about chromium? They should take that down as well, imagine what children can see using that thing. `curl`, `wget` as well as gitlab - massive offender, random number generators - one of the biggest offenders, any worst nightmare you can imagine can be produced by it!

Why not just ban computers or even why not jail people who even think about using ytdl? These organisations like RIAA need reality check. Sadly there is no body to stand against their bullying and stiffling the freedom of speech.

EFF takes up these causes sometimes, right? This notice is hollow sabre-rattling, so I wouldn’t worry too much. What can RIAA do if somebody forks the project and hosts it in the Lithuania? Not much. Yell into a pillow, maybe.

youtube-dl needs to be regularly updated as streaming sites add new countermeasures to block it. If those updates can no longer be crowdsourced from a popular, reputable site like GitHub, the tool has a good chance of dying.

Well, we (Lithuania) have a law that works along these lines. When you buy any storage device a part of the price is a tax that goes to IP protection agency. The reasoning is exactly that: because you may store some pirated music or whatever on it. How was this bs passed I have no idea.

Why in the world did they include copyright works in the README? That's contributory infringement!

Why? youtube-dl is a violation of YouTube's ToS most probably, but does using it to download a copyrighted video necessarily constitute copyright infringement? I have literally used youtube-dl to watch YouTube, in the past; it's handy to be able to use whatever media player you want, including ones that have better scrubbing.

Umm, yes the law makes it clear downloading copyrighted material you do not own is not legal.

The RIAA and MPAA were suing users of Kazaa, BitTorrent, etc individually because of this law you may or may not like, but that's again the law!

I don't think you understand. Yeah, you can sue people for illegally redistributing copyrighted works. However, I am skeptical that you can do the same for people using YouTube-dl to consume copyrighted works. You are downloading the file from someone who has a license to redistribute it, you are just using a CLI utility instead of the page itself. You can't view something without downloading it in some capacity.

I'm not saying there's no possibility this is "illicit," I am saying this is not the same as illegally downloading music off of Kazaa.

Umm, yes the law makes it clear downloading copyrighted material you do not own is not legal.

It most certainly does not, as almost nobody "owns" "copyrighted material," instead most users are granted a license in this context.

Maybe not Copyright, but perhaps CFAA, for accessing the site in ways that was not authorized by the site owner.

So would using an adblocker, or any extension for that matter, also be a violation?

Another point: If you put your content up for public viewing, you're implicitly allowing people to download the material as that's what browsers do. You are downloading a video every time you go to youtube to watch a video.

IANAL, but regardless, according to RIAA, youtube-dl is circumventing the "DRM" built into YouTube, and therefore they're violating anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA. Therefore a DMCA claim can suffice to take it down.

Perhaps if youtube-dl used different examples (i.e. videos not protected by anti-circumvention) perhaps they could have avoided this.

Incorrect. DRMed YouTube-content cannot be downloaded using YouTube-dl. Only regular content.

Videos with obfuscated request signatures can be downloaded by youtube-dl. A german court ruled this is an effective technological protection measure.

Conversely, the RIAA is making its media available on a known, at-risk platform to attain distribution. They're not protecting their copyright sufficiently, and the copyrights should be revoked.

I can't wait for ML to lower the barrier to entry for music to near nil. Make anyone a vocalist or instrumentalist and hose these assholes.

As much as I would like this to be true, copyright doesn't have to be defended in order to be kept. That's a very different law, trademarks.

You can have your copyright infringed for decades before you try to prosecute the infringers, and the courts will still rule in your favour.

I'm suggesting that ML will lower the barrier to entry so dramatically that the value of individual songs and musicians will plummet. The back catalog of copyright that the RIAA holds will become a fraction of its value today.

I could be wrong, but nascent technology in this field looks incredibly powerful.

I think this will happen with all media.

This... doesn't make any sense to me. Are you arguing that songs written by machine learning will become sufficiently good at their "job" that there will be no value in actual humans writing music? And that this will be a good thing?

You wouldn't even need ML. Iirc there was this guy who coded a script that played every permutation of 12 notes in a 5 minute period and then made all the Melodys public domain. Ianal so I don't know if this would hold up in court, but technically that should invalidate every copyright on Melodys after that point in time.

E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU&t=135 found the ted talk

It seems to me that they are making the claim that this tool is expressly for doing something that is forbidden by the YouTube TOS and breaking the music licenses provided.

Of course YouTube has other videos that are under different licenses so it isn't clear that this is the only use case of the software.

Wait a minute, there's a difference between distributed copyrighted works, and merely copying it for yourself. In France for instance, we have this notion of "copie privée" (private copy), that says we are allowed to copy anything as long as we don't distribute it back. We even pay taxes on persistent memory for the privilege.

Up thread there's also a citation of the Betamax case, which says that it's okay for people to record shows so they can watch them later, and it's okay to sell video recording devices.

This is different from Bittorent, which automatically distribute any content you download. With this too, when you are downloading, you are also distributing, which is a much clearer case of infringement in most jurisdictions.

That's a very common misconception of private copy; the existence of the private copy tax is not excusing copyright violation.

What private copy wanted to cover is more like "I bought a physical CD and I make a cassette copy because my car doesn't have a CD player" or because I want to listen to a mix of my favorite music (so you paid a tax on cassettes and later on CD-R and CD-RW media). This was later extended to "I copy all my collection of music to a hard drive and stop flipping CDs in and out of the player" (so you pay a tax on hard disk drives).

The issue here isn’t that youtube-dl infringes copyright, it’s that (according to the RIAA claim) its purpose is to “circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services.” Even if youtube-dl was tested exclusively on public domain videos, so that the developers never infringe copyright, it could violate 17 U.S.C. 1201 [1] if the RIAA succeeds in proving that it was “primarily designed” or “marketed” for circumventing technological protection measures.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that use, and the RIAA complaint will likely stand up to any legal scrutiny. Just because it can be used for legit purposes too won't matter in the slightest. I mean, Napster could have been used for legal means as well, and it got destroyed in court.

