> Does gitlab still have to comply with DMCA? Can't they just move there? Or perhaps to a host in Europe or Asia?

GitLab, unlike Github, offers a self-hosted plan. In theory, youtube-dl could self-host, as long as they found a hosting provider that isn't subject to the DMCA and is willing to ignore DMCA notices (even many non-US providers will respond to them) and doesn't have any DMCA-like laws in their own country that could affect youtube-dl (many others actually do, although they're less publicized on places like HN).

Yes, GitLab is US, and just one more DMCA notice away from another "takedown"... its time the Internet community looked into other legal jurisdictions that don't have to bend to such rules. How does it matter where the bits come from exactly?

This is supposed to be the whole point of the Internet but somehow people are behaving as if the end of the US-hosted GitHub repo is the end of everything!

Enough of legal jurisdictions. That's why distributed / p2p technology exist. It should be possible to have a distributed version of github.

While it is a long-term solution, as far as I can see, there is no immediate, P2P solution comparable to GitHub available today, while code-hosting solutions that can be spun up on non-US servers or SaaS products are available for use right now.

Without the hub, we could call it just "Git" or something like that.

And indeed, I can't think of anything in particular that'd be stopping someone from putting git repos on e.g. IPFS.

Europe actually has stronger IP protections than the US does, so that would make things worse.

Most Asian countries don't care much about IP, but what host would they be able to find that users could trust enough to download the software from?