This is not a DMCA notice; A DMCA notice requires the identification of claimed copyrighted content and this document does no such thing.

The document claims that youtube-dl is illegal for being able to download video and audio from YouTube but not for hosting copyrighted material in the repo or binary distributions. The RIAA is claiming youtube-dl is "circumventing DRM".

They do actually mention 3 specific copyrighted songs used as examples in the tests. Seems to me that was on oversight, and they should have only used open videos as tests in the repo. Similar to how Kodi can't use copyrighted material in app store screenshots or videos.

The tests are testing that youtube-dl can successfully see through three specific varieties of obfuscation as used by those videos. Testing open videos would not work, since Google doesn't obfuscate those in the same way. Uploading special videos with the right configuration wouldn't work, those particular obfuscation methods are only available to specific YouTube partners, not to the youtube-dl authors.

Isn't that evidence for the case though? youtube-dl has code to see through obfuscation methods which are only available to specific YouTube partners. If you're a tool for downloading open, not copyrighted videos, why do you need that?

youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool. You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union? youtube-dl is a useful library for the job.

You can use youtube-dl to download videos, but the intended use here is clearly for watching them. Just because syringe needles are tested on (and advertised for) human skin and are also tested with poisonous chemicals, that doesn't mean you should attack syringe needle manufacturers for making murder weapons.

You're trying very hard to make a technical distinction but the problem is that this is a legal problem not a technical one and rightly or wrongly, legal definitions don't always align with technical ones.

For starters, intent is factored into the law. There's several different classifications of murder depending on intent. Likewise someone carrying a kitchen knife home, still packaged, from the shops is unlikely to be reprimanded compared to someone carrying a more decorative knife around. They're both knives but one instance clearly carries a different intent to another.

The problem with youtube-dl is that having tests which work against copyrighted content and having the README describe usages against copyrighted content, it's much harder to argue that the intent of this is purely for copyleft content. Your point about this being an access tool (which actually makes no difference in terms of circumventing DRM anyway -- which was the claim for the take down) also doesn't fly because this tool creates a file on your local disk so it's hard to argue that the intent is for that file to be temporary.

I'm not saying I agree with the take down notice (I don't) but something a great many techies on here miss is that not every argument can be won with science.

> ...intent is factored into the law.

What gets lost or missed is the underlying intent of the protocols and tools being used to share content. An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access.

I'm not saying people should be free then to republish/share copyrighted works. Just that we are free to use tools to retrieve files that have been served openly via the web.

Right, but even when offering free resources to the public you still maintain the manner in which they are accessed and distributed.

It's not as clear as let's say access to a public park on private land. But the idea would carry weight that youtube may control the manner in which their publicaly accessable website may be accessed.

Let's say you can access via the YouTube app which does not require an account, and now you reverse engineer that app to bypass the app all together. It's a bit like cutting a hole in the fence around the playground.

I'm not a fan of what happened it's just clear to me why it happened.

This was indeed bound to happen. The discussions we have are what's needed to decide how the internet/web moves forward. And there's a bit of cake eating and having it too from both sides.

There's an expectation from the publishing/serving side of the equation that the content is being served to a proprietary app or a web browser that works a particular way. With the browser being one of Chrome, Firefox, etc., along with Google's YouTube apps.

On the user side, especially those who understand how the content is served, that the browser is not the only abstraction allowed. Google themselves run bots to scour the internet employing all sorts of tricks to access and index content. There's a fundamental way in which the http protocol works and its content served that is client agnostic. Everyone, Google Search most of all, have benefitted from this.

Making tools other than browsers illegal will fundamentally break the internet in my opinion.

> An http server serves files independent of the client/user-agent–that's how the web works. If a work is published this way then that's the expectation. If YouTube and the RIAA want it to work another way, then use a different protocol/medium and put the content behind a login and limit access.

They don't use HTTP. HTTP is used to bootstrap the player, not to feed the content. The content itself is served over another protocol such as RTMP and that protocol is a streaming protocol (it sends chunked data) and it wasn't intended for downloading files and writing them to disk as a singular binary blob. Obviously it can be used that way but it's fair to say services like youtube-dl are using the protocol in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used rather than content owners serving content on a protocol that was always designed for distributing files.

