It will probably come as no surprise to hear that the DMCA takedown and subsequent removal of the youtube-dl repository has utterly failed to contain the spread of the program. In fact, you could easily argue that it’s done the opposite. The developers could never have afforded the amount of publicity the project is currently enjoying, and as the code is licensed as public domain, users are free to share it however they see fit. This is one genie that absolutely won’t be going back into its bottle.
Yes the tool could be used to make a downloaded copy of a copyrighted work on YouTube, but so can a car or a public road be used by bank robbers to commit a crime as well as achieve their getaway. So many things in daily life can be used for good or bad but what happens when we try to ban everything – we end up killing the good too. In the case of open source it’s a different challenge as it belongs to no single individual corporation and its source code is already everywhere.
See Community Rallies Behind Youtube-dl After DMCA Takedown
#technology #copyright #DMCA #youtubedl
At this point, you’ve likely heard that the GitHub repository for youtube-dl was recently removed in response to a DMCA takedown notice filed by the Recording Industry Association of America …