> This request wasn't well-received by developers, many of whom retaliated by posting copies of the code. Yesterday, things went from bad to worse when a user with the name 'F* T RIAA' uploaded three MP3s of the songs the RIAA mentioned in its takedown notice
RIAA couldn't care less. As far as I understand, they practically are just a team of lawyers whose job is to attack whoever they can reach, take whatever they can down and collect money when possible. They hardly even care about the actual recording business, let alone about how do people feel about them.
Making developers afraid to work on youtube-dl is a much more powerful move than taking down a few songs that were already available for free on YouTube.
Which will lead to GitHub adding content filters which will lead to false flags and rejected commits which will lead to algorithms wrongly flagging existing content in your repo which will lead to a byzantine appeal processes which ...
Companies actually lobby the EU, I guess the same is true for the US, to allow "forward scanning". Meaning they would like to proactively try to purge the net of illegal content. Mozilla is part of this alliance.
I am going to leave Github, since the tech giants + Mozilla should not be trusted.
It "backfires" because people post a small number of mp3 files on github that will promptly taken down? We did it reddit, the DMCA is no more!
What a silly headline.
If you want to actually something that will matter then make sure that github doesn't become a single point of failure for FLOSS software in the future. Or get your GH account banned by posting Lady Gaga tracks in your repos, you do you.
The EFF appears to concur with a previous comment I made on this topic:
"EFF believes that the circumvention restrictions in DMCA section 1201, which prevent people from bypassing technological restrictions, are too broad.
DMCA 1201 is incredibly broad, apparently allowing rightsholders to legally harass any ‘trafficker’ in code that lets users re-take control of their devices from DRM locks,” EFF wrote recently."
This creates an unaccountable enforcement party who can harass "targets" on behalf of another unaccountable party. The way it is written, reddit would have to take down a selectively unpopular subreddit for providing technology that facilitates the trafficking of copyrighted images. Whose copyright? Who cares? One could inject a bunch of copyrighted material into sites and then use a DMCA notice against their upstream provider to shut them off - a pattern I would predict is likely to materialize in coming months. Write sideloaded apps for a community because an app store uses their policy against you? "Circumvention!" The opportunities for abuse are endless.
While teleological arguments are always a bit iffy, the final objective is to ensure that there can be no information or service on the internet that is outside not only U.S. subpoena, but that there can be no communities or networks of personal relationships that are not governed by legacy institutions. It is under the auspices of people being "accountable," for their thoughts and beliefs, and yet without precision about to whom one is being held to account by.
To every establishment growth is the greatest threat of all, and the DMCA s1201 is effectively designed to suppress it. The good news is these blunt attacks are a forcing function for developing decentralized technologies, and every one of these creates a cohort of new hackers.
Music consumers across multiple generations, while supporting artists, have expected a certain degree of freedom with the music playback technology placed in their hands. Whether it was recording a custom mix-tape for a special friend full of copied tracks or ripping a stream to play back on demand, there are certain things that most people see as reasonable and harmless.
RIAA made a habit of attacking things seen as reasonable and harmless and has earned a reputation for being unreasonable and harmful. Musicians deserve better. Ultimately, they are the bosses here. Perhaps someday they'll start acting like it.
Some do. I seem to recall Nirvana being outspoken of their corporate attack dogs the RIAA back in the Napster days when the RIAA was with a straight face claiming damages that totaled more money than was in circulation, globally.
It seems one of the RIAA's jobs is doing unpopular things and taking the blame. The recording studios can keep them at arms length and stay reasonably spotless while they are the real responsibles for these actions.
This didn't backfire for the RIAA, it backfired for GitHub, who are absolutely not the bad guys in this. They have expressed more support for the project than they would have needed to and are bound to laws.
Github's failure is one of principles. That the youtube-dl repository is actually a violation is tenuous at best. Should they actually care about the state of things they would have resisted, but they did not.
