Re:Youtube-dl GitHub Template
by Retr0spectrum on Sunday October 25, 2020 @11:25AM
(#24886970)
The reason I propose a name change is mainly for clarity of purpose, rather than for any kind of legal protection (although I do think it contributes there too). Youtube-dl downloads from many other sites. If I was a potential new user googling for "vimeo downloader", and the first result was titled "youtube-dl", I'd skip over it assuming it was just a bogus search result.
From what I read earlier the problem is bound up in the solution. Youtube has mechanisms to prevent download of copyrighted content which youtube-dl circumvents deliberately, which is why it works on every video. That's what the unit tests were all about and why they had to use examples of strictly protected copyrighted material.
The only options are to move development to a server located somewhere beyond the reach of the DMCA and similarly take it off all repositories or to give up on making it possible to download every (or even most) videos from youtube.
But the tool expanded significantly from its original purpose of acquiring YouTube videos, and it supports at least a hundred platforms through all its extractors. An opportunity to rename it to a more purposeful name will not come very often.
The name is good, there's a lot of really legal use cases -- downloading properly licensed videos for offline usage, archiving your own creations, etc.
The fundamental problem was that in the README and elsewhere, there were examples of ripping copyrighted content.
It would've been better to use examples of libre/public domain content, but I'm not sure how they can un-sail that ship.
The real solution is that we use the decentralized version control system as intended, and make this impossible to DMCA-away.