After YouTube-dl was deleted, angry fans created countless new repositories
Recently, the Recording Association of America, which represents the recording industry in the United States, submitted a DMCA notice to Github to delete the repository of the well-known open-source project YouTube-dl.
According to the American Recording Association, the company believes that the source code provided by this project is used to circumvent copyright protection and can download a large number of copyrighted songs.
Therefore, the association requires Github to delete in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Law, and Github also deletes the corresponding project as required after receiving the DMCA request.
YouTube-dl is one of the most popular open-source projects on the Github platform. This open-source project has received up to 72,000 stars since its inception in 2006.
A large number of users use this tool to download videos posted on the YouTube website. Of course, they can also extract audio from downloaded videos to avoid Google copyright protection.
It is precisely this reason that caused the attention of the Recording Association of America and sent a letter to delete it. However, many downloads of non-copyrighted content using this tool are also affected.
So after the project was deleted, a large number of angry fans immediately copied the source code and created countless new repositories.
There is even a guy who used the vulnerability to add the project source code to the official Github DMCA notification repository and it has not been deleted so far.
Although this open-source project can objectively be used to circumvent Google’s copyright protection, it does not host any copyrighted content in the project repository.
Usually, deletion in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act refers to the deletion of directly infringing content, so filing a complaint against the download tool seems to abuse copyright protection.
The media claim that this behavior of the Recording Association of America may set a precedent for abuse of copyright protection, and if it is not stopped, there may be more abuses in the future.
For example, browsers can download copyrighted content circulating on the Internet. According to the American Recording Association, these browsers should also be completely deleted.
In addition, some public welfare foundations have issued articles criticizing the practices of the Recording Association of America. These organizations call on the Recording Association of America to apply for the restoration of deleted repositories.
Via: bleepingcomputer