In the short-term, no. In the long-term - should companies like Microsoft get sick of their crap, all of the RIAAs power is based in regulatory capture. We can (and should) change the copyright laws that enable them to sue someone over a creative work that quite frankly they shouldn't get a single piece of after an extremely short period of time. The RIAA is big, Microsoft is much, much bigger and could tie them up in courts and outspend them in lobbying without missing a beat.
You helped make an album? Great - here's your flat fee, royalties go to the artist and the artist only. The problem would fix itself overnight.
> As we highlighted earlier, hundreds of new copies of the youtube-dl code appeared online in response, also on GitHub.
> While GitHub’s CEO Nat Friedman was annoyed by RIAA takedown efforts, he stressed that the platform legally had to comply, which it did. More recently, the company even said that users who continue to republish the code risk being banned.
Mates, just put the youtube-dl code up on IPFS[1] or SourceHut[2], which is a platform much more sympathetic to and defensive for the open source cause. No need to put it back up on GitHub and risk banishment there. There are lots of options here. The RIAA can't sensor open source software. At least, I'd like to see them try.
I wanted also to say that I don't necessarily agree with jacking videos off of youtube. But who knows? What if you have the permission of the youtuber? What if the youtuber is just posting stuff that's in the public domain anyway? What if you're downloading the whole video so that you can get clips of the video you intend to put in your own video in an attempt to criticize the video, thus invoking fair use? The RIAA does not and should not have the power to take down open source software just because it could be used for nefarious purposes. There are also plenty of innocent uses out there.
But now there is no official fork of youtube-dl, so development will either stop or be fragmented. And users will not want to trust any given fork, so downloads will taper off.
If the original creator endorses a fork, is he making himself liable? - not sure what happens if you repost after a takedown notice.
And the involvement of the law, and the publicity will lead overall to self-censoring, as most devs won't want to deal with this...
Doesn't seem to me to making things worse for the RIAA
All the maintainer has to do is collect patches and release an updated version of the canonical source. This isn't something that happens only in theory, the kernel for the OS I'm typing on right now is developed this way.
Github is more interesting because of eg issue tracking, but there are other ways to do that.
What laws haven't been a disaster? People are still murdered. The environment is still polluted. Taxes are still squandered. Healthcare has become unaffordable.
TL;DR: Someone uploaded 3 (yes three) mp3s, which will be duly removed if they haven't been already. Torrentfreak bothered to tell the RIAA, to generate further drama and ad views, but even they weren't interested.
This has nothing to do with youtube-dl; it's just someone annoyed about it doing something completely pointless.
This makes it necessary to sync another service with Github for software projects. Once Github, now a unit of Microsoft, gets takedowns going, legit software projects will be taken down through random errors.
Systems which rely on Github in production, such as Rust's "cargo", now need to be using multiple sources and checking hashes.
Even without that package manager relying on Github sounds plain stupid to me. What if Github decides to rate limit, gets banned in country(it got banned in India once) or lot of other things that could happen at Microsoft's whims.
I'm not sure I'd call this "backfiring," as I'm sure that the RIAA must have seen this coming (they have been the Snidely Whiplash of the tech industry for a couple of decades). This kind of reaction is not exactly anything new; just the medium.
I think that pirating streams actually helps to sell music. At least, in my limited sample pool, that has been the case.
I used to stream an Internet radio station that played Industrial (dating myself -no one else will), and would often grab songs from it.
A lot of times, the only reason that I grabbed it, was so that I could find out more about it. The quality of the audio grab wasn't really what I wanted as a "keeper."
These pretty obscure groups made a lot of sales (to me) because they had their stuff out there.
I'd rather see a curated database of content that isn't covered by any enforcement arm of the recording industry, so I can compensate those musicians directly.
i agree with you... now show them your support by sending them a blank check for their legal fees. oh... i'm sorry... did i offend HN, strike a nerve and become a troll?
no i did not. i am demonstrating that most people on this site haven't the slightest clue what they are talking about.
it costs money and time to fight something and companies have something called a risk management department that decides whether it is worth the risk to fight or comply.
github knows that getting into a heated legal battle is going to cost alot, especially going up against the deep pockets of the RIAA. not saying that github and microsoft don't have deep pockets, but that this _will_ become an expensive battle to fight and defending a grey area open source project isn't worth the time nor the money.