The only chance tools like this have legally is when infringement is an "unintended side effect."

Should it stand up to legal scrutiny though?

What does it matter if I play the beatles on youtube by watching in a web browser or watching an .mp4 file that I just downloaded? It's functionally the same.

The former gives money to the original content owner for every listen while the latter does not. Which is why you're able to listen to it on youtube without having to personally pay someone.

It could but probably doesn't

One could argue that YouTube success is mostly about unlimited access to illegal copyrighted material uploaded by some unknown person in some unknown part of the world

After all the thing it's already on YouTube and on my HD after I watched it

If the videos mentioned in the notice are hosted on Youtube without authorization, then the takedown notice should be sent to YouTube.

If the videos were uploaded to Youtube with authorization, then accessing them through youtube-dl is not an example of the program being used for infringement.

Either way, the purpose of the software is to download anything publically available from YouTube. Its purpose is not copyright infringement unless the purpose of YouTube is copyright infringement.

  Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 
  U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the “Betamax case”, is a 
  decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which 
  ruled that the making of individual copies of complete 
  television shows for purposes of time shifting does not 
  constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.[1][2] 
  The Court also ruled that the manufacturers of home video 
  recording devices, such as Betamax or other VCRs (referred 
  to as VTRs in the case), cannot be liable for infringement.

How is downloading something from youtube for later offline viewing ("time-shifting") in any way different from recording a tv show?

The Betamax case was about stuff broadcast over public airwaves, whereas this is a medium that the RIAA barely tolerates, rather than the (ideal) main distribution channel. Seems like a big enough difference to me.

I don’t see the fact that the RIAA dislikes internet based streaming as relevant to the analysis. Downloading a publicly available video transmitted over a nearly global communications network is directly analogous to recording a show to tape from a TV signal.

The signal is broadcast (ie not under your control) and so the sole purpose being permitted there is time shifting.

YouTube is an on demand stream. It would be comparable to recording a pay per view movie that you purchased. Is that legal? (The question isn't rhetorical, but I seriously doubt it.)

Someone who is capable of downloading youtube videos can easily block ads and many do, not because ads are bad but because they are both excessive in any form possible and a malware spreading channel. I do too but don’t bother to download videos because it is still more convent to watch’em directly on youtube. But it seems those days are coming to an end soon, lets see

The intent matters. Browsers don't make it easy to get ahold of a copy of the file that you can share, youtube-dl does. Add that to a bad README and that's something that a court might treat very differently from a web browser.

This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime. Either way you're carrying the same lockpicks, but if the court decides that you were carrying them with bad intentions, you're in trouble.

The intent matters. Browsers don't make it easy to get ahold of a copy of the file that you can share, youtube-dl does. Add that to a bad README and that's something that a court might treat very differently from a web browser.

I can't say for YouTube specifically (I haven't tried, I suspect they have the talent to make it actually difficult), but browsers do make it remarkably easy to extract most forms of media from a website. Even websites that attempt to hide it have to embed it somewhere. Whether you feel like it's easier to install Firefox and figure out how to extract the media, or figure out how to install Python and pip and then run youtube-dl is up to you.

There are likely even tutorials up by Mozilla somewhere about how to use the dev tools to pull an image (though I assume they're not stupid enough to do it on material they don't have rights to).

There are many reasons one might want to use youtube-dl. Furthermore, there are many creators that either don't care or are happy that you're downloading their stuff.

If we want to make analogies, every gun shop in America sells guns and human shaped targets. Do they have the intent to encourage people to murder other people? It is a tool that can be used for illegal purposes. They might even have examples of how you can do such a thing (as do gun manufacturers, lockpick manufacturers, security exploit announcements, etc, etc). Why would that make the tool illegal? The argument might hold if the only possible use of it is illegal; that puts it among the ranks of things we deem illegal to merely possess, like fully automatic weapons. I'm not buying the RIAA's argument that youtube-dl is so dangerous to society that we can't trust anyone to use it legally.

This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

No one has demonstrated intent. The publishers have demonstrated that it could potentially be used in an illegal manner (depending on your jurisdiction). They aren't going after someone who downloaded youtube-dl and is trying to use it to pirate things. They're going after the lockpick manufacturer because they have a tutorial on using their lockpicks on their site, and people could use that to commit crimes.

It stands up to legal scrutiny, and Betamax case is not applicable.

They have these things called "streaming licenses" these days, that are very different from "download licenses" because streamed data is not the same thing as a downloaded file even if they both use the same codec and are derived from the same source.

This is a wholly imaginary distinction based on a triviality. Streaming IS downloading. Also how is the betamax case not applicable. The user of a VCR isn't "licensed" to record whats on their tv

No, it's a distinction that exists based on the differences in how the video content is consumed.

It is irrelevant, legally, that one implementation of a streaming software may choose to download the streamed data to a temporary disc file, or that some content downloaders can structure the assembly of a partially downloaded file so that (some) content can be accessed before the download is fully completed. What matters is that a streamed file is intended to be consumed contemporaneously with the acquisition of the downloaded data however it is stored on the computer, and that caching for efficiency aside, each separate act of consumption involves a separate act of acquiring the content, whereas a downloaded file is intended to be downloaded once and consumed multiple times.

Also how is the betamax case not applicable. The user of a VCR isn't "licensed" to record whats on their tv

No, they are not licensed to record what's on TV. But the point of the Betamax case was that "time-shifted viewing" by a private viewer was deemed to be fair use because at the time broadcast TV content was transmitted on a fixed schedule and absent the private recording, was not otherwise consumable because many of these shows were not rerun or sold on cassette tape. Thus the court found that the Betamax had substantial non-infringing use (and indeed, that it's primary intended use was thus non-infringing).

However, digital content is provided on demand so there is no need for "time-shifted" viewing, and so the reasoning from Betamax no longer applies. Moreover, many content owners now make the content available for "connectivity-shifted" viewing (aka, away from internet connectivity) via a downloaded content license. Thus, downloading that content from a streaming source is generally no longer protected by fair use.

