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Comment by jk700 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses youtube-dl for all the videos online, it's presence in any repos isn't as important as it may seem, because it breaks from time to time for some websites and you need to update it in order to keep using it, which is only easy if you keep it in your home directory so you can just run youtube-dl -U once it breaks.

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I completely disagree. I have been using for example NewPipe from FDroid which is autobuild regularly as native Android program.

I would no longer expect FDroid now to keep doing this if they risk a DCMA letter that takes out their entire repo.

And I would assume a shitton of users use yt-dl code through another GUI application, rather than directly through an EasyInstall/virtualenv/whatever. And will most py repos still dare to host/link this code if the risk is a DMCA letter to their ISP?

NewPipe doesn't use youtube-dl, they have their own implementation of the stream extraction code[1]. Unless that codebase also has test cases which specifically try to download RIAA content, they would need to find a different justification for a DMCA takedown.

[1]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor

I realize that since NewPipe's Java; but it's just an example.

I really doubt the "it's just the test cases" justification btw, since test cases would likely be fair use. The deencryption stuff is the problem, and NewPipe does it too.

Cam down. This will just end up like DeCSS, when it was packaged separately and left to the user to trigger the necessary download.

Distribution/integration is the easy part. The hard part is to anonymise and secure core developers, and to allow contributions to continue flowing in a safe manner.

But user loss implies contributor loss, and that is the problem. It's not about me being able to find it (I definitely will be able to :) ), or guaranteeing a "safe harbor" to developers (there are plenty of organizations that are dying to host something like this). It's about a project hat requires a shit ton of constant manpower not having it because of it being "tainted".

It’s not C++ and complex encryption, this is a python web scraper - hardly rocket science. I don’t think manpower will be significantly harder to come by than it was in the past — the opposite, in fact.

It did not say it requires experienced manpower, I said it requires a lot of it, and importantly, constantly. It's easy to find a bunch of "fanatics" that will rise to the ocasion to "defend their freedoms" right now. But that is not what these projects require. On the other hand, it's hard to have volunteers who will keep doing the _menial_ changes for years as the different websites change their HTML/layout. Anything less and the tool loses a huge chunk of its usefulness.

Yes, but this was the same before. If anything, the current visibility is a shot in the arm. I don't think that, once the dust settles, youtube-dl will end up with less regular contributors than it had before - likely the opposite, in fact.

NewPipe has their own fdroid repo already, so that shouldn't cause any serious issues

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