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A comment on Update: YouTube-dl reinstated thanks to EFF (2020). Parent comment

Re:Update: YouTube-dl reinstated thanks to EFF (2020) by musicale on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @04:36PM (#25852309)
> Any hosting platform will sooner or later have to comply with such a request. It can become very expensive if you end up in court.

Yet it wasn't actually DMCA takedown request, but a strange new kind of takedown request, where a a private company claimed (falsely) that youtube-dl violated section 1201 and demanded that github remove it.

Unfortunately github seems to have codified these new "1201 takedowns" which didn't seem to exist previously.

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Re:Update: YouTube-dl reinstated thanks to EFF (2020) by kmeisthax on Wednesday January 20, 2021 @04:41PM (#25852372)
Even if DMCA 512 doesn't cover DMCA 1201 violating circumvention tools, that wouldn't make GitHub in the clear to host them. If anything, it would actually increase their liability: the whole point of DMCA 512 is to provide a process by which an ISP can disclaim liability for contributory copyright infringement.

If they refuse the request on the grounds of "you can't DMCA a circumvention tool", then they're still liable regardless of if a DMCA 512 takedown can or can't apply to a 1201 violation, since there's still an underlying tort of distributing a 1201 circumvention tool. If they accept the request, and get sued anyway, they could at least argue that they have a safe harbor (or should have a safe harbor).

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