Consequently, using youtube-dl to download your favorite streamer to watch on a plane trip would probably be fair use because they probably don't make the content available for access-shifted viewing otherwise. But using it to download a music video would not, because the music and video owners make those available for download with a purchasable license. And the problem with youtube-dl is that they demonstrated that the primary intent of the tool was to download music videos, the evidence being that the README and parts of the code explicitly refer to downloading music videos subject to RIAA licensing. Under the Betamax ruling, this would be fine, because there are substantial legitimate uses...but the DMCA changed that and so it doesn't matter if there are substantial legitimate uses if the primary intended use was to violate copyright.

No it doesn't follow at all, any more than had the repo owners included a couple of public domain recordings in the repo then the conclusion that the tool was clearly intended to download public domain recordings.

You may feel it doesn't matter, but it does in fact matter to the entities where decisions are made on matters like this: the courts.

I guess that means those decisions are then based more on emotion than facts?

From a practical perspective, it's hard to wish for or imagine a legal system that doesn't rely upon judicial interpretation of intent. An example would be causing the death of another human being. Would you want all four of these incidents to be treated the same from a legal perspective?

- A surgery, which is known to have a 50/50 chance of success even at the hands of an excellent surgeon, goes poorly and the patient dies.

- A serial killer spends six months plotting the murder of his victim before executing them.

- A shoving match breaks out at a bar. Somebody slips, falls, hits their head on the ground, and dies.

- You accidentally frighten somebody by sneezing in a quiet library. They have a heart attack and die.

From a purely logical perspective, these are literally the same thing. A person dies! Realistically speaking, any legal system needs to consider intent.

No, the court looks to facts to establish intent. It's not possible to look into someone's brain, but courts are very, very comfortable with looking at facts to determine something about what's going on in there.

Crimes like first-degree murder have intent as a requirement. People are convicted of it all the time, and it's based on facts and evidence from before and after the killing.

It's hard for a lot of techies to grapple with this, but courts and law are often decided by the intent of the offense. This shows intent, whereas public domain works would not. The difference, in court, is massive.

It's not that it's hard to grasp, we just think it's irrelevant, since plenty of people also have legitimate uses for this tool, and any other tool that allows them to do the same things is just as capable of downloading copyrighted youtube videos.

since plenty of people also have legitimate uses for this tool, and any other tool that allows them to do the same things is just as capable of downloading copyrighted youtube videos

True, but _other_ people and _other_ tools aren't relevant to the intent of _these_ authors and _this_ tool. _Your_ intent is relevant in establishing whether _you_ violated the law (and thus whether an associated DMCA takedown is valid).

Intent does matter only if there's some action taken, or attempted.

The tool just sits there on github. Only the tool's users actually do download stuff or attempt to.

Also you'd be hard pressed to prove such specific intent from some random testsuite url, added by one or two authors, when the tool has very many authors/contributors and the README/manual for users just has non-copyrighted material sample urls, anyway.

RIAA just tries to make it harder to preserve regularly disappearing youtube content, like war crimes evidence, just to make some people richer on some stupid music. I can prove their intent, because that's what this tool is used for, and they're trying to remove the tool from the internet. /s This is the same stupid argument they're using. They will fail, but why not try to make other people's lives harder, right?

I do hope they fail, but regardless I think your analysis here is completely off base.

The intent or action taken in this case is the creation, maintenance, and publication of the tool itself. At issue isn't the intent of any particular end user, or even the majority of end users, but rather of the authors themselves.

To the best of my knowledge, it simply does not matter how the tool is used in practice. AFAIK, all that matters is the intent of the authors in creating and distributing it.

Are there other tools outside of software that we apply this sort of thinking too?

Can't it be trivially reinstated then by removing any references to copyrighted content? youtube-dl has plenty of legitimate uses beyond just copyright infringement.

Which is why RIAA is trying to kill the code itself.

Cure the disease not the symptom

They can't fully un-ring that bell. The RIAA will always be able to argue infringement was the purpose since they used copyrighted examples.

Plus they've advertised themselves as having that capability. I suspect that even after the removal the RIAA will argue that the fact that the ability to download copyrighted material, which is something that the project itself said it could do in the past and has not been modified, makes it continue to be illegal.

I don't think that's quite how it works. It's not (generally) capability that matters but rather intent.

The RIAA would of course argue that examples of infringement in the test cases or readme demonstrate intent. A reasonable response to that might (or might not, depending on the context) be that infringement in those specific cases was never intentional but instead purely by accident.

If the infringement in this case ends up appearing to be intentional, it would probably make for a very uphill battle to argue that the tool itself was only intended for legitimate use cases.

Edit: Of course, it's reasonable to ask - if it's legal for YouTube to distribute the content, does using youtube-dl suddenly make it illegal? Is it a violation of copyright to record a pay per view stream? What about a publicly available stream paid for by ad revenue?

I think we're in agreement, it's just that I'm saying that the capability for that remains and the intent was shown to exist already.

the intent was shown to exist already

Well that's the question, isn't it? Is downloading those particular URLs infringement if the content is legally allowed to be hosted on YouTube in the first place? If so, was the use of those URLs specifically intended to demonstrate or verify the ability of the tool to infringe copyright? Alternatively, can the tool be said to circumvent a protection device under DMCA section 1201?

(For the record, my answer to all of the above is an emphatic "no".)

Argue in front of whom exactly? Because thats ONE of the big problems with DMCA.

Federal court in the USA.

What if another person will recreate this repository without history and offending links?

Isn’t the problem that this stuff is on youtube in the first place? The RIAA can’t win against google, so now they’re going against smaller players?

Youtube has a licensing agreement with the RIAA. If they didn't, Youtube would be bankrupt, since statutory damages for copyright violations are $750/violation and there's no legal defense once they show the violation occurred.