It's a bit like recording something on VCR from an RF signal; there's nothing technically stopping you from doing that as recording a TV show is technically equivalent to watching it. But equally you can't blame TV networks for using RF to air their broadcasts knowing that risk is there.

The problem is any delivery system you can dream up for enabling consumers to view a recording will have some unintended method for copying said content. Even if it is as low tech as someone physically sat in a cinema with a handheld camcorder (how many movies have been leaked online that way?!)

This is why I keep coming back to the point that you can't use science to argue a legal issue; they ultimately serve different purposes. Science can prove something can be possible, the law is there to argue if something should be allowed to happen (putting aside for one moment the variety of differing opinions about morality et al). So if you have an issue with the youtube-dl take down then you need to treat it as a legal problem rather than a misunderstanding of a technical solution.

> They don't use HTTP. HTTP is used to bootstrap the player, not to feed the content. The content itself is served over another protocol such as RTMP and that protocol is a streaming protocol (it sends chunked data) and it wasn't intended for downloading files and writing them to disk as a singular binary blob. Obviously it can be used that way but it's fair to say services like youtube-dl are using the protocol in ways it wasn't originally intended to be used rather than content owners serving content on a protocol that was always designed for distributing files.

Not true at all, most YouTube videos are offered as plain webm files.

Also, keep in mind that recording TV's is legal.

> Not true at all, most YouTube videos are offered as plain webm files.

It's been a while since I've written a video streaming scraper but it used to be quite common for a file to be served over HTTP but that file was a small "shortcut" type file to an RTMP stream. So a webm file wasn't the content itself but instead a pointer to where to stream the content from.

I'd imagine the same would still be true for YouTube since, like most other video streaming services, YouTube can adaptively switch bitrate depending on the bandwidth available to the end user. That seamless switching can't be done with a HTTP GET of a singular video file but it can happen effectively with a chunked streaming protocol.

> Also, keep in mind that recording TV's is legal.

Yes but with caveats, depending on the country.

Though it is worth noting the only reason America and UK law is so relaxed regarding VCR usage is because corporations making video recorders were taken to court by film studios and won their case. So once again it comes down to presenting a legal argument rather than a technical one.

This hasn't been the case in a long time, most streaming sites no longer do RTMP unless specialised cases, because of scaling and ease of scaling. They're mostly HLS or equivalent now.

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about HLS (doh!). But even there HLS, while based on HTTP, is still very different to the kind of GET requests the GP (or however many posts down it was now) suggested when they talked about downloading a file.

HLS is not about downloading a file, it's about downloading chunked data. It wasn't intended (though it can't be prevented) that the chunks would be used to recreate a video in full, unlike with a stream of bytes from a HTTP GET which are very much intended to be recreated in full at the receivers end.

HLS really only uses HTTP transport as headers to circumvent many firewalls (and in fact you can do this with RTMP too, eg RTMPT) but aside from that it's a completely different beast to GET.

>> not every argument can be won with science.

Is this even a science argument though? The law and its enforcement may occasionally use science to illustrate specific cases (the implementation) but it's more the documentation of a giant, waterfall-based architecture project. Why are we suprised when we see specific cases that seem like failures despite agreeing with the fundamental premise?

Come off it, the other part of the name is "dl"

I use YouTube-dl as much as the next guy for lawful reasons but these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name.

Please remember that to reverse this YouTube-dl needs to go through a court. Courts are not code that can be tricked by clever wording. If anything you'll be trying to describe what it is to some old grandma who hasn't got a clue what GitHub is never mind convincing them this software isn't for downloading YouTube videos.

By all means everyone go on with coming up with clever interpretations of the law but you're just farting into the wind

P.s downvoting my comments doesn't change the way the law works either, but if it helps you feel good have at it :)

> … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name.

Regardless of the name, the tool supports over a thousand different sites, not just YouTube, and is routinely used for streaming rather than downloading, with no permanent copy saved. If you run "mpv https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY" to simply play the Blender Open Movie "Spring" it relies on youtube-dl behind the scenes to stream the video. (Though of course the difference between streaming and downloading is a trivial one; getting the content to the end user's device is the hard part.)

YouTube itself is the entity responsible for duplicating and distributing the content, and they have a license to do so, ergo there is no copyright violation here. The most any user of youtube-dl might be liable for, assuming they don't save a permanent copy or further redistribute the data, would be a violation of YouTube's TOS. Which is no concern of the RIAA. To call youtube-dl a "circumvention tool" is laughable; obfuscation of a video's URL is not DRM.

