It's not like any of us are going to be able to change the DMCA overnight and people rely on this tool for all kinds of purposes. Do we wait for somebody to magically fix the DMCA or do we make minor fixes to youtube-dl to make it less susceptible to bullshit DMCA notices like this? I assume most people just want the original repo to go back up and for normal development to continue before functionality breaks because of changing websites.
There are other options, e.g. hosting somewhere where automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing and the RIAA would have to go through a proper court process.
I think it's not feasible to continue the project as long as this issue isn't resolved appropriately. I've seen at least one contributor already dealing with letters from the RIAA because of a minor contribution years ago. That's going to significantly hinder community development of youtube-dl if it becomes more commonplace to harass anybody who's contributed anything to the project. Most people simply don't have the time or money to deal with this kind of thing. Most people don't want to deal with this kind of thing at all.
Let's assume that happens. Then instead of going after the hosting location RIAA will go after the developers which, until now, had no reason to hide their identities. That's what Blizzard did with bnetd, they sued the devs and invoked DMCA anti-circumvention clause, among many other things (in the end they ended up winning on the EULA I think).
Automatic anti-circumvention takedowns aren't a thing for this section of the DMCA either. But it becomes an automatic liability issue when you're informed so a host is betting their business and in some cases the jail time of senior executives to ignore it.
Is there? Just because someone claims (without court determining it) that some content is illegal doesn't make it so. So there would have to be some language in the law that the intermediary incurs liability due to mere allegations.
> Asking developers to remove code is ridiculous. It reads more like "Bad cop/good cop" routine rather than genuine help.
Not only that, the argument here is supposed to be that youtube-dl is "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure" etc.
If you can remove <1% of the code and somehow cause it to not be that anymore and yet still be something which is useful for the majority of what people do with it, doesn't that just mean it was never that to begin with?