(And as someone who has dealt with the music licensing agencies, you always just pay for the license. Paying the big 3 licensing agencies annually for millions of streams cost less than the statutory damages for a single violation.)

No the DMCA says that so long as they respond to take downs they aren't liable. The agreement prevents litigation that COULD result in a judgement that might modify this deal which is clearly a risk in addition to the cost of ongoing litigation.

No, you're talking about something else.

Youtube has the right to stream those videos, because they pay the RIAA for a streaming license, which is a thing that music licensing agencies have provided for many years now. In many cases, the videos were uploaded by the recording studio itself, and in those cases presumably Youtube isn't paying a licensing fee because the license is implicit in the upload (but note that many videos uploaded by the artists themselves are not technically theirs to upload because the actual rights were held by the recording company, hence the reason Youtube needs the agreement with the RIAA).

The DMCA take-down exemption you are thinking of is a separate protection, that applies to Youtube taking down videos that aren't licensed by them containing music that isn't licensed by the creator of the music.

The statutory damages would apply in the former case, such as if an artist uploaded their own music video and Youtube didn't have the broad RIAA license. This happens a lot more frequently than you would think.

The issue with the readme infects the rest of the code, even if it's removed. It's still evidence that the repository was intended to facilitate copyright infringement. The problem isn't the words of the readme but what those words imply about what the authors of the code intended.

If they instead had released it and then said in a public forum "check out my cool code for copyright infringement" (but had a totally blameless README) that would be used as evidence in the same way.

Just to add a data point, but back when I still was working for a video distribution startup, we offered our customers the ability to directly import their video inventory from YouTube. They were the owners of the videos, it was just a convenient (and very popular!) feature for them to let us handle this import.

We used YouTube-dl for this, of course. No way we could have done this easily without it. We imported hundreds of thousands of videos like this.

I suspect there are many more legitimate uses of YouTube-dl than you would expect.

Yes, which makes this very sad that a simple slip-up can make it very difficult to come back from this.

I would hardly call this a simple slip-up. It is known that the software could be used to infringe copyrights and other open source projects make it clear that they do not support copyright infringement even when it is clear that their software can be used to do so. (If I recall correctly, Kodi and Calibre are two examples.) Meanwhile, youtube-dl has a test for that specific use case.

I feel that is rather thin legal grounds, if the examples are what dictate legality. The fact that I can change some text that does not change the function of code, or what can be done with it, to suddenly make it more legal does not sound like very great legal basis.

I'm not a lawyer, but I am playing devil's advocate here.

Did your customers own those video files or the rights to the video? If they are the authors and owners of the content surely they uploaded something to YouTube to begin with. Why is that not what they uploaded to your service? If they preferred to import YouTube libraries clearly YouTube was adding some value there.

A copyright is for a creative work, not for a set of bits.

It's unlikely transcoding a video added anything creative to the process.

Yes I am aware that the bits are not what is copywritten and I am not suggesting Youtube has any right to the content itself. But using youtube-dl to download content from a competitors site is taking advantage of the functionality on that competitors site to add value to your own product.

It could still be in Youtube's interest to prevent this from happening.

I'm asking why you would expect a competitor to make your own product more compelling for your customers.

This is a further example that Youtube-dl is there to circumvent the intended functionality of Youtube.

But YouTube is not the one taking legal action here, The RIAA is.

I understand that as well. I am saying it is possible to imagine a scenario in which someone looks at Youtube-dl as something other than a totally harmless aid to users.

Youtube has legitimate reasons to try and prevent people from downloading content from their site. Youtube-dl is clearly there to enable people to do that. Rightsholders can use this as another argument that Youtube-dl violates (or is designed to violate) the DMCA.

I'm not defending the RIAA or DMCA here but I can understand their argument and why they are making it.

It could still be in Youtube's interest to prevent this from happening.

And in fact it is illegal for YouTube to lock your data within their service in that manner in the EU. You have a right to export your data and they have the responsibility to make it make possible to move that data to a competitor where technically feasible. And it clearly is technically feasible.

Do they have an obligation to export your data in a format you choose with a method of your choice or can they make that determination for themselves? Does the EU mandate the ability for YouTube-dl to exist?

There’s a lot of talking past each other going on in this thread. Nobody is defending the RIAA or DMCA. But they exist and this outcome seems painfully obvious.

RIAA being mean, DMCA being bad and copyright being outdated doesn’t matter here. What matters in that the law exists and YouTube-dl made it really easy for the RIAA to make a compelling case against them.

Transcoding a video is making a copy of a creative work. Ergo, by definition, copyright applies.

In fact, if transcoding a video added anything creative to the process, you would have two copyrights: one for the original creative work, and a second for the derivative (transcoded) work.

You missed it. OP has rights to the work. The question was whether downloading from Youtube breaks any laws. Youtube's add is transcoding, which is not a creative transformation. Ergo, OP probably has a legal right to download from Youtube, at least as far as copyright law is concerned.

Not PC but,

Some people use YouTube as their repository. Or if they lost the original files it would be a way to recover something. I once had to download mp3's of my own music from MySpace because I had an HD crash and lost them.

Sure that is perfectly reasonable. And the fact that YouTube is a resource for this is one of its competitive advantages. So it makes sense that YouTube might make it hard for other parties to take advantage of its position as a repository. Thus Youtube-dl is created to circumvent this design choice on the part of YouTube.

YouTube's design choice is to serve all their content via an open api, which is why youtube-dl works. It's not circumventing anything.

youtube-dl scrapes the website, from what I can tell. The API has rate limits that youtube-dl would bypass in a few minutes if it were to use the official API.

That's primarily what's got the RIAA's panties in a twist, is that youtube-dl is 'bypassing' youtube's protection measures to prevent their site from being effectively scraped.

I too offload my personal vidos (family/kids) to youtube from my iphone. I used to back them up on a Hd but it has since crashed so whats on youtube is basically my sole backup. If youtube dl goes down I’ll have a hard time retreiving all that

It doesn't matter how much value YouTube adds. It neither owns, nor does it assert that it owns, the copyright to these videos. Banks provide a value-add service for your money. They don't own your money. Value-add is not a valid legal test for copyright ownership.

