Great. I posted two forks, if GitHub takes action then I've got standing to sue RIAA (under the declaratory judgement act), which I'd love to do pro se.<p>Btw, if anyone is associated with any fork that did go down and is interested in bringing a pro se case, feel free to contact me. I'm not a lawyer and can't give legal advice but I can help point you at some helpful laws and cases. I've been fighting false infringement claims in court for over a year on other issues. Also take a look at the complaint in <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-sued-by-youtube-ripping-site-over-dmca-anti-circumvention-notices-201027/" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-sued-by-youtube-ripping-site-o...</a>, although it has some issues I noted at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902619" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902619</a>.
Some example comments in this thread:<p><i>>"People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, "</i><p><i>>"Time for a decentralized version control system?"</i><p><i>>"The nice thing about fossil"</i><p>... those well-meaning suggestions are missing the <i>true difficulty</i>: The community wants a (1) <i>Schelling Point</i>[0] for workflow/issues/discussions/PRs that's also (2) censorship resistant. So far, (1) and (2) contradict each other's goals.<p>Nobody has come up with a technology solution that satisfies both goals. Yes, Fossil has has discussions built into the repo, but fossil is <i>not</i> a Schelling Point. Yes, one can run Gitlab on a self-hosted Raspberry Pi from a home internet connection but that's also <i>not a stable Schelling Point</i> because ISP like Comcast can shut that IP down for DMCA violation.[1] And SMTP mailing lists also ultimately depend on a server that holds the discussion archive and a <i>well-known</i> address for new users to send a "add my email" request. Thus, the <i>existence of a well-known</i> server becomes a <i>specific target</i> for RIAA/DMCA takedown.<p>As for other "uncensorable" technology ideas such as IPFS, Freenet, blockchain, etc. I haven't seen any proof-of-concept from other projects that demonstrates similar easy-to-use collaboration of Github. Remember, it's not about the raw git repo... it's about the Focal Point for the <i>collaboration workflow</i>.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/comcast-dmca-compliance-policy" rel="nofollow">https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/comcast-dmca-compli...</a>
I think some people are missing a major point about youtube-dl's takedown. The purpose of this DMCA claim wasn't just to prevent people from downloading videos, it was to set a legal precedent for the RIAA and similar organizations to troll Github and anyone hosting public repositories with it, by linking them to "illegal downloads".<p>By agreeing to this without any public opposition, Github has become similar to Youtube itself, in that it will be expected to immediately comply with à la carte takedown requests by RIAA and other copyright trolls from now on. It doesn't matter that the actual reason to take down your large repository is political or it simply bothers certain company for miscellaneous reasons, since all it takes is some "illegal content".
Technologists once again shocked that a policy issue cannot be solved by Technology.<p>Tech solutions that are not aligned with the policy only work until lawyers and politicians catch up.
People should move their youbube-dl repositories to servers hosted in Switzerland, where people are not criminalized when downloading content and making copies for personal use (even when copy protected).
Jesus, this is DeCSS all over again.<p>Here are some creative options<p>- <a href="https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/02/25/1631259/the-decss-haiku" rel="nofollow">https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/02/25/1631259/the-decss-ha...</a>
- <a href="https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/09/10/2225214/decss-source-mass-posted-to-usenet" rel="nofollow">https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/09/10/2225214/decss-sourc...</a>
- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098470" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098470</a>
Hopefully they won't ban mine!<p><a href="https://github.com/TimDaub/youtube-dl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TimDaub/youtube-dl</a>
This is an area where GitLab could have a huge advantage. If they had really good support for mirroring projects between instances then running your own private instance for control while mirroring to GitLab.com for scale / convenience would make a lot of sense.<p>Of course I’m sure that would go into the super mega platinum “we’re only charging 1/5 of the real value” BS tier or whatever they’re pushing these days.
The nice thing about fossil is that you could have the website / documentation as part of the repository, then simply clone the repository and run `fossil server` over and over to decentralize the entire network with the built-in http server. Some kind of solution that makes it _easy_ for people to decentralize makes it more likely that it will be decentralized when needed.
The actual DMCA takedown was just an excuse. I'm sure Microsoft's top brass would love to give the gift of killing youtube-dl to their friends at Google. Sort of a "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours". Maybe YouTube will stop begging users to switch from Edge to Chrome.
I'm fine with this. It reminds everyone that Github is a potentially malicious layer-on-top of git that can bite you, even if they seem to be on your side.<p>Sure, slap a clone on GH for a bit of extra traffic - but keep your main activities somewhere under <i>your</i> control.
I kind of worried that some of the value of GitHub's data is derived from knowing which developers browsed/pulled/forked/contributed to different projects, and whether or not they or their employers could be sued for breaking licenses, infringing copyright or patents, etc.<p>For example, Microsoft might want to know which of their former developers contributed to say WINE or ReactOS. A patent troll might want to know who pulled code that allegedly infringes their patents, so they can audit and sue their employers. The RIAA might want to know which businesses use YTDL, even if they're using it under fair use, and so on.
Is it not the right time to decentralise those type of services? I think it is. Isn't this site owned by Microsoft? So if it is, this is normal big corporation behaviour. They embrace open-source community to gain advantage. Is there a way to host code without being dependent on big corporation? I am really interested in the answer of this question. Public programming code must be treated like public utility. For example like water, it must be ensured that water is drinkable and properly managed, but in public domain. Is anyone remember Nestle attempt to privatise water? (<a href="https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/nestle-bottled-water-american-freshwater-supply" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/nestle-b...</a>).
Linus gave us git to get rid of centralized repos and we web devs invented github to centralize it all.<p>Sometimes I feel we web devs behave worse than fashion industry when it comes to blindly following random trends, making it all religious instead of logical and messing up all innovation
Why would some brunching lawyer know what yt-dl even was unless someone who hired them was making a political play against it?<p>Given youtube-dl is not copyrighted material the RIAA would have in its mandate, that it replicates functionality that every browser already has, and GitHub is a property of MSFT - this is basically a legal harassment play that implies we're going to need more than decentralized repositories. I'm thinking something like Kali Linux but one that tags certain code repositories as politically exposed and then mirrors them into a distribution via torrents.
The original DMCA request stated that they violated copyright by suggesting songs in their source code. While this is a dubious copyright claim, surely the easy solution is to uphold the claim by simply replacing the songs with open source items such as big buck bunny in the source?
When men were men, every single GH user would host YT-dl in protest, then good luck to MS alienating their entire userbase.<p>(ps. I don't have a GH account)