STUNLOCK THE PRESSES: combo breaking news (Part 1)

Sakurina · October 23, 2020, 8:03pm

The RIAA killed youtube-dl, the premier command line Swiss army knife for ripping content from basically any media hosting site out there:

github.com

github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md

October 23, 2020 

GitHub

Dear Sir or Madam:

I am contacting you on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) and
its member record companies. The RIAA is a trade association whose member companies
create, manufacture or distribute sound recordings representing approximately eighty-five (85)
percent of all legitimate recorded music consumption in the United States. Under penalty of
perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on
matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images,
including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

Copyright Violations. We have learned that your service is hosting the youtube-dl source code
on its network at the following locations, among others:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl  
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/gh-pages  
http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/

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https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Felix · October 23, 2020, 8:07pm

nooooooooo

notbov · October 23, 2020, 8:13pm

god is dead

Drem · October 23, 2020, 8:18pm

maybe if sony designed their new store around triangles none of this would have happened, the bad ui or youtube-dl getting struck

villain · October 23, 2020, 8:18pm

lol stupid dinosaurs will have to die eventually.

mplayer $(echo -s "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$(curl $youtube_url | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.＊\(video_id.\+\)&title.＊;\1;p")&fmt=22")

Victor · October 23, 2020, 8:19pm

what on earth

idiot · October 23, 2020, 8:36pm

dogshit

jsnlv · October 23, 2020, 8:47pm

“the Big Enders” is the best I can come up with, but I feel like they’d probably err on the side of not including wordplay whatsoever and go pure abstraction instead

Ymer · October 23, 2020, 8:49pm

I didn’t even know they were in any sort of legal grey area where this might occur honestly!

Victor · October 23, 2020, 8:55pm

can’t wait for the riaa to finally raid microsoft internet explorer hq for the file/save as… menu command

doolittle · October 23, 2020, 8:55pm

Were enough people using a CLI tool to download youtube videos to get on their radar? I’m so confused.

I guess it could have gone the other way - client says they’re mad as hell about the youtube and lawyers find a target that’ll obey a C&D.

Sakurina · October 23, 2020, 8:59pm

I’ve seen speculation that apparently one of the examples in the documentation was a copyrighted music video, and that made it cross the line into questionable territory because it would be encouraging people to use it to rip copyrighted material?

That’s a dumb mistake to make if true but still a massive overreach IMO

Felix · October 23, 2020, 9:00pm

it’s a very, very popular tool, and supports virtually every streaming site… I make no guesses about just how popular CLI tools are, but basically anytime I wanted to get widely-known audio samples for something, I’d start with this

BustedAstromech · October 23, 2020, 9:03pm

Was the tool in a race against streaming site changes? Does the existing program start to break, now?

Felix · October 23, 2020, 9:04pm

yup

notbov · October 23, 2020, 9:09pm

as someone who uses it for mostly not-YT, here’s hoping someone forks out with YT support stripped out

Blade_Wolf_Chaos · October 23, 2020, 9:36pm

can’t they host it somewhere that doesn’t suck? does the dmca apply in europe?

Felix · October 23, 2020, 9:39pm

it’s still on pypi, so I don’t think this is going to be the world’s most aggressive takedown, I think it’s getting easier to posture on github

physical · October 23, 2020, 10:07pm

i’m so goddamn angry about this, i use their audio-only feature to sample old records on youtube all the time (yes, i know it’s not good quality, but with My Process it doesn’t really matter) because outside of private trackers a lot of shit is impossible to find anywhere else

one more step towards everything being locked down stream only rent hell

physical · October 23, 2020, 10:33pm

some details on the technicalities

basically, this isn’t actually a valid DMCA notice, just a threat by the RIAA, and github immediately folded to avoid legal issues