Did your customers own those video files or the rights to the video?

Not sure why that's relevant?

I often use(d) Youtube-dl to grab 1080p videos to watch once, not to keep them. eg as an alternative to Firefox

That's because YouTube itself recently seemed to change something about their streaming, such that some 1080p video's now stutter and don't work correctly.

So, I download them to a temp directory then watch with VLC instead. Then batch clean up the temp directory when it's getting full.

eg Youtube-dl is just another Youtube client, no different from a browser. If you're saying that watching media via Youtube-dl is different than watching it via Firefox... to me that sounds incredibly bizarre.

The point is YouTube is a video streaming service. Not a file host.

Errr, yes?

A video streaming service is literally a host for video content + UI's for accessing it.

Whether YouTube internally stores those video's as single files, as multiple versions of a file, as chunked pieces, or whatever... who cares? They'll obviously optimise their backend storage for their particular needs.

Whether you start viewing in the middle of a video, or from the start... are you're trying to say it makes a difference?

Because VLC can seek around a video too.

With YouTube-dl, I download the video, and watch it. At some point, it gets deleted.

With Firefox, I download the video and watch it. At some point, it gets deleted.

Are you saying it makes a difference whether or not it gets assembled into "a file" on the receiving side in order to watch it in an appropriate player?

With firefox, you can see the ads that pay for hosting that content you are interested before, during and after you see it. I don't know how enforceable is that you should watch some content exclusively with the provided frontend, but it really makes a difference for them how you watch it.

Right, but that's not the heart of the matter.

It's one thing if a tool designed for legitimate archiving use results in incidental violation of copyright.

It's another thing entirely, legally, if a tool is designed for violating copyright. In such case, it doesn't matter if there are also legitimate fair use uses of the tool.

And that's what the README showed: that youtube-dl was built primarily to violate copyright.

EDIT: based on other comments, it turns out the offending evidence was in the unit testing code not the README file, which legally makes it a bit worse than if it had just been in the README file.

The kicker is that if their demo examples had been something like that, or e.g. students downloading copies of free lectures, or etc, the RIAA would have much less of a case. No actual code would have had to change.

If you have a tool which skirts (bad, overreaching, probably constitutionally invalid) laws, be smart about how you present them!

If this content is freely available, why can't we take a fair use copy? That is not a violation of copyright. (Even if it is entertainment / not educational.) Those are the terms of the deal, we made when we enshrined copyright into law. If you can show it to me, then I am allowed to take a copy. (Is it not? I thought that DMCA law itself was written to skirt around this fact of law.)

If this content is freely available, why can't we take a fair use copy? That is not a violation of copyright.

Making a copy on its own is not fair use. What matters is the reason for making the copy. If you are making an connectivity-shifted copy (aka, for viewing away from internet access) there could be a fair use argument to download content from a streaming site that is not otherwise available for offline consumption.

But the flipside of that: if there is a way to access the content in a way that fair use is not implicated (i.e., because the copyright owner makes the content available for that use case such as offline viewing, even if payment is required), then generally fair use does not apply.

Remember: fair use is a defense to violating copyright, and it must be reasonable under the circumstances. Not wanting to pay for a license for your intended use case is generally never considered reasonable.

If you can show it to me, then I am allowed to take a copy.

That has never been the law, at any point in the history of copyright, dating back to before copying works was trivial.

In Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. the majority opinion stated:

[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses.

Is there a subsequent opinion that reversed that? (How is youtube-dl substantially different from a VCR recording, if youtube is substantially similar to a broadcast medium?)

[W]hen one considers the nature of a televised copyrighted audiovisual work ... and that time-shifting merely enables a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge, the fact ... that the entire work is reproduced ... does not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use.

But the flipside of that: if there is a way to access the content in a way that fair use is not implicated (i.e., because the copyright owner makes the content available for that use case such as offline viewing, even if payment is required), then generally fair use does not apply.

Can you cite a source for this? I do not believe that is generally the case. You are allowed to rip CDs even if the same music is sold digitally and you are allowed to DVR a TV show even if they sell DVDs of the same show.

Why can't we take a fair use copy? That is not a violation of copyright.

That's not covered under "Fair Use": see [1] for fair-use criteria. It is definitely a violation of copyright, yea.

[1] http://fairusetube.org/guide-to-youtube-removals/3-deciding-...

why does that make it worse?

I don't think it does. Just because there are copyrighted works in the test cases, doesn't mean they are willfully in violation of copyright. If I am granted a license by Youtube to view this material, then is it not also fair use if I take a copy for later review, or otherwise maintaining the fair use rights innately afforded to me by copyright?

What other facilities could I use to exercise my fair use rights in this case, besides tools like youtube-dl? If the video is already available freely for viewing (with advertising), are there any greater damages that aggrieved parties could calculate than the loss of advertising revenue from my repeated viewing of that file?

What incentive is there for me to share this file in violation of copyright if anyone can download a fair use copy for themselves, with the tools provided by youtube-dl?

It makes it worse because otherwise they could have argued that the README was separate from the development of the tool itself, so the tool itself wasn't intended for violating copyright.

By putting the infringing act into the code of the tool itself, they lose the ability to make that argument, and moreover show that the tool was built to infringe copyrights, because clearly they thought it was important enough to be able to infringe copyrights that they created multiple unit tests for it.

are there any greater damages that aggrieved parties could calculate than the loss of advertising revenue from my repeated viewing of that file?

The loss of advertising revenue is largely irrelevant unless the RIAA chooses to demonstrate the amount. Copyright law provides statutory damages starting at $750, and for that they just need to show a single infringing act (and for each additional act they prove, they get another $750).

What incentive is there for me to share this file in violation of copyright if anyone can download a fair use copy for themselves, with the tools provided by youtube-dl?