> You want to access YouTube videos through an alternate client, as is your legal right in the European Union?

Do you have a source on this? I can't find anything about this through a quick Google search, but I'd love for this to be true.

To the best of my knowledge (and IANAL) a good example of this is the European Court of Justice Case C-355/12 "Nintendo v. PC Box" where europas highest court ruled that DRM must respect the principle of proportionality and circumvention of technical protection is only illegal if done for unlawful purposes. If DRM prevents lawful purposes, then the DRM is not proportional to consumer rights (or those of other corporations). If circumventing DRM is illegal is a question of the specific case and must take into account the purpose of the tech used to do it and what people actually use it for.

This, at the core, means it is very hard to argue that some library written to circumvent DRM is "illegal tech" and have it taken down in this manner, because the DRM could be inappropriate and it is not the copyright owner who has to decide that.

The ECJ was asked by a Milan court for a preliminary, so they gave instructions how the Milan court should handle the matter and how the law is to be interpreted. The base case was about a mod-chip sold by pc-box, who argued as a defendant, that circumventing nintendos DRM for the purpose of playing homebrews was ok and nintendo preventing that is inappropriate.

In the general case this was a huge win, because "circumventing DRM is illegal" is only true with a big IF, not as a blanket statement. And from that follows that usage of alternative clients is well within the consumers rights, but again i am not a lawyer.

However note that the Milan court then ruled in its case 12508/2015 that this particular mod chip is illegal. Nintendo gave a lot of evidence about the advantages of their DRM in terms of cost, ease of use, security etc, comparing it to inferior implementations of their choice that would fail to protect the copyright holders interests, as well as evidence of usage of the mod chip for piracy. On the other side pc-box defaulted, filing no evidence showing that their users are a vibrant community of homebrew gamers and techheads that circumvent DRM for purposes well within their rights, like running self written software on the hardware. The Milan court also argues that defendant has a burden of proof to show that a more proportionate drm method was possible, which i strongly disagree with, and which seems to follow nintendos argument that their solution is appropriate even if more restrictive then strictly necessary. Note that Milan does not speak for the EU.

The EU directive is a bit different to the implementations I've seen (which are stronger), but you still have a right to create such an alternate client (if it's sufficiently different in its expression, which youtube-dl clearly is):

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:... article 6(1):

> 1. The authorisation of the rightholder shall not be required where reproduction of the code and translation of its form within the meaning of points (a) and (b) of Article 4(1) are indispensable to obtain the information necessary to achieve the interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, provided that the following conditions are met:

(a) you're allowed to use YouTube, (b) YouTube is undocumented, (c) this only applies to relevant parts of the code.

> 2. The provisions of paragraph 1 shall not permit the infor­mation obtained through its application:

to be (a) used for other stuff, (b) distributed, (c) used for cloning or copyright infringement.

> 3. In accordance with the provisions of the Berne Convention for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the provisions of this Article may not be interpreted in such a way as to allow its application to be used in a manner which unreasonably prejudices the rightholder's legitimate interests or conflicts with a normal exploitation of the computer program.

Creating youtube-dl isn't infringing on anyone's copyright, and the rightsholder here is Google, so it's allowed. There's wiggle room for arguing – it's not as cut and dry as most Big Bold Legal Statements I make, so iamnotalawyerandthisisnotlegaladvice – but I'm fairly sure this is sound.

In the UK, you have unequivocal rights to do this. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/50B, based on this directive, says:

> (3) In particular, the conditions in subsection (2) are not met if the lawful user—

> (a)has readily available to him the information necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (b)does not confine the decompiling to such acts as are necessary to achieve the permitted objective;

> (c)supplies the information obtained by the decompiling to any person to whom it is not necessary to supply it in order to achieve the permitted objective; or

> (d)uses the information to create a program which is substantially similar in its expression to the program decompiled or to do any act restricted by copyright.

The wording in (d), here, is clearer than the EU directive – unless youtube-dl's existence can somehow be shown to be a copyright violation (specifically, if its creation was an act restricted by copyright), it's permitted. Not sure whether this would help in an EU court, but if other countries' implementations have taken the obvious interpretation of the directive, then the other language versions of the directive are probably clear on the matter.

