None of these solutions will work. Look, I try not to be negative, but at some point you have to admit the RIAA dealt a serious blow.
The value of youtube-dl wasn't the software. It was the community. It was the ability to respond, within hours, to a change made on any given site. I.e. youtube-dl stopped working? No problem, file an issue, wait a day, solved.
That is now gone. And the world is simply going to have to accept that it is gone, or figure out a way to get it back. Because that was the sole reason youtube-dl mattered. Not the software.
Yes, this youtube-dl2 thing is certainly ... clever. I guess that's the point, right? "Look! youtube-dl can still be downloaded!" That's why it has 34 upvotes right now, right?
... But so what? In a day, no one will remember it, and it won't have any impact. There's no community here. The community was the key.
I just don't understand why people will do ten thousand mental backflips to avoid admitting defeat here. Yes, go ahead and clone this software far and wide. Make three youtube-dl templates! Etc.
In three months, after youtube-dl is broken on most websites, no one will know where to turn, or how to update it, or how to file issues, or any of the things that made youtube-dl special. Because youtube-dl wasn't software. It was people; the combined effort of hundreds (thousands?) of people. That collaborative space is now gone.
I am mortified to hear myself speak so negatively, with not one positive thing to say. I used to despise people like that. And here I am, doing the same thing.
But you know what? You, personally, can solve this problem. You have the power to build The Next Thing. The thing that doesn't suffer this same fate.
The tech can exist. I urge you to (a) think about a long-term solution, and then (b) devote years of your life to making it a reality.
Until then, though, just accept that youtube-dl is gone, and be done with it.
The good thing is that the website https://yt-dl.org is sill up, and the original author seems to have control over it. If there is some coordination behind it, I don't see why the community could not re-locate to a different place, where it is less likely to be sabotaged by what seems to be an inappropriate DMCA takedown.
> It was the ability to respond, within hours, to a change made on any given site. I.e. youtube-dl stopped working? No problem, file an issue, wait a day, solved.
That's funny. You must have not been around on the repo for the last six to eight months. It was practically abandoned, with several broken extractors not being addressed, and essential PRs being ignored for months or even years. See this:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
As an example, take the tiktok extractor, which was (and is still) broken for almost a year without even being acknowledged by the maintainers:
Never underestimate the community. The Github project is gone, the people are not. I'm pretty sure they will find an good alternative to github (with Issues, Pull Requests and so on) to continue the collaborative work on youtube-dl.
> Until then, though, just accept that youtube-dl is gone, and be done with it.
Not so fast. Let's not be so quick to mourn a loss that we do it prematurely. Remember, GitHub /has/ to take youtube-dl down at least /temporarily/ in order to be procedurally compliant. That doesn't mean it stays down. Relevant HN subthread about Popcorn Time being reinstated earlier by GitHub [1]:
"""
GitHub isn't siding with anyone here. They're not increasing liability to protect Popcorn Time, they're only following regular counter-notice procedure by reinstating the repositories after 15 days of the MPAA not filing a lawsuit against the owners of Popcorn Time[0,1]. This procedure will also happen with youtube-dl if they decide to counter-notice.
> But you know what? You, personally, can solve this problem. You have the power to build The Next Thing. The thing that doesn't suffer this same fate.
> The tech can exist. I urge you to (a) think about a long-term solution, and then (b) devote years of your life to making it a reality.
The way you've described it, this isn't a problem with a technical solution. Discouraging or eliminating the ability of an organization to deplatform a software community requires a social/legal solution. Presumably, someone hoped to reignite interest in the social solution yesterday by pointing at [0] gittorrent. Ultimately, I affirm your general sentiment that this can only be an occasional flower in the desert and tall weeds get cut. Any network I can find, RIAA can find.
Exactly what stops the team/community from hosting the latest sources outside US jurisdiction and continuing to develop it over the Net, preferably anonymously? I mean... this is exactly one of the best strengths of the Internet...
2) It should be possible to clone as much content from YouTube as possible using the last version of YouTube-DL while it still works
3) We can migrate the content off a platform that wishes to make it impossible to share and remix work and put it on a decentralized model that does. Even better are platforms which allow you to download it directly without the need for hack tools.
I think the future is simply getting enough people to use the existing alternatives and contribute to them.
I still think this is an unnecessarily defeatist attitude. Let's wait and see.
For now, these kind of things serve as a demonstration of spirit and of the fact that there are many people who do not agree with this interpretation of the law.
Wow I never thought about it like that. You raise a very valid point. Lots of time my youtube download did not work and all I had to do was upgrade the brew package. But it won't be the same next time it breaks :/
You are overly pessimistic, just move to another site, happens all the time. RIAA makes a lot of noise but is actually toothless. If it was only US persons involved with excess tangible assets and there was a lot of money changing hands they might roll the dice, but in this instance everything is working against them.
youtube-dl can still be used for reference so that people can use as it as a starting point to learn to scrape video. If enough people take an interest in fixing their local youtube-dl individually when things change and it stops working, even just for themselves, means that the video scraping knowledge is more widespread. Maybe that is a bit of a pipe dream, but it is something people can do if they really care about it, there is certainly the motivation now. Yeah, it's going to be a lot more difficult now that there is no longer a centralised community for it.
