youtube-dl DMCA takedown on GitHub is risk for all GNU/Linux distributions

[Jean Louis]

Even yesterday I was thinking to write to this list as the youtube-dl
DMCA takedown on GitHub is more serious than many would think.

youtube-dl is already in many GNU/Linux distributions:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=youtube-dl&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all

Now I notice you have the comment on that on your website:
https://alirezahayati.com/2020/10/24/riaa-took-down-youtube-dl-repository-on-github/

> This is what we get when we centralize everything. Git is more than
> GitHub and also it was designed to be decentralized.  GitHub is
> owned by Microsoft, a corporation that values benefit much more than
> people.

> I’m even not sure if the takedown was legal as it’s not the software
> that does anything but it’s people’s use that may be considered
> illegal. Last night I was talking about this on IRC with some people
> and everybody were unhappy about the situation.

I agree on that.

The real danger much greater than currently perceivd.

It is the potential risk to all GNU/Linux distributions that
distribute this package including to those who are outside of the US
jurisdiction where DMCA does not apply. And what about other similar
packages?

If the DMCA does not apply to the host serving software in other
country, it may well apply to Google that is US company, or Bing, that
is US company, or other search engine and they may need to comply to
take down any search engine results pointing to software not compliant
to DMCA.

That would mean that whole servers of GNU/Linux and other OS
distributions could be blocked of appearing in the search engines and
if they would be located in the US, could be ordered to stop
distributing specific software. This can negatively impact users.

This implies that whole DVD distributions containin one affected
software such as let us say Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre could be forced
to stop distributing the DVD and remove the software (if they have it
inside). This could impact users so much.

Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre has similar software hypervideo, I do not
know how much of youtube-dl is inside, but it could be risky there
too.

And the DMCA takedown on that software may be igniter for other
companies to start taking down various other software.

There are websites that prevent me reading the article by using any
common browser. If I use lynx or wget I can get the article to be
read. If I change my User-Agent string to pretend to be specific
search engine I can read articles that are not meant to be read if I
would have Javascript turned on. Maybe wget and other simple tools
could become future target as we as users are circumventing the
technology to get the information without being authorized.

-- 
Jean Louis