> youtube-dl is not, strictly speaking, a downloading tool. It's an access tool.

What you’re describing is a circumvention device. The DMCA explicitly outlaws these. 17 U.S. Code § 1201

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

So why can't we crowdsource some Youtube partners that are willing to allow their copyright to be used, while still utilizing the obfuscation?

Or are we talking a sweetheart deal only available to specific parnters ?coughvevocough

That just proves that Youtube-dl is intended to circumvent copyright protection measures. Those obfuscation measures count as "effective" for the purposes of the DMCA. Trafficking in software to circumvent them is a felony. GitHub and Microsoft could find themselves criminally liable if they do not take it down.

Take down chrome then its "intended to circumvent copyright protection measures" as you can clearly watch these youtube videos with chrome.

That's what confuses me. Isn't there a gray area here where it's not illegal to download copyrighted material, but illegal to reshare it, aka upload it.

So if that is true, then youtube-dl is not illegal and this DMCA is easily reverted.

RIAA is just trying to use their deep pockets against a nobody and Microsoft is basically saying "We side with you" knowing damn well their lawyers know this code is not illegal.

I would love to know the legal distinction between YouTube-dl and Chrome.

They are both obviously user agents used for accessing video content hosted on a public remote server using standard web protocols.

Then tell me how uBlock Origin is somehow Ok if YouTube-dl is not.

What is the legal distinction between DeCSS and the decryption code in the firmware of a DVD player?

One comes from the publisher and is intended to play back the content in an approved way.

The other is a reimplementation of the first, intended to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the first. That's illegal, per the DMCA. It's black-letter law in the US and elsewhere.

In the case of DVDs, the copyrighted code which decrypted DVDs was being licensed to DVD player companies. The code was not open source, and so stealing the key was itself copyright infringement, and more obviously circumvention of DRM.

In this case we have video which is streaming on the open web, which trivially provides for the user agent to download / cache a copy. The question is not a matter of whether that copy is being redistributed, but that the user agent can watch it in an ad-free space whenever they want. You could probably accomplish the same thing, or nearly so, with a browser plugin.

Which is why I make the comparison to uBlock. uBlock is similarly "playing back the content in an unapproved way" and perhaps you could say it is also a circumvention device.

The whole concept of "user agent" is that software on the user's machine -- that they control -- is rendering remote content in a form and fashion chosen by the user. The HTML provided by a remote server is not a legal contract for how that content must be displayed. It is a semantic description of the content, which the user agent can do with whatever it pleases for display to the user.

As long as no redistribution is occurring, the whole basis of the world-wide web is that a user agent can do whatever it wants to the content, including save a copy on the local machine.

So to me the most interesting question is exactly how youtube-dl becomes/became distinct from a user agent.

I missed the news story where the RIAA is going after chrome and the one where they filed a DMCA complaint against the uBlock Origin repo.

Anyone who read the justification in the original complaint would see how these are different, but it doesn't matter; the RIAA is not pursuing them so until they or someone else does it's irrelevant.

> Take down chrome then its "intended to circumvent copyright protection measures" as you can clearly watch these youtube videos with chrome.

No-one out there thinks there's any problem watching them on Youtube, where royalties can be traced and paid.

streaming through your browser from the YT site is clearly an allowed and promoted use - it's explicitly in the T&S.

Regardless, not honoring a DMCA would mean GitHub is asserting that they think it's false and would need to defend their decision if RIAA were to sue them; it doesn't make sense to verify every single DMCA claim and increase liability by not honoring some.

THis is likely a consideration. From my decidely non-lawyer viewpoint the RIAA is using a terrible law, but still a law and they have grounds under this law for their claims. GH and MS have deep pockets and if they tried to initially fight this I'm confident they would settle. If you're the RIAA who would you rather go after - someone who will pay after a little bit of fighting, or a huge group who will immediately roll over but have nothing to give you?

DMCA covers "circumvention devices".

But the DMCA notice mechanism does not.

No, youtube-dl is illegal for including code to decrypt youtube video request signatures, which are scrambled specifically on most music videos, which a german court ruled is an effective technological protection measure.

>llegal for including code to decrypt youtube video request signatures

No it's not, in Switzerland for example it's legal to use tools to remove stuff like DRM, if you DONT redistribute the decrypted stuff.

What a German Court says is often not relevant outside germany.