Honest question. Why do you need hundreds of people to maintain a simple software that downloads videos from YouTube? Is it that complicated to assemble the query string? I haven't done any work on YT per se, but in my experience from other social sites like Facebook all it takes is to fire a headless browser and do a couple hours of research at tops. Does YT changes on a daily basis?
[+] [-] sillysaurusx|5 years ago|reply
The value of youtube-dl wasn't the software. It was the community. It was the ability to respond, within hours, to a change made on any given site. I.e. youtube-dl stopped working? No problem, file an issue, wait a day, solved.
That is now gone. And the world is simply going to have to accept that it is gone, or figure out a way to get it back. Because that was the sole reason youtube-dl mattered. Not the software.
Yes, this youtube-dl2 thing is certainly ... clever. I guess that's the point, right? "Look! youtube-dl can still be downloaded!" That's why it has 34 upvotes right now, right?
... But so what? In a day, no one will remember it, and it won't have any impact. There's no community here. The community was the key.
I just don't understand why people will do ten thousand mental backflips to avoid admitting defeat here. Yes, go ahead and clone this software far and wide. Make three youtube-dl templates! Etc.
In three months, after youtube-dl is broken on most websites, no one will know where to turn, or how to update it, or how to file issues, or any of the things that made youtube-dl special. Because youtube-dl wasn't software. It was people; the combined effort of hundreds (thousands?) of people. That collaborative space is now gone.
I am mortified to hear myself speak so negatively, with not one positive thing to say. I used to despise people like that. And here I am, doing the same thing.
But you know what? You, personally, can solve this problem. You have the power to build The Next Thing. The thing that doesn't suffer this same fate.
The tech can exist. I urge you to (a) think about a long-term solution, and then (b) devote years of your life to making it a reality.
Until then, though, just accept that youtube-dl is gone, and be done with it.
[+] [-] heinrichhartman|5 years ago|reply
What are the next steps for the community?
- Should we re-locate to a different space?
- Shall we wait until a lawsuit has been filed?
- Shall we wait until we have a legal response?
The good thing is that the website https://yt-dl.org is sill up, and the original author seems to have control over it. If there is some coordination behind it, I don't see why the community could not re-locate to a different place, where it is less likely to be sabotaged by what seems to be an inappropriate DMCA takedown.
[+] [-] llacb47|5 years ago|reply
That's funny. You must have not been around on the repo for the last six to eight months. It was practically abandoned, with several broken extractors not being addressed, and essential PRs being ignored for months or even years. See this: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
As an example, take the tiktok extractor, which was (and is still) broken for almost a year without even being acknowledged by the maintainers:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://webcache.googleusercon...
[+] [-] tutfbhuf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yowlingcat|5 years ago|reply
Not so fast. Let's not be so quick to mourn a loss that we do it prematurely. Remember, GitHub /has/ to take youtube-dl down at least /temporarily/ in order to be procedurally compliant. That doesn't mean it stays down. Relevant HN subthread about Popcorn Time being reinstated earlier by GitHub [1]:
"""
GitHub isn't siding with anyone here. They're not increasing liability to protect Popcorn Time, they're only following regular counter-notice procedure by reinstating the repositories after 15 days of the MPAA not filing a lawsuit against the owners of Popcorn Time[0,1]. This procedure will also happen with youtube-dl if they decide to counter-notice.
0: https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...
1: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/05/2020-05-0...
"""
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886023
[+] [-] Nzen|5 years ago|reply
The way you've described it, this isn't a problem with a technical solution. Discouraging or eliminating the ability of an organization to deplatform a software community requires a social/legal solution. Presumably, someone hoped to reignite interest in the social solution yesterday by pointing at [0] gittorrent. Ultimately, I affirm your general sentiment that this can only be an occasional flower in the desert and tall weeds get cut. Any network I can find, RIAA can find.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874994
[+] [-] Santosh83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
In the same way, did the RIAA remove youtube-dl from visibility and awareness? just watch.
[+] [-] apta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitblitblit|5 years ago|reply
So a few ideas...
1) YouTube alternatives already exist (Libry, PeerTube, DTube, etc.)
2) It should be possible to clone as much content from YouTube as possible using the last version of YouTube-DL while it still works
3) We can migrate the content off a platform that wishes to make it impossible to share and remix work and put it on a decentralized model that does. Even better are platforms which allow you to download it directly without the need for hack tools.
I think the future is simply getting enough people to use the existing alternatives and contribute to them.
[+] [-] feanaro|5 years ago|reply
For now, these kind of things serve as a demonstration of spirit and of the fact that there are many people who do not agree with this interpretation of the law.
[+] [-] lalwanivikas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pitay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
Would that solve the legal issue?
(I assume then the download functionality can be unlocked using a few lines of code)
[+] [-] atomi|5 years ago|reply
The fight should be an ideological one - akin to first amendment protections.
[+] [-] elorant|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aswinmohanme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noxer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chippy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ankushnarula|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkmeneguello|5 years ago|reply