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by chug 2057 days ago
My guess is that RIAA will pursue it until they either win legally or exhaust and frighten everyone away from it and it becomes a much less powerful tool. It's not like DMCA notices are their only option after all (and I'm not sure the DMCA notice sent to GitHub is really even a DMCA notice anyway). I would imagine they're either already in the process of or are ramping up to also go after the individuals involved as maintainers and (major) contributors. I think that could actually be a really interesting legal case to see if something like youtube-dl is found to be something more like a VCR or more like Napster, but I don't know if RIAA would ever take the chance of letting that happen on the chance that they lose. I think the more typical strategy for them would be to start sending everyone they can track down the real identity of scary letters and maybe drag a few into court and settle so the rest run away.

I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).
1 comments
bxk1 2057 days ago
> but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side

It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.

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chug 2057 days ago
That's a good point. I definitely have too much of a US-centric view on this as I'm not very familiar with the project and was assuming at least a few of the major people involved are living in the US or a country friendly enough with the US that the RIAA has major reach. Russia is a member of a few major international copyright agreements, but I have no idea how that will play out practically speaking. I'm not sure to what extent various member countries actually cooperate. Maybe the RIAA will just give up after they get GitHub and GitLab and any other major platforms with a US presence to stop hosting it if the main people are in a country that's enough of a speed bump for them.
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