GitHub Reinstates ‘youtube-dl’ Project After Concluding DMCA Takedown Request From RIAA Was Bullshit

Abby Vollmer, writing for The GitHub Blog:

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.

The “additional information” link is a response to the RIAA’s takedown request by the EFF, acting on behalf of the youtube-dl project. It’d be a shame if there was a Streisand Effect to this abusive attempt by the RIAA to hurt a great project like youtube-dl, which is a terrific utility that lets you download offline copies of videos from YouTube (of course) and a slew of other services.

There are, of course, a bunch of options (youtube-dl is a nerdy command-line tool), but basically you can just type youtube-dl 'URL-TO-VIDEO-HERE' and it just works. You pass youtube-dl a URL to a web page with an embedded video, and it downloads a copy of the video. And you can install youtube-dl on your Mac easily using Homebrew.

Really would be a shame if this just raises awareness of youtube-dl.

★ Monday, 16 November 2020