Switzerland, as well as almost every western country that ratified the relevant WIPO treaties, has broadly similar laws to the DMCA: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19920251/...

Yes and? I just wrote that removing DRM is not illegal here, but distributing the de-drm material is. And tools to remove drm is also not illegal.

If you read the link you will notice that just like the DMCA, distributing tools capable of removing DRM is illegal in some cases.

>The ban on circumvention may not be enforced against those persons who undertake the circumvention exclusively for legally permitted uses.

And download a Youtube Video is legal.

Storing your DVD's in another format and rip your CD's

EDIT: BTW in the take-down notice you can read that the tool promotes or is/can be used to download Justin Timberlake (and that would be illegal if you redistribute it) so it's not that the code to decrypt is illegal (you know "hackertools" are illegal in germany too) but the potential intention of the tool.

"Exclusively" is the key word. Whether youtube-dl is designed to "exclusively" be used for legally permitted uses is a matter for a court to decide. The RIAA's claim listed several reasons why it believes this is not the case.

The DMCA as written is a little more nuanced, but on whole the laws serve the same purpose.

>Exclusively

Not the tool is meant here but the User, and you know it.

It's legal to record radio, and record/download Youtube videos, if you don't redistribute it (outside Family and Friends

The distribution of youtube-dl itself is what's at issue, not the use of youtube-dl or the distribution of files downloaded with youtube-dl.

Just read that article:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/808cf690f8e801381778002590d8e...

And why is that not a issue anymore? (hint it was):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss

The RIAA is specifically making the allegation that "the source code was designed and is marketed for the purpose of circumventing YouTube’s technological measures to enable unauthorized access to our member’s copyrighted works" [1], justified by the references to copyrighted works in the youtube-dl readme and source code. If it wasn't for that, it'd be much easier to argue that it's designed for non-infringing purposes only (or one of the other exceptions to the DMCA's TPM clauses), like you could plausibly argue for libdvdcss.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...

Here's a video of a copyright lawyer agreeing with GP for 1h20min: https://youtu.be/wZITscblMBA

In short, what a german court says will absolutely influence what a US court says in the context of an international copyright treaty.

>german court says will absolutely influence what a US court

Not will but can. That's a difference...and i dont watch a 1h20min YT video about Copyright...when decrypting has nothing todo with copyright.

It's a video about the exact case in question, talks extensively about the decryption aspect and in general the circumvention of technological protection measures.

Watch it, don't watch it, it doesn't matter to anyone here, but please lower that horse back down to earth, it's a little high.

>but please lower that horse back down to earth, it's a little high

As if your talking about yourself, maybe your a bit young but we had the exact same problem in the past (decrypting DVD's) those are Disc who stored Movies on it. And a Swiss Court decided that it's legal to use dvcss (not sure about the name).

And you tell me to watch a YT from a US Lawyer.

If you'd bother watching the video you'd note that he specifically talks about the CSS DRM, and even the AACS encryption key.

So yeah, tone it down a bit.

>So yeah, tone it down a bit.

Speak for yourself please.

It is.

The DMCA makes circumventing "effective" protection measures illegal. "Effective" is a term defined in law and basically means any hoop you have to jump through to get to copyrighted material, no matter how flawed or trivially bypassed. The restrictions in place to allow YouTube videos to be only downloaded through YouTube count.

Youtube-dl is absolutely illegal software.

> Youtube-dl is absolutely illegal software.

Not in Italy

What US law says is often irrelevant outside of the US of A

No, the restrictions around circumventing an effective technological protection measures are implemented in Italian law too [1] and more broadly are required to be implemented in every EU member state as a result of EU Directive 2001/29/EC [2]

[1] https://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/it/it211en.pdf

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A...

That doesn't make youtube-dl "absolutely illegal".

You should know that "absolutely" means anytime, everywhere, which is obviously wrong.

You should also know that in Italy for something to be claimed illegal the court has to emit a verdict.

If nobody challenge the status of youtube-dl obtaining a guilty verdict, it is perfectly legal.

Last but not least, that law was created during fascmism, so there's also that.

But in any case "fair use"(as you americans call it) is always permitted in Italy, you don't need a license, you are liable only if the entity detaining the copyright obtains a restricting order from a judge.

So in Italy I can download any video I want from YouTube and I am permitted to watch them, It's not against the law.

