Update: YouTube-dl reinstated thanks to EFF (2020)
assassinate-you.net
assassinate-you.net
The smaller hosts may not have the financial and legal cushion to do anything but rollover if the music industry lawyers send them a notice.
Given that this request was completely fraudulent, no matter your take on whether youtube-dl itself is legal the project itself is not an unauthorized post of copyright material, doesn't this give groups like the RIAA a free pass to do whatever they want until someone challenges them?
While it's good that github eventually returned it, their willingness to comply with such a sham should make projects consider moving from them.
The takedown request didn't claim the project was an unauthorised post of copyright material. It claimed it was a DRM circumvention measure, and US law is sufficiently vague on that matter it really can't be said definitively one way or another if that's correct unless someone is willing to litigate it.
Nobody does, in this case. Certainly, describing the request as "completely fraudulent" is wrong. It may or may not have been valid, but the legislation is sufficiently vague in most of the US and Europe that it's entirely possible this could go to court and the RIAA would win.
The takedown notices do not apply to DRM circumvention measures, only copyright material.
I agree it's completely possible that a court case could rule against youtube-dl, but the only method for taking down a DRM circumvention tool is to get a court order.
Github took a punt that the RIAA weren't going to take it to court, because they don't want to risk establishing that the circumvention provisions are more limited in a court case. They got a lot of free PR out of it with little risk, that's why they did it.
As I said at the time, I wouldn't want to litigate on either side of this case. The law is badly drafted, there's little precedent, and I think it's a genuine 50/50. Any lawyer on both sides would advise you not to do so. I suspect the main reason is that the RIAA can now go back to Google and say they are in breach of contract for not preventing downloads on YouTube using technical protection measures, and push them to switch to Widevine on everything with any music in it.
The RIAA got effortlessly blocked here with a couple of lawyer man hours, which contained information gathered from a handful of really interesting blog posts.
I would say this entire story is something to celebrate, because it shows how easily a single person could stop this.
Mitchell L. Stoltz, Senior Staff Attorney at the EFF signed this letter, which probably took no more than handful of man hours to compile.
Pretty great roi.
It's not clear that the RIAA needed to spend any real lawyer man hours making the request, I don't think a designated agent needs to be a lawyer but even if they do they just send a form letter.
Welcome to the future. Github has received “a DMCA” from the RIAA’s film counterpart requesting they take down another repo for tool that does not contain proprietary copyrighted material (this time not even including a test suite that downloads it IIUC), and apparently instantaneously complied. As of the time I’m posting this, it’s been more than a day (an order of magnitude longer than “a couple of lawyer man hours”, times 1–2?) since it was posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836503 and I’m still not aware of any other response from them so far.
It's also something that requires lawyers/law staff, not just random people, for maximum effect.
But yes, this is definitely a positive thing! I'm not sure anyone but the EFF would have done it succesfully, I am grateful to the EFF... and, yes, to github for their response, which not every company would have had.
Why not try to direct people toward that, rather than direct them towards crossing their fingers and hoping the lone company wins the fight?
By building up sufficient case law, everyone can do things better and the next time this comes in front of law makers, there will be a better understanding of edge cases and better laws can be written.
I’d really love to see a Developer’s Guild or Union that could collectively take on these sorts of fights and argue for all software devs. The EFF can’t stand alone.
Yet it wasn't actually DMCA takedown request, but a strange new kind of takedown request, where a a private company claimed (falsely) that youtube-dl violated section 1201 and demanded that github remove it.
Unfortunately github seems to have codified these new "1201 takedowns" which didn't seem to exist previously.
If they refuse the request on the grounds of "you can't DMCA a circumvention tool", then they're still liable regardless of if a DMCA 512 takedown can or can't apply to a 1201 violation, since there's still an underlying tort of distributing a 1201 circumvention tool. If they accept the request, and get sued anyway, they could at least argue that they have a safe harbor (or should have a safe harbor).
Gitlab so far has a history of not responding to bogus requests
The Pirate Bay would disagree? Somehow they've been mostly online for over 10 years despite blatantly and obviously facilitating copyright infringement.
Now YouTube-DL doesn't actively intend for its software to be used for infringement, however its inherent capability to do so is apparently enough to piss off the media industry, so maybe it's best to learn from the aforementioned "expert" in this field and move to infrastructure that's outright immune to the industry's complaints?
ok... am I crazy? I thought when someone sends a DMCA request to you, the platform, that you are required to take the content down and wait for a counter notice from that contents author. The legality of the message is not your problem. You receive the DMCA, you take the content down, if you get a counter claim, you put it back up, the two parties go to court.
If that's correct, then can you really criticize github for following an odious law? Whether we like it or not, they are bound by these requirements.
The DMCA is heavily tilted in favor of the supposed rights holder, and GitHub really did have no choice in that situation. It’s messed up, but it’s the reality of the laws of the land.
There’s also the issue of people who are mistaken and think it was a section 512 notice (direct copyright infringement) when it wasn’t. It was a section 1201 one (DRM circumvention). We can argue all day about whether it’s DRM circumvention or not, but the fact of the matter is: there was obfuscation of some sort, and it wouldn’t be hard to convince a judge that that counts as DRM. GitHub erred on the side of caution here.
You can criticize them and you should.It is their choice to run GitHub in a US jurisdiction. Many other places in the world are not as repressive.
(Plus, I'm betting there's at least some mechanism to reject frivolous DMCA takedown requests immediately.)
2. Microsoft could spin off GitHub into a separate, non-US entity, outside its legal control for purposes of DMCA enforcement. Of course, it obviously won't do that, since it doesn't help the bottom line.
This is almost correct. GitHub could refuse to take it down and in doing so accept liability for any copyright infringement that exists. If the repository is not infringing (which in this case there's a solid chance it's not), then GitHub is doing nothing wrong. Of course, since the penalties for copyright infringement are so high and defending suits would not be worth it for GitHub, they are effectively required to take it down.
So no, the problem did not get resolved.
It is not a fair process if it requires you to get public outrage.
Whenever I see a story of a kid which family succeeded to collect money for an expensive treatment thanks to public outcry, I always think about all those other kids who were not so fortunate to get public interested in them.
Should we be happy that we got one of a thousand saved or should we be thinking there is something fundamentally wrong?
That's why you regularly need to update your issues with `git bug bridge pull`. Then you have all the issues locally, and are not bound to slick but the unfree website UI. You can edit and add issues locally and push it eventually. Only problem is: corabolation on issues with such a temp. took down GH project relies on everybody interacting with it via git bug. But all the bug refs are pushed upstream, wherever that is.
About lost pull requests: Regular remote branches are the standard workflow, and an issue can carry the description, if the commits are not descriptive enough.
Problems: issues are not numbered, only have hashes. They can be merged out of order, there's no central truth. So references in docs or commits need to use the hash, like bug #4e327af, not just GH #403.
$ man git-bug
No manual entry for git-bug
$ git bug
git: 'bug' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
The most similar commands are
log
tag
$ git --version
git version 2.17.1
"When a large organization makes asinine threats with spurious reasoning, take a lawyer friend to lunch and help them draft a sternly-worded email about the offending organization."
"Mail said letter to threatened party. No further action needed. Go back to solving meaningful problems."
And the title has been labeled (2020) as you suggest.
HN isn't up-to-the-minute "news" necessarily; the best date I've seen recently on HN was (516). ;-)