The RIAA, GitHub, and youtube-dl

Toward the end of October, GitHub removed the repository for the youtube-dl utility, which provides a means to download video content from various streaming sites, such as YouTube. The repository was replaced with a cheery notice that it had been removed due to a DMCA takedown. It will likely come as no surprise that the DMCA action came from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or that the complaint was that the program circumvented the "technological protection measures" used on the videos by YouTube and other authorized sites.

If the goal of that notice was to somehow erase youtube-dl from the internet, the effort could not have been more misguided. Predictably, the notice fully revalidated the "Streisand effect": as word filtered out, youtube-dl was spread far and wide. Beyond that, many who had never heard of the program before were suddenly aware of its existence, purpose, and the threat to its continued existence. Meanwhile, youtube-dl is still available for download, packaged for Linux distributions, and so on. The repository shutdown is an inconvenience to the project and its users but not much more than that.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a US law—ostensibly about protecting copyright-holders—that has been (ab)used in a wide variety of ways by the enormous content conglomerates that hold the bulk of the copyrights for music, television, movies, and so on. In particular, the anti-circumvention provisions have been invoked in dubious ways to try to prevent competition in printer-ink cartridges, thwart investigation into the Volkswagen emissions cheating, and to chill cryptographic research of various sorts. While the DMCA itself is US law, it was written to implement two World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaties, so the effects are more widely applicable.

The RIAA is no stranger to using the DMCA, of course. The organization has been sending takedown notices since the DMCA was enacted and was filing lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers before that. There are certainly legitimate infringement problems that the organization and its members have targeted along the way, but their blanket attacks and overreach (e.g. the the "dancing baby" video takedown) have also done much to paint the law (and the RIAA) in a rather bad light—not that it has resulted in any changes to the DMCA, sadly.

While youtube-dl can be used to circumvent the controls that streaming services place on their content, it can also be used for a wide variety of other tasks, many of which are perfectly legal. In addition, as the creator of youtube-dl, Ricardo García, recently pointed out, there are some who are unable to see these videos without using a tool like youtube-dl. While bandwidth has increased in many areas since youtube-dl was created in 2006, there are still plenty of folks who live at the end of a tiny, unreliable pipe. Beyond that, those with metered access might not want to pay multiple times to replay a video that they like. Those types of uses might not strictly be legal, but they are understandable; the RIAA, however, is not known for making distinctions of that sort.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation has described a number of different youtube-dl use cases for journalists, who need to be able to do things that are simply impossible without having direct access to the video content. The videos in question are generally not copyrighted by RIAA members, but, once again, the RIAA takes an "all or nothing" approach to the tool. In its notice to GitHub, the RIAA points to some specific entries in the source code that refer to pop music videos copyrighted by its members:

A look at the Python source code shows that those works (and others) are used as tests; they are not presented as "sample uses" of the tool, as described. In an interview with former maintainer Phillip Hagemeister, he describes the tests as simply downloading the first 10KB of the videos in question, which amounts to a few seconds of video, to ensure that the formats are still being handled correctly. "This is certainly fair use, but the project is fully functional without these test cases." If he were still involved in the project, he would be in favor of removing them from the source code, however, presumably to try to placate the RIAA. He also provided some more reasons why youtube-dl is important:

It is undoubtedly true that youtube-dl is used to download copyrighted work out from under its technological protections, but it is not at all clear that is the dominant use for the tool. Given that YouTube and other sites have vast arrays of user-uploaded content that is not subject to the same restrictions as the RIAA's precious content, any tool to access it will need to be able to use those sites in ways that are outside of the web-based interaction provided. Since there are also good reasons why people might want to view these videos in ways that RIAA members have not envisioned—or countenanced—any useful tool will need to be able to decode all of the different formats provided by the platforms. As with all tools, youtube-dl can be used in many different ways, some that even the RIAA might find to be acceptable.

One guesses that the abrupt shutdown of its repository will not seriously deter the project moving forward. But it is not clear what data the project was able to extract from GitHub beyond just the Git repository itself. There are a number of additional features at GitHub, such as the issue tracker, pull request discussions, and wiki, that could be lost forever. That would be unfortunate, but is one of the dangers projects face when choosing to host their project at a site like GitHub—the data is not always easily backed up, nor is it readily imported into another hosting site if needed.

Based on the perfectly predictable outcome of the notice, it is hard to see what the RIAA strategy or goal really is here. It seems unlikely that the highest levels of the organization's leadership were involved in the decision; perhaps some low-level RIAA lawyer was doing a bit of "freelancing" on behalf of the members. In any case, the notice was made and GitHub had to act on it. There are indications that the company is not happy with the situation, but that does not really change much either.

These days, though, GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which, famously, (now) "loves open source". Microsoft is also a member of the RIAA, which has led the Software Freedom Conservancy to ask the tech giant to resign from the RIAA over the youtube-dl DMCA notice.

So far, there have been no public statements from GitHub, Microsoft, or the youtube-dl project; one suspects there may be some discussions going on behind the scenes, though. The whole episode is something of a black eye for GitHub, but that is not particularly fair; the RIAA and the various governmental entities involved in creating the WIPO treaties should really bear the brunt of the opprobrium. But regardless of any of that, removing youtube-dl (or something derived from it) from the internet is, effectively, impossible—much like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. For now, at least, youtube-dl can still be found in the GitHub DMCA repository, ironically, and in countless other locations as well.