What's against the law is the re-distribution of the content.

Moreover, you probably misread the law or skipped that passage, in Italy internet publishing (such as file downloading) itś a different right and it's called "exclusive right of communication to the public of the work"

> it also includes the making available to the public of a work in such a way that members of the public may access it from a place and at a time individually chosen by them

Sorry.

You're getting down-voted because people don't agree with you, not because you're fundamentally wrong.

All the responses "not illegal in COUNTRY X"; how is this relevant? Is the RIAA using a law from <UTOPIA_COUNTRY> on a company based in <FANTASY_LAND>?

You can absolutely host this repo with a country & business that doesn't recognize or cooperate with US laws. Your choice is somewhat limited.

What was sent was not a DMCA notice in the standard sense; I encourage you to read it. It’s designed to look like one, but lacks critical elements (such as identifying an infringing URL).

The infringement described in their notice is hypothetical, not an actual instance of infringement, which is one of the required things in a DMCA notice.

GitHub can indeed leave the repo up, as this notice is insufficient to trigger the part of the DMCA that forces them to remove it.

More info from Parker Higgins in a tweet thread:

https://twitter.com/xor/status/1319755776043384838

Correct. A company cannot not comply with a dmca takedown. When the law was written, the supposed safeguard against copyright holders filing tons of frivolous claims is that a counter claim can be pretty serious. Of course history has shown that this didn't work out as planned.

A company is under no obligation to comply with an invalid notice. Wikipedia ignores invalid DMCA requests all the time.

It is risky though, as the company opens itself up to a lot of liability if its wrong.

wikipedia has the advantage that they can deploy a banner informing people about stuff in an instant. From some googling, back in 2015 Wikipedia had half a billion monthly users - that is massive reachout capability.

Anyone daring to put up a fight with Wikipedia risks being flattened by outrage.

That's pretty much it though.

In all honesty, we need a GH alternative hosted outside the US, in any place where absurd laws like DMCA don't exist.

What we really need is a decentralised git forge using something like ActivityPub. We cannot keep relying on companies to host open content for us.

Yes, like https://forgefed.peers.community/ which is exactly that.

Probably a dumb question, but don't federated services eventually lead to centralization? for example SMTP is federated but most users are on gmail, IRC is decentralized but most users are on freenode server, etc. users tend to choose the services/instances with the most users, which is what makes github currently very valuable.

That could very well be argued. However, I still have the ability to run my own Email servers and communicate with user who use gmail.

If gmail decided to ban a number of accounts due to something like a DMCA claim, I would be unaffected by that.

The same is not true on GitHub which is one Website. Every fork of this project on GitHub was affected by this claim...

Gmail killfiled a domain I was running on a small but reputable ISP I had used since 2001 (there were no spam or reputation issues in 17 years).

They did let one-in-20 or so emails through, but everything else got to gmail recipients’ Spam folder. I wasn’t able to troubleshoot this with Google tools, and there’s no one to talk to at google.

(Worst thing, you get no feedback - except realizing a month later that someone didn’t get an email you sent)

I gave up and replaced small ISP with fastmail.

My bottom line is that, no you can’t really run your own SMTP server anymore unless google, Microsoft and fastmail let you, by virtue of hoisting 90% of your recipients.

Sure, something like that can happen... but it is not like they have an explicit "allow-list" of domains that mail can be received from. These might be the biggest providers but if me and my friend who do not use their services want to communicate, we will always be able to do so without them.

I have many domains that I use to send and receive mails, and I have personally never had these issues.

Now if I did have a gmail account, I suppose I would have to check the spam folder regularly. But I don't have that problem with my server, it affects their users more so than me.

in the current world, you host your code on github and you can only submit prs to github with a github account. anyone without a github account cannot submit a pr. github hosts all the code.

in a federated world, while github may still host all the code, you could potentially submit prs with and have metadata about a repository, such as issues, spread across multiple different providers. Instead of needing a github account to contribute, you just need an account that github could federate with.

This would mean that if Github did start doing something you didn't like, you would be able to change code host without losing the metadata.

Potentially, anyway.

Federation doesn't prevent centralisation if the service is good enough; it just makes it less painful to decentralise if better competition exists. It also diversifies ownership of data, which is in general a good thing for consumers - and a bad thing for big tech companies that wish to make money off of analytics, which is why we will never see current social media platforms allow federation with other social networks, even if would be better for the world and consumers.