You're assuming a fair use case for using youtube-dl to download a copy of a licensed music video. But fair use is defense to a claim of violating copyright, so you need to show why your use is a fair use, you can't just say "fair use" as if it were a magic spell that makes your legal problems go away. And generally, it would be difficult to prove fair use for any of the content covered by an RIAA license because they make that content available for use offline, time-shifted, etc...they simply require that you pay for that.

The mention of the copyrighted work eg. "Taylor Swift" does not lay out a case of infringement. Merely possessing a copy does not indicate infringement, you could be in pursuit of your fair use rights, with no intention to share. Given the cost of bandwidth and predilection of media conglomerates to meter and limit it, I would argue that there is actually no likelihood of facilitating any substantially infringing use.

The person who took a copy has no substantial reason to share it with anyone, as it is freely available through the content providers. Anyone with a copy of youtube-dl can get it, (does youtube-dl enable the download of any paywalled content? If so, that might be a fact that changes the game. But if so, does the RIAA claimant have standing to make that argument?)

it doesn't matter if there are also legitimate fair use uses of the tool.

What are you basing your legal theory on?

The text of the DMCA and cases based on it.

Once the infringing use has been established, it doesn't matter that there is also the potential for legitimate fair use. If it did, then Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire would still be around because they all had the potential for legitimate fair use.

Not having read any legal literature around or really understanding the DMCA, how can they not make a distinction between things with legitimate uses and not? How do torrent clients stand up to that?

Torrent clients don’t name themselves “Game of Torrents” and have test cases for downloading TV shows.

The problem YouTube-dl ran into is they literally named themselves after a prominent streaming site that is copyright holder friendly and also literally tested, in their codebase, the ability to do a thing that arguably violates the DMCA.

iTunes was designed [in part, probably a principal part of the original design] for CD ripping, I gather (I haven't personally used it more than twice, many years ago).

Format shifting was at the time not allowed in UK copyright law, and again is not allowed as of a couple of years ago (it was only allowed for about a year).

iTunes was designed for copyright violation. I'm sure the manual will show that.

Just for comparison.

It's my understanding that any media _can_ fall under Fair Use in the USA, meaning that there would have to be specification as to who was using the software and their circumstances within the unit tests in order to make it infringing use. You might fir example be archiving, or preparing educational materials, or compiling a review, or doing subtitling.

It's not sufficient to prove someone downloaded, you have to show it was infringing activity. How do you do that with a unit test? Software to perform legitimate, legal downloads would still have to do that same test.

In short you've found a smoking gun, now prove its principle purpose is murder.

This comment is provided solely for entertainment and in no way relates to my employment.

Tunes was designed [in part, probably a principal part of the original design] for CD ripping, I gather (I haven't personally used it more than twice, many years ago).... iTunes was designed for copyright violation. I'm sure the manual will show that.

No, Itunes was designed for organizing music. How you got that music was a separate function,and you could split out the CD ripping functionality and still have the primary function of iTunes. Additionally, making copies of physical media for personal archival purposes is recognized as a legitimate fair use (and was back then), so the the CD ripping functionality would have generally still have been okay. And yes, there is case law on when ripping CDs is considered fair use and when it is not.

It's my understanding that any media _can_ fall under Fair Use in the USA, meaning that there would have to be specification as to who was using the software and their circumstances within the unit tests in order to make it infringing use. You might fir example be archiving, or preparing educational materials, or compiling a review, or doing subtitling.

Yes, any media can be subject to a fair use defense. The second statement is not relevant to the copyright analysis. The last statement are examples of fair use, but note that acquiring the content for the purposes of preparing educational materials is not automatically "fair use". For example, preparing educational materials for a class provided at a for-profit institution, or in educational materials sold commercially, would not support a fair use defense, though otherwise the use of copyright content in educational materials has generally been deemed fair use.

It's not sufficient to prove someone downloaded, you have to show it was infringing activity. How do you do that with a unit test? Software to perform legitimate, legal downloads would still have to do that same test.

The unit-test is a part of a different analysis from a basic copyright infringement claim; That question is whether the tool is intended for violating copyright and for that, they don't need to show any infringing activity actually took place, only that the tool was intended for infringing activity. The DMCA does not require a creator to suffer harm before they sue, since it recognizes that in the computer age, once such harm occurs it may not be possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

No, iTunes was designed for organizing music. How you got that music was a separate function, and you could split out the CD ripping functionality and still have the primary function of iTunes.

Well, being able to rip music off your CDs was literally advertised as an iTunes feature; Apple promoted iTunes after its introduction in 2001 with the slogan "Rip, Mix, Burn." And Apple did get accused by various industry players of promoting copyright violation. I wouldn't say that iTunes was "designed for copyright violation" any more than I'd say youtube-dl was "designed" for it, but Apple definitely understood that iTunes had value to people who wanted to make digital copies of media in ways that did not strictly fall under fair use guidelines. :)

A unit test seems like fair use.

I don't know where tranformation would land as they are just streaming data and not actually viewing it.

It's (potentially) the whole content, but a case that was literally just uploading an entire video as-is with a different title was ruled fair use not too long ago, so this isn't itself damning.

The nature of the work seems irrelevant here as it's not viewed. It could easily be replaced with any other video -- even one owned by the repo creators.

Likewise, since they are unit testing rather than viewing the content, I doubt there is any commercial harm and the market overlap between video viewers and unit testers is zero.

No, the unit test isn't fair use, because it wasn't necessary to violate the license holder's copyrights in order to test the code.

It's (potentially) the whole content, but a case that was literally just uploading an entire video as-is with a different title was ruled fair use not too long ago, so this isn't itself damning.

I'd like to see a cite for that. Generally, uploading whole content owned by someone else is not fair use absent something like the content being newsworthy in itself (such as video of a police beating). Otherwise, fair use would generally require some transformative effort.

Likewise, since they are unit testing rather than viewing the content, I doubt there is any commercial harm and the market overlap between video viewers and unit testers is zero.

Copyright violations don't require the copyright holder to prove commercial harm. That's the entire point of statutory damages.

Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA.

Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.

A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.

The only tenuous leg the RIAA has to stand on is claiming that allowing only streaming of content constitutes some form of digital rights management code, and by reverse engineering it, without imposing the same restrictions as Youtube's website and apps, do, maybe that's some form of circumvention which will be found not entirely legal.

They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.

It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.

Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA. Downloading videos may violate Youtube's TOS, but that's civil/contract law and not criminal and so the DMCA can't be used to enforce such TOS violations.

Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it.

A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.

This is false. Also, time-shifting is not a a valid fair-use defense for material available on-demand, because the justification for time-shifting (as in the Betamax case) generally no longer exists. There are other fair use arguments that could be made, but time-shifting isn't one of them.

They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.

I don't know if you're joking or not, but they cited a variety of US cases. Kazaa, Limewire, Napster, etc, are all US cases that all came down the same way: a tool intended primarily for copyright violations violates the DMCA, and in certain cases can even expose its developers to statutory damages under the copyright code.

It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.

Nope, not even close for so many reasons already explained in this and other comments.

Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it.

YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal violation when you're downloading a copy from YouTube even though you're the original copyright owner of the video. Youtube has a license to distribute the copy according to their TOS. That license will be subjected to specific terms (streaming + DRM protection). It might not include allowing creators to circumvent those terms for archival purposes.

Technically, even streaming is making a copy.

Legally, even running a program is making a copy (from disk to RAM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp....

I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.

Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.

Downloading a Youtube video with youtube-dl IS NOT violating copyright in the USA.

Are you a lawyer? Ethically I agree with you: copyright law regulates distributing copies to other people, and YouTube is the only one doing that in this scenario.

But I've been told in other internet discussions that courts don't see it that way. Basically, that the point of the law is to allow big companies to stop people from accessing media without paying, and the interpretation is stretched as far as it needs to be in order to enforce that.

So I don't know what to believe here.

Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see it the way of the party with the most money all the time. You can interpret laws until you're blue in the face, but they get to break the rules.

Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally.

It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".

Yeah if you get realistic about it, courts in the USA simply see things in the way of the party with the most money all the time.

This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court.

In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it.

RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?)

A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they?

So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.

They may not be a lawyer, but they have basic grasp of copyright law. It is indeed distribution of copyrighted content without permission that is illegal, not obtaining it.

Wait, are you sure about this? All I've ever seen leads me to believe piracy in and of itself is illegal, sans distribution.

Courts take a very non literalist approach to technology. Even though YouTube is literally sending copies of the video to users’ computers, because they provide no convenient mechanism for saving the video then courts will tend to ignore that. Instead, it will be argued that a musician’s YouTube channel is acting like a venue and the users are attending an authorized public performance. youtube-dl would then be equivalent to someone recording a concert using a camera.

They might have a very strong case in court. One of the reasons youtube-dl is so active as a project is because they’re in an arms race with Google. Google regularly changes how videos are delivered in an effort to thwart downloading tools. The RIAA could seize on this and even have Google testify that they’re trying to protect against this unauthorized downloading. Given the revelations about the tests in youtube-dl’s own repo, it would be a very difficult legal battle.

In that context youtube-dl would be a camera which most assuredly isn't illegal.

To add another item to the list of legal, legitimate uses of YouTube-dl: lots of public domain content is uploaded to YouTube, including a lot of media produced by the US government. For example, The White House has a YouTube channel, and my understanding of US law is that the vast majority of the content uploaded to that channel is public domain (produced by federal employees in the course of their job). Journalists or anyone else wanting to monitor the government would likely find YouTube-dl useful for archiving this public domain content from government channels.

Google should add direct download links for public domain content, but that's another fight entirely.

Why should they ? YouTube is in the streaming business, not the archival business. If someone wants to make their videos available for download they should post a link on their website, served through their servers and bandwidth.

Isn't streaming live video? It seems to me that youtube is exactly in archival video and hardly in streaming. But it's a big site so maybe a lot of people use it in ways I don't know.

Streaming is not exclusively live video. Streaming is viewing the file as it downloads. As a stream. The alternative is what we did in the dark ages. Download the entire file before beginning playback.

Youtube benefits from being everyone's go-to site for finding video content. Keeping that monopoly of mindshare is worth far more to them than any short sighted profit maximisation.

as recent legal action shows companies benefit from being monopolies up until the point that they monopolize too much.

I've gobbled hours of Cspan videos with youtube-dl. Turns out cspan is a hodgepodge of like 3-5 video hosting and codec schemes, but it is able to pull about a 3rd of them no problem.

Definitely forking it, I need this to continue my research.

Hope you can find a way to fork it. GitHub has disabled the repo and many forked repos.

The beauty of `git clone` is that there are copies of the repository on many thousands of hard drives (including mine -- last pulled a few days back). The main loss at this point is the metadata stored in GitHub's proprietary addons, like issues.

We can hope this inspires a) greater suspicion toward proprietary players that are sitting atop open-source work like GitHub (they're not the only one by any stretch); and b) greater adoption of systems that distribute the software's entire history together, including documentation and bug reports, e.g. Fossil.

If no-one else has anything more recent, would you be ok to put yours online somewhere for others to grab?

Try GitLab.

Or Gitea!

I'd love to be wrong here, but there are two separe things, content license and general YouTube terms of use, I think the terms prevent you from downloading any content, the fact that some content is licensed CC has to do more with being explicit, perhaps for displaying publicly or just informative, and I want to think they are leaving a bit of gray area for non abusive use(tons of downloads) , but you can see there is no download button, and if you build something that depends on it to certain scale they could go after you with terms of use, not license.

If you can prove me wrong with some link to where are we covered legally to download CC content from YouTube, it would make me very happy.

Curiously, what do scrapers (aka "readers") have to worry about with this topic?

Eg, i'm making an archiver and reader combination that, for personal use, archives stuff in a Git-like store. Yet, Git (and Git-likes) can also be used to distribute.. so hypothetically i could use this software to scrape and distribute content.

