Not sure what RIAA's endgame is though. I'm somewhat fearing that they are coordinating with Youtube in an attempt to prevent any organised effort against youtube's next obfuscation or something.

And, yeah, by the way: let's not forget that it's youtube and the likes of it who are actually the enemy of youtube-dl. All these RIAA notices and stuff are just tools.

Even if you are against these downloads, there are laws that let you prohibit such downloads by using DRM. Ignoring those laws or trying to claim that publicly available links count as DRM means these programs should be allowed.

The constraint on the majority of cases is bandwidth, not storage.

For mobile, that is not necessarily true, I concede.

From a purely technical perspective, streaming makes little sense.

This is really a manifestation of legal constructs.

I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).

It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.

Git itself works just fine without one.

There are many other project hosting alternatives as well. E.g. Canonical's Launchpad, GNU Savannah, etc.

Also, aren't both Launchpad and Savannah both code hosting repositories too?

But my inbox, and everyone's inbox that participates in it, would have a copy.

I think mailing lists solve A LOT of problems that we are having now.

How? It's not like China has the greatest respect for intellectual property.

Maybe that's the point.

If all the valuable engineering projects leave the West because the West's laws are that dysfunctional, maybe the West will be forced to reevaluate them.