Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> writes:
> Dear people,
>
> As many of you may know, the RIAA issued a resquest for GitHub to take down
> the youtube-dl repository.
IANAL so I may be confused, but AIUI that takedown is based on the
notion that there is no legitimate use for youtube-dl, which is
nonsense, as this comment clealy demonstrates:
https://twitter.com/mindspillage/status/1319744290340286464
"youtube-dl is pretty much the only thing that makes use of CC
licenses on YouTube meaningful at all, btw."
That being the case, I'd think that:
a) you should ensure that the repository on salsa is fully up to date
with all available branches, as a service to the public, and people
should be encouraged to clone that elsewhere for extra resilience.
b) if the RIAA feels the need to repeat their claims, that we should
then insist that they persuade a judge that their case has some
merit before doing anything about it.
We could presumably consult a lawyer, but the RIAA would need to be even
more moronic than I think they are to have a go at us, given that nobody
in the wider world has ever heard of us, and we're going to have no
trouble raising funds to defend a case, and we're very clearly not
making a cent out of publishing this stuff, so they're going to have fun
trying to calculate the damages. Also, see the recent Gnome case[1] for
how well these things can go when people who don't know the first thing
about Free Software start trying to throw lawyers at the situation.
Overall even if the law managed to be sufficiently deranged to result in
us losing a case against the RIAA, the light that would shed on the
situation seems likely to do more harm to them, and more good to us than
not getting involved in the first place.
The alternative world where we stop doing good things because of people
like the RIAA seems much worse.
Cheers, Phil.
[1] https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/lessons-from-the-gnome-patent-troll-incident/
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