https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/...-10-23-RIAA.md

The RIAA complained about youtube-dl, github took the repo offline immediately.

Hacker News discussion

After reading a bit I realise that what happened is specific to the US legal system - gihub.com is forced to comply with the takedown immediately, otherwise they're becoming a target of possible legal claims just like the developers of youtube-dl.
So that makes the really fast takedown understandable:
Also see:
https://tildes.net/~tech/suf/youtube...down_from_riaa
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming..._riaa/g9sm6pp/
I've said it many times: don't host your stuff on servers subject to US law!

Interesting: youtube itself does not seem to be affected by any of this.

Many people are cloning the repo, or putting their local copies online,
You can find them on https://gitea.eponym.info/, https://notabug.org/ and even github itself: https://github.com/search?q=RIAA+youtube-dl
Youtube-dl's own web page still works.

So the current version is safe, but I am worried about continued, centralised development...
I hope ytdl devs will post sth on their site. Also how to support them if it should come to a lawsuit.

I have a feeling we have been at similar points many times over the past decade or so, and that's what it always comes down to.
I mean, bittorrent clients are still legal, and I'm sure there was a very similar thing happening there ~10y ago?

I liked this comment on the ycombinator thread:
Oh and don't think for one moment that the RIAA's actions have anything to do with supporting the struggling artist.

It appears RIAA's main reasoning is that parts of the code contain actual links to RIAA member companies' material is being used for examples. I don't think they can attack the code itself, unless they get youtube itself behind them.

There is already an active thread on this.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...aa-4175684137/

^ ah, under slackware. Well, this affects us all.

Not really. libdvdcss is generally considered to contravene US law, which is why distros owned by US companies like Fedora or OpenSUSE leave you to get it from independent European repositories. I can't see that youtube-dl is any more likely to vanish than libdvdcss.

No, the code itself won't go away.
But youtube-dl's biggest plus is (or was, up til now) continuous development & lots of help from lots of developers, to keep up with the constant changes those streaming sites create to thwart such efforts.

So far, and concerning youtube itself, the latest version still works - which means youtube haven't changed anything (yet) - one more reason to believe that they don't care about RIAA's little tantrum.

I miss some sort of statement from the (main) devs themselves. The DMCA takedown was acknowledged on their site but that's all so far. Well, it's still early days I guess.

The biggest pain I think it the loss of issues and pull requests, there were many issues with info on current bugs and unmerged PRs that had fixes for these bugs. Before this the ytdl development was slow and the unmerged PRs were piling up.

They're not lost (yet), since the repository is merely disabled and not deleted, and will be restored if there's a successful appeal.

The Arch package is now flagged as out-of-date: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/c...ny/youtube-dl/

Which seems to be a mistake? According to this page such a flag is to indicate "there is a newer stable release available", which is not true - the package in the Arch repo matches the version on the website. Did someone flag it because they want to change the URL to an unofficial clone?

The AUR youtube-dl-git package has comments from its maintainer saying they're waiting to see what happens before even considering changing the upstream URL, so the flag on the main package makes no sense?

There's a fork of youtube-dl that is more active: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc

Correct. That said, it's not flagged anymore.

well that's the maintainer of the AUR package, not the maintainer of youtube-dl.
Funny, so many people post, nay demand, alternative sources. It takes more than a cloned repo to take up development...

This however:...looks like it's been around for a while?
I could not tickle the github interface into telling me when exactly this wqs forked off from the original youtube-dl, how long it has existed, with the specific "intention of getting features tested by the community merged in the tool faster, since youtube-dl's development seems to be slowing down" (have to admit I had noticed that myself once).
It appears the owner complained about that long before current events, but the AUR package is new.
edit: OK, it appears this was forked sometime in August because of slow development and happens to have a few extra commits compared to the original. I'm not sure I agree with the idea of pushing a fork instead of trying to work together more with yt-dl devs, but atm the point is moot...

Still no news on the official site...

So apparently there's a bit of security flaw in GitHub - note the user and repo, then check the link...

https://github.com/github/dmca/tree/25cdace60ac64788a4853d33d9fa48c5338f7249

In other words, (GitHub owner and also a RIAA member) Microsoft sends itself a DMCA notice to take down youtube-dl - and promptly complies.

Maybe the good guy Microsoft will save the day and re-enable the repository..

The first commit from blackjack4494 was on August 4 of this year, for whatever that's worth.

It suggests a genuine intent to improve the project and not just an opportunistic newbie.

I hope the terrible name choice of "yt-dlc" is only a temporary one though.