YouTube-dl has been deleted due to a DMCA complaint
The well-known open-source project YouTube-dl has been deleted due to a DMCA complaint. According to the information released by GitHub, the complainant is the Recording Industry Association of America, Inc.
This open-source project mainly provides relevant code for video downloading from the YouTube website. Currently, many online download websites on the Internet use the code of this project.
YouTube video site does not provide video download functions, but Google has never intervened in the development of the YouTube-dl project.
So after this open source project was deleted, a large number of users thought that Google initiated copyright complaints, but they never expected that the American Recording Association initiated the complaint.
Google has deployed a copyright protection mechanism on its video site itself, so Google does not provide video download functions and will also actively delete infringing content.
For example, if a video creator uses the relevant track without authorization when Google scans it, it will transfer the video revenue to the copyright owner instead of the video creator.
This mechanism has been operating for many years to allow Google and copyright content providers to live in harmony, and the YouTube-dl project seems to have made some copyright providers feel infringed.
According to the complaint initiated by the Recording Association of America, the open-source project can circumvent Google’s copyright mechanism and directly download those copyrighted music works.
And the video downloaded by the user can extract the audio content or directly download the audio content for storage, and even the stored audio content can also be spread online.
At the same time, the Recording Association of America also stated that the source code of the project is marked to circumvent copyright restrictions on downloading content, so its infringement must obviously be deleted.
Although it is legal to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to initiate a complaint, the media claim that the American Recording Association’s complaint may become a terrible precedent for abuse.
This is because normally such copyright complaints are directed against the copyrighted content itself, and no copyright-free content appears in the YouTube-dl project warehouse.
The focus of the American Recording Association’s complaint is that the tool can be used to download copyrighted content, and Microsoft seems to agree with this, so Github directly deletes the project.
If complaints about non-copyright content can be deleted, then more tools may be deleted or stopped development due to such complaints in the future.
The media said that Microsoft should carefully review such copyright complaints, because once such complaints are abused, they may endanger the normal development of a large number of open-source projects.
