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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

That's not good then. There were some concerns before that the project wasn't active anymore, so I hope it's not a sign of maintainers deciding to pull the plug.

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The claim was filed on Friday. It's been less than 48 hours, almost none of it during business hours. Filing a counterclaim is literally saying "see you in court," and given both that RIAA is known for being litigious and that youtube-dl's defense here is (to my reading of the law) merely decent and not slam-dunk, I would not want to take that step without seeking the advice of a lawyer first.

So even if a counterclaim were to be filed, I would not expect it to have been filed yet.

Edit: the most recent counterclaim I see filed was done on 2020-10-08 (https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/5dfed34cdb3774fcb10cb294...)... for a claim filed on 2020-09-16 (https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/951b7ba132fd6bafab2401a7...). That's almost a month later.

I'd also note that if anyone feels like duking it out with the RIAA for some reason (Why? Is your goal to spend as much money as possible or something?) you can always create your own youtube-dl equivalent and wait for a takedown notice of your own.

Now presumably GitHub won't let you push forbidden changesets, but since hashes are chained all you have to do is modify a single byte of the root and replay everything. (I have no idea if GitHub would ban you for a ToS violation or if they would just wait for the next DMCA takedown notice to show up.)

I'm hoping the EFF helps them out with this case. They've tweeted in support of them[0] and its not unheard of for them to provide counsel for projects in these circumstances.

[0]: https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1319787243184123904

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