Video downloading tool source code to be banned.
2020-10-23 at 20:33youtube-dl, a popular open source video downloading tool, just received a DMCA request from the RIAA.
It is known that the music industry not only pushes boundries but crosses them to stop people from sharing music illegaly, but this is absolutely ridiculous.
The RIAA wants to ban the hosting of the source code, that could be compiled into a tool, which could theoretically be used to download copyrighted material.
It is not the source code which is illegal. It's the act of downloading and redistributing which is illegal. We don't ban metal because it could be used to forge a knife which could be used as a weapon, do we?
Fingers crossed that youtube-dl can stay. You can't ban open source projects anyways. Once they ban one repository, 5 forks will show up on other sites.
Update:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation picked up the phone and dialed the heck-off RIAA number. They just released this document which basically says that they did nothing wrong. It really is an interesting read. They addressed all the controversial points like the copyrighted videos for their software tests. Let's see how that goes!
Update:
Aaaand it's back! GitHub sided with the open source community and reopened the repository. Hooray!