My intention is primarily to make news articles/etc searchable, archived, etc. Yet i'm sure NYT would have something to say about my test cases scraping their site.

.. the world is interesting.

I think the recent LinkedIn case established that it is legal to scrape anything which is publicly available (ie no login required). Redistribution would be a copyright violation, but the scraping itself is legal.

I'm not sure what that means for youtube-dl though.

The same argument can be made for video that's also publicly available.

Not to mention, youtube has it's own Download function in the mobile apps, even for copyrighted content. So there's that.

youtube has it's own Download function in the mobile apps, even for copyrighted content

Wait, seriously? I had no idea. I would think the presence of such a feature would severely undermine the RIAA's case.

It does, but it's only available for those who have a subscription to youtube premium.

As such, I assume the RIAA will try to argue that it doesn't fall into the same bucket that youtube-dl does, since the method of accessing the site is different (scraping the site, vs a sanctioned API)

I assume that YouTube's licenses with the RIAA covers the Youtube Premium features on their videos. If they didn't, they'd be in violation of RIAA's copyright (streaming licenses are not the same as downloading ones).

It beats me why they'd use those videos as examples knowing how finicky copyright law is.

Lack of legal awareness / advice?

"Napster could have been used for legal means as well, and it got destroyed in court."

But Napster was a service run by an organization.

youtube-dl is neither a service nor an organization. It's just some source code floating around the internet, to which volunteers contribute to.

A very different situation.

If anything, it's Youtube itself that's like Napster, and it's telling that the RIAA has gone after youtube-dl rather than Google.

It's not even clear that youtube-dl vs watching in the browser is any different from watching on tv vs using your vcr to record which has long been legal.

In this case, it "steals" the ad revenue that the copyright tries to protect, no? Or am I thinking about this incorrectly?

The fact that copyrighted works were included in the readme shows it was intended for that use

How could that be true? if the YouTube link in the test case was a video of farmer on his truck would that show it is intended for that use? No. YouTube dl is made to download any YouTube videos it has not been made to download specifically Taylor Swift music videos, it just has just been picked as a test case as any other YouTube videos could have been

While I agree with the point, a strong case can be made that the music video in the README and the test case were a poor choice.

A silly home video, preferably uploaded by the maintainers themselves would've just given RIAA's claim no teeth.

We might as well ban screen shots because it can illegally reproduce photography stills. /s

Android allows applications to disable screenshots while they are running, as a form of DRM.

Seems like putting that in the readme was pretty stupid. Intent matters in legal things, making the example infringing undermines the argument that the tool is good and some people are just bad.

This feels like DeCSS all over again.

I think napster would be the better comparision (and especially napster compared to vcrs)

I don’t see how Napster is more applicable than vcrs. YouTube in this case is the broadcaster, putting content out to a general viewing public, ytdl is a recording device. For Napster to work, YouTube has to be imputes with illegally providing the copy and ytdl has to be the means to facilitate the copies transport.

They did not put that in the readme. The README contains only references to test videos, videos that don't actually exist, and one small-time video (in spanish?) that seems to be an old test video, but I have a hard time seeing for sure.

The source code does contain references to copyrighted videos in the tests, tests intended to make sure that youtube-dl can download the data from videos using the extremely "token" signature scrambling that youtube employs for certain videos. You can see the test cases here:

https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub...

There's stuff like Justin Timberlake in there and Taylor Swift. This was immensely sloppy considering how the RIAA has won cases before.

I think you are misunderstanding the legal argument. The DMCA Section 1201 specifically prohibits (among other things) technology that "is marketed ... for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." The example in the README is evidence of this.

The argument is that youtube-dl is primarily used for breaking DRM not just that it could be used for doing so.

Calling the thing youtube-dl in the first place rather than GenericDownloadHelper or something like that could, I guess, be seen as marketing it for a specific purpose.

Sadly yes. Legally this was actually rather stupid.

Giving the project an innocuous name - think of a cute animal that isn't already being used as an open source mascot - and not explicitly mentioning popular artists in the README would have made the RIAA's case harder to argue.

As it stands now, whatever the ethics or politics, legally there isn't much of a defence.

so, let's fork it and call it something like FURIAA

Too late; the code is already tainted. It carries the colour of "intended, marketed and used for copyright violation", and you can't just wash it away by reuploading the repo under a different name.

Why not?

If youtube-dl incorporates some generic HTTP library (which it presumably does), is that now "tainted" too? If it used the one from Chrome, does everybody have to stop using Chrome? That seems problematic. Also, if that's the case I foresee some epic trolling ahead as people incorporate "interesting" code into their overt piracy tools. I bet some of them even incorporate code built into Windows or macOS.

If not, what stops somebody from taking all of youtube-dl, changing the name and three lines of code, and saying that the removed lines were the ones promoted for infringement?

The law isn't some computer program that you can trick if you try hard enough. If someone can reasonably tell that you just took a program and rejiggled it a bit to pretend it's something else, they are going to come after you regardless and likely be successful when they do so.

See my response here for summary, and the article linked there for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874225.

If not, what stops somebody from taking all of youtube-dl, changing the name and three lines of code, and saying that the removed lines were the ones promoted for infringement?

What that somebody says is immaterial. If they did clone youtube-dl, their clone carries the "meant for copyright infringement" colour, by the virtue of being a clone of a project with that colour, and not a completely unrelated and independent project. It's the provenance and intent that matters. Web browsers and HTTP libraries do not have the "bad" colour, and being general-purpose tools, they likely never will.

It definitely was very sloppy of them to show examples on actual copyrighted material. Couldn't they have simply put examples of public domain content?

JFYI i was wrong. There were no such examples in the README or “marketing material,” there was URLs and metadata in a few unit tests.

Not that big of a difference, since I see unit tests as examples, still sloppy either ways.

It's not "marketing," though, which is a key difference.

Programmers put weird things in unit tests all the time. Maybe the contributor was making a joke.