IRC isn't federated in that sense, users on EFnet can't interact with users on freenode, so the network effect works in that case.

Gmail has an enormous market share (about 40%) but I don't think that's related to the nature of SMTP, more about their incredibly competitive free tier and the decidedly not federated groupware for their business offering.

ActivityPub is federated like git is distributed. You can add several remotes from different servers (or peers in case of single user instances hosted at home)

Even though other sites like GitLab exist that GitHub remains a near-monopoly default doesn't bode well for attempting to migrate to a completely decentralized system as default. There are decentralized extensions of git (like git-ssb).

Addenda: Git is also not well suited for a lot of decentralization due to how branches are modeled. Patch-theory based systems like darcs and pijul would need more adoption before code repositories could be decentralized.

I understand that but there is a difference between just git and the forge, which is GitHub in this case. If I fork a project on GitHub it has a fork relationship on the platform itself. This makes it very easy to interact with the original project. However, without an actual GitHub account I can't contribute back to the project at all.

If I have for example my own Gitlab server I have the ability to clone a project from GitHub and maintain my fork on my server. However, to contribute back, I will still need to bring my changes back to GitHub first.

What a federated implementation of such a "git hosting/collaboration platform" would allow me to do would be to fork a project from another instance to my self-hosted instance. It would benefit every open-source project that would be willing to host their own instance. I could then easily contribute back into the main project without needing an account on their instance.

It would also make it much harder to take down a project with a DMCA like this because forks of it would exist across instances, meaning claims would have to be sent to each maintainer of these instances. In this case, they were simply able to list all of the forks on GitHub and because GitHub is one website, all of them were taken down, seemingly without any further inspection wether the claim covers these forks as well.

I realise that this is difficult to implement but I think mastodon is a great example of how such federation can work in practice.

What if... you kept github in the loop?

What if you could make a federated/decentralized git that doesn't care whether the git repo is made available by github or my-fancy-federated-git-host?

> What if... you kept github in the loop?

It is like wanting to keep Twitter in the loop when migrating to federated alternatives like the Fediverse. Twitter (or Github) wont federate in good faith and will actively attempt to capture as much users as possible.

> What if you could make a federated/decentralized git that doesn't care whether the git repo is made available by github or my-fancy-federated-git-host?

Git is distributed already; remotes work like that.

Yeah Twitter doesn't work because it's not simply hosting the posts that you interact with elsewhere.

Github is simply hosting the repos.

Git is decentralized already. That's the key difference between Twitter and Github and why I made GAnarchy the way I did. and also why I make a point of hosting a GAnarchy instance on github pages and encouraging others to do the same. (self-hosted is better of course, but.)

The law says “expeditiously”, not immediately. This gives a degree of flexibility to judge the basic elements of the claim, which they clearly did not do here (as others have pointed out, this does not look like a valid request).

> notice must immediately

No, at most-- they lose a safe harbour if the notice was well formed and properly delivered, and they don't follow the procedure.

But the vast majority of notices are not well formed or properly delivered.

And loss of the safe harbour isn't particularly important if the complaint is bogus to begin with.

Sure, it does mean a slightly increased risk of legal costs-- though anyone can sue github at any time regardless-- but ultimately those sorts of risks are business decisions that have to be weighed against other business costs and benefits.

Github has historically been pretty unusual in its degree of following the DMCA takedown requirements, a lot of other places are a LOT more willing to ignore apparently spurious DMCA complaints than Github has been. I had hoped that this would change with the Microsoft acquisition, because maybe before their position was just that they couldn't afford any legal fights... but it doesn't seem to have been.

False in this case.

The 17 USC (2)(c)(1)(C) safe-harbour protections apply only to hosting of infringing works, and neither youtube-dl nor its test suites infringe on any RIAA or member copyrights as averred in RIAA's notice.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

The RIAA's letter does not claim infringement within the text of youtube-dl source or test suites, though it tries hard to appear so, but rather anti-circumvention of a "copyright protection mechanism", under §1201. That is also part of the DMCA, but falls outside the safe-harbour.

At best, youtube-dl's test suite may be infringing works when run, in which case infringement would accrue to the operator, presumably a tester or Github's CI/CD process. Even that argument is specious.