They might decide not to counter-notice, because there's a big trap in the DMCA counter-notice: as far as I know, for a DMCA counter-notice to be valid, the one doing the counter-notice must agree to be bound to the jurisdiction of an USA court. If the youtube-dl author is not from the USA (I think he's from the EU), that would expose him to legal risk.
(As a non-USA person, to me this is the most evil part of the DMCA take-down system: even a defective DMCA notice leads to a dilemma, either you keep the content offline, or you risk being sued in a foreign jurisdiction you have no control over. This is also why I believe one should always prefer to host in one's own country, so that any dispute can be resolved by the local courts.)
I don't feel sorry at all for Microsoft. They have a long history of harassing developers (e.g., [1]. It's nice to see them bear some of that for once.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
RIAA couldn't care less. As far as I understand, they practically are just a team of lawyers whose job is to attack whoever they can reach, take whatever they can down and collect money when possible. They hardly even care about the actual recording business, let alone about how do people feel about them.
[+] [-] sp332|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michelb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pankajdoharey|5 years ago|reply
Also there are tons of options GNU Savannah, Gogs,Gitea , Git Bucket ...
[+] [-] shmerl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] austincheney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|5 years ago|reply
... no wait, that was my Youtube channel.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
I am going to leave Github, since the tech giants + Mozilla should not be trusted.
https://edima-eu.org/
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
What a silly headline.
If you want to actually something that will matter then make sure that github doesn't become a single point of failure for FLOSS software in the future. Or get your GH account banned by posting Lady Gaga tracks in your repos, you do you.
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
"EFF believes that the circumvention restrictions in DMCA section 1201, which prevent people from bypassing technological restrictions, are too broad.
DMCA 1201 is incredibly broad, apparently allowing rightsholders to legally harass any ‘trafficker’ in code that lets users re-take control of their devices from DRM locks,” EFF wrote recently."
This creates an unaccountable enforcement party who can harass "targets" on behalf of another unaccountable party. The way it is written, reddit would have to take down a selectively unpopular subreddit for providing technology that facilitates the trafficking of copyrighted images. Whose copyright? Who cares? One could inject a bunch of copyrighted material into sites and then use a DMCA notice against their upstream provider to shut them off - a pattern I would predict is likely to materialize in coming months. Write sideloaded apps for a community because an app store uses their policy against you? "Circumvention!" The opportunities for abuse are endless.
While teleological arguments are always a bit iffy, the final objective is to ensure that there can be no information or service on the internet that is outside not only U.S. subpoena, but that there can be no communities or networks of personal relationships that are not governed by legacy institutions. It is under the auspices of people being "accountable," for their thoughts and beliefs, and yet without precision about to whom one is being held to account by.
To every establishment growth is the greatest threat of all, and the DMCA s1201 is effectively designed to suppress it. The good news is these blunt attacks are a forcing function for developing decentralized technologies, and every one of these creates a cohort of new hackers.
[+] [-] beloch|5 years ago|reply
RIAA made a habit of attacking things seen as reasonable and harmless and has earned a reputation for being unreasonable and harmful. Musicians deserve better. Ultimately, they are the bosses here. Perhaps someday they'll start acting like it.
[+] [-] backtoyoujim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] na85|5 years ago|reply
Some do. I seem to recall Nirvana being outspoken of their corporate attack dogs the RIAA back in the Napster days when the RIAA was with a straight face claiming damages that totaled more money than was in circulation, globally.
[+] [-] skj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperman1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] R0b0t1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tw04|5 years ago|reply
You helped make an album? Great - here's your flat fee, royalties go to the artist and the artist only. The problem would fix itself overnight.
[+] [-] djhaskin987|5 years ago|reply
> While GitHub’s CEO Nat Friedman was annoyed by RIAA takedown efforts, he stressed that the platform legally had to comply, which it did. More recently, the company even said that users who continue to republish the code risk being banned.
