youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

[Posted November 16, 2020 by jake]

The GitHub repository for the youtube-dl utility, which is used to download video content from various web sites (including YouTube, thus the name), has been restored. As we reported in last week's edition, GitHub had taken the repository down due to a DMCA notice from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The only change made to youtube-dl is the removal of some tests that downloaded a few seconds of certain music videos; those videos were specifically targeted by the RIAA in its complaint.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 16, 2020 16:30 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Good to hear. Could RIAA still make it an issue that the tests are in the git repository as part of the history? Or were they purged from there as well?

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 0:33 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The tests are still in the history, and the code that allowed them to be downloaded was not removed from youtube-dl, so a quick `git revert` will let you download the test videos again.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 16, 2020 22:59 UTC (Mon) by lucifargundam (guest, #99519) [Link]

Great to hear. A lot of people were upset about this and was mentioned almost everywhere I frequent online. Hopefully things can go back to normal now.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 0:52 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Unfortunately a lot of forks are still not restored after this and they cannot be updated, but if you fork again to a different name then you can re-push your local work on youtube-dl to the new fork. Of course then you need to update each of your pull requests to the new fork, not sure how to do that.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 1:24 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

It seems that GitHub is asking forkers to contact them to decide between re-forking, deletion and restoring. The latter two require contacting GitHub support and restoring requires rebasing on the latest mainline youtube-dl.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 1:00 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for widevine-l3-decryptor, which has similar format-shifting and time-shifting fair uses as youtube-dl.

https://github.com/tomer8007/widevine-l3-decryptor
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/nov/13/widevine-dmca-...

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 19:54 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

It seems reasonable to have to test against YouTube videos you actually own with all of the interesting and unusual properties that you want to validate. After all, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to come up with a topic for an expletive-laced video that is unsuitable for children, to use to test the age-restriction handling.

youtube-dl repository restored at GitHub

Posted Nov 17, 2020 21:39 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

Some of the properties that they need to test against are only available to large companies that partner directly with YouTube, so they can't just create their own videos with those properties for testing. In any case it's not as if the testing process makes a permanent copy of the video; it just streams the first few seconds of the clip to verify that it's working and discards the content. By any reasonable metric there is no infringement as a result of these tests.