Given output is discarded, no permanent copy is retained, and the action is for research and development, and numerous Fair Use affirmative defence claims exist under §107, notably (1) and (4), test suite execution falls outside exclusive rights. Any one fair-use test is sufficient, or none at all. Test suite execution could be argued non-infinging under numerous theories, including reverse engineering, research, interoperability, all under §1201, or under general limitations on exclusive rights in §112, §117, or elsewhere.

This is where ... things get interesting....

- The "copyright protection scheme" in question, if it even is one, was written by and is provided by Google/Youtube, not the RIAA.

- It is not even clear to me the RIAA has standing to sue under §1203: "Any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in an appropriate United States district court for such violation." RIAA are not injured due to utilisation of a non-member's mechanism.

- Does not pass the 17 USC 1201 (a)(2)(B) test: "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title".

- Yes, Microsoft / Github may have liability under 17 USC 1201 (a)(2), "offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic" the code, subject to the same test above. However there is no safe-harbour provision for such violations.

- Microsoft (owner of Github) is listed on the RIAA's members page. Neither Google LLC, its Youtube subsidiary, nor parent Alphabet Inc. are. The RIAA are threatening a member for a §1201 violation against a nonmember. That's ... weird. https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/

- There's an exception in §1201(f)(2) "a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs".

- Youtube-dl is executing code as a World Wide Web user agent, provided by Google/YouTube, and meant to be accessed and run by user agents in order to access YouTube content. That is, youtube-dl's operation is entirely within YouTube's technical design and intent.

- Any potential copyright infringement which might occur through use of youtube-dl is at the volition of users, not the software's authors, actions would properly be directed at such users for individual acts of infringement, and much of this is subject to the same and other defences listed above.

The remaining question is whether or not this claim should be contested. I argue that it should, on numerous grounds;

1. Though the claim is made under US law, similar anti-circ provisions exist in international law, which is highly standardised in large part thanks to the RIAA, MPAA (video), SIIA (software), WIPO, and other copyright monopoly cartels' special-interest deep-pockets lobbying. Offshore legal safe havens are limited and vulnerable. Defence within DMCA /anti-circ / WIPO / Berne regions is unfortunately necessary. Simply hosting the repository outside US jurisdiction is not sufficient, though a valid immediate response.

2. Such claims are specious at best, carry heavy chilling efects, may be entirely fraudulent, and should carry considerable risk. A countersuit agaist RIAA may help make this cartel, or others, think twice about repeating such attempts, as well as establish precedent agaist future such attemps.

3. The future of software, to which Microsoft claims to have harnessed its own wagon, is open, collaborative, Free Software. As such, the software and information services industry's interests diverge from those of regressive copyright maximalists.

TL;DR: This is not a 17 USC 512 infringement/safe-harbour, RIAA's standing is highly questionable, it is threatening a member for an averred nonmember's §1201 injury, any actual works duplication is not performed by youtube-dl's developers directly, nor is the work itself or its test suite an infringement of RIAA / members copyrights, and numerous defences exist for routine use or incidental transmission or copies made by others. Further, youtube-dl, digital and information liberties groups, Microsoft, and Google/Youtube should fight the RIAA's claim.

Haha! This is absurd:

> Microsoft (owner of Github) is listed on the RIAA's members page. Neither Google LLC, its Youtube subsidiary, nor parent Alphabet Inc. are. The RIAA are threatening a member for a §1201 violation against a nonmember. That's ... weird. https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/

That ... was an interesting realisation.

> Youtube-dl is executing code as a World Wide Web user agent, provided by Google/YouTube [...]

I'm guessing that's a typo, and this was actually meant to say the following?

> Youtube-dl is executing code as a World Wide Web user agent, accessing a service provided by Google/YouTube [...]

No, the code is provided for the purpose enabled by ytdl.

I'll try to clarify that elsewhere:

> Youtube-dl is executing code provided by Google/YouTube, for Wold Wide Web user agents, as a World Wide Web user agent, and meant to be accessed _and run_ by user agents in order to access YouTube content. That is, youtube-dl's operation is entirely within YouTube's technical design and intent.

Wait, but it doesn't execute analytics or run ads.

Which are neither 1) acts infringing RIAA / members' copyrights (this is literaly not copying creative works, nor 2) an anti-circumvention action.

NB: I've adapted this comment as an article here:

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/808cf690f8e801381778002590d8e...