Mates, just put the youtube-dl code up on IPFS[1] or SourceHut[2], which is a platform much more sympathetic to and defensive for the open source cause. No need to put it back up on GitHub and risk banishment there. There are lots of options here. The RIAA can't sensor open source software. At least, I'd like to see them try.
I wanted also to say that I don't necessarily agree with jacking videos off of youtube. But who knows? What if you have the permission of the youtuber? What if the youtuber is just posting stuff that's in the public domain anyway? What if you're downloading the whole video so that you can get clips of the video you intend to put in your own video in an attempt to criticize the video, thus invoking fair use? The RIAA does not and should not have the power to take down open source software just because it could be used for nefarious purposes. There are also plenty of innocent uses out there.
1: https://ipfs.io/
2: https://git.sr.ht/
[+] [-] sam_goody|5 years ago|reply
If the original creator endorses a fork, is he making himself liable? - not sure what happens if you repost after a takedown notice.
And the involvement of the law, and the publicity will lead overall to self-censoring, as most devs won't want to deal with this...
Doesn't seem to me to making things worse for the RIAA
[+] [-] heinrichhartman|5 years ago|reply
https://gitlab.com/dstftw/youtube-dl/-/commits/master
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24960039
[+] [-] swiley|5 years ago|reply
Github is more interesting because of eg issue tracking, but there are other ways to do that.
[+] [-] majewsky|5 years ago|reply
youtube-dl has made new releases after the takedown, so development appears to be continuing.
[+] [-] Pelic4n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hashtagmarkup|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmachinery|5 years ago|reply
This has nothing to do with youtube-dl; it's just someone annoyed about it doing something completely pointless.
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tirz|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Systems which rely on Github in production, such as Rust's "cargo", now need to be using multiple sources and checking hashes.
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the5avage|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
I think that pirating streams actually helps to sell music. At least, in my limited sample pool, that has been the case.
I used to stream an Internet radio station that played Industrial (dating myself -no one else will), and would often grab songs from it.
A lot of times, the only reason that I grabbed it, was so that I could find out more about it. The quality of the audio grab wasn't really what I wanted as a "keeper."
These pretty obscure groups made a lot of sales (to me) because they had their stuff out there.
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|5 years ago|reply
So you say that users pirate the music and then buy the same music they illegally downloaded?
[+] [-] rch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernihil|5 years ago|reply
run
1. run `node dmca.js` to get a Justin Timberlake - Tunnel Vision (Official Music Video) (Explicit).mp3 file
2. `node youtube.dl.js` to get a youtube-dl-master.zip file
;-)
[+] [-] vorticalbox|5 years ago|reply
It would be nice if for once platforms stood up legally for their users when they believe its unjust.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmeisthax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway954|5 years ago|reply
no i did not. i am demonstrating that most people on this site haven't the slightest clue what they are talking about.
it costs money and time to fight something and companies have something called a risk management department that decides whether it is worth the risk to fight or comply.
github knows that getting into a heated legal battle is going to cost alot, especially going up against the deep pockets of the RIAA. not saying that github and microsoft don't have deep pockets, but that this _will_ become an expensive battle to fight and defending a grey area open source project isn't worth the time nor the money.
[+] [-] verroq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cesarb|5 years ago|reply
They might decide not to counter-notice, because there's a big trap in the DMCA counter-notice: as far as I know, for a DMCA counter-notice to be valid, the one doing the counter-notice must agree to be bound to the jurisdiction of an USA court. If the youtube-dl author is not from the USA (I think he's from the EU), that would expose him to legal risk.
(As a non-USA person, to me this is the most evil part of the DMCA take-down system: even a defective DMCA notice leads to a dilemma, either you keep the content offline, or you risk being sued in a foreign jurisdiction you have no control over. This is also why I believe one should always prefer to host in one's own country, so that any dispute can be resolved by the local courts.)
[+] [-] karlzt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miga|5 years ago|reply
To keep their business they should defend from both sides.
[+] [-] craftyguy|5 years ago|reply
1. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2676459/microsoft-sues-lin...
[+] [-] phkahler|5 years ago|reply