[erling]

Totally down with the potential conflict of interest or implications of GitHub, but it’s not GitHub specifically that’s zealous about DMCA. Any server and any host of that server is going to be subject to it. The only appeal of a smaller or private server is less visibility, but legally it’s the same. DMCA isn’t going anywhere.

[judge2020]

Well, GitHub/Microsoft could go on a PR campaign and say "we're not going to honor this RIAA DMCA since we know yt-dl isn't violating the DMCA!" but then GitHub/Microsoft would opening themselves up to a lawsuit against (basically) the entire music industry. The amount of goodwill MSFT loses over this (hopefully isolated) incident has to be worth a few orders of magnitude less than the tens of millions of dollars that would be burned to actually fight the RIAA.

Smaller hosts could get away with not honoring DMCAs since the RIAA likely isn't going to waste resources actually filing a lawsuit, but this yt-dl situation seems like the perfect setup for the RIAA to set a precedent outlawing video/music downloaders if someone were to actually fight them on it (and until then, they can continue to take down video/music downloaders until someone does counter it).

[pxeboot]

Microsoft is actually a member of the RIAA [1].

[1] https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/

[ponker]

Microsoft is much wealthier than the “entire music industry” but this still might not be a hill they want to die on.

[dx034]

They don't want to get rid of copyright, it's just about creating a less punitive system. I don't think there's much downside for them if they really cared.

[gisishskdlt]

How deep is the RIAA's pockets? Has this most recent tactic held up in court? What are you basing this on?

[mayneack]

Does github actually have to honor every request that comes in? I thought the youtubes of the world did that because of the volume, but hypothetically, couldn't they do some due diligence and push back on requests they don't think are valid instead of just taking them down and requiring the repository owner to appeal. I'm sure it would be more expensive for them, but it's still a choice.

[adrianN]

It is my understanding that DMCA requests have to be honored immediately unless the hoster wants to expose themselves to large legal risk. The uploader of the banned content can file a counter request, upon which the copyright holder either withdraws, or things land in court. But if the hoster doesn't honor the request they lose their hosting privilege and can be sued for copyright infringement themselves.

[feanaro]

DMCA is not a worldwide law.

[mschuster91]

It may not be legally, but practically. Almost all major content-hosting companies are headquartered in the USA and thus bound to the DMCA: Facebook/Twitter (social networks), Google/Amazon/Microsoft (clouds), Github/Gitlab/Sourceforge (code repositories), StackOverflow, Automattic (Wordpress), Akamai/Cloudflare/Fastly (CDNs), Wikimedia/Fandom (wiki hosting). The only major exception is Atlassian who are headquartered in Australia.

No matter if your content may be legal under e.g. European law (e.g. right to repair, right to interoperability, right to reverse engineer), you are going to have a hard time hosting it. And even if you get it hosted at an European provider (remember, we don't have anything that competes with any of the three US cloud giants in terms of functionality!), you will have issues with accepting donations easily - Paypal, Stripe and all credit cards are under US regulation.

And it's not just theoretical, just look at what happened to Kim Dotcom/Megaupload (or, tangentially related, Julian Assange). If the US deems you a danger to their business interests, you are going to get hunted down, no matter where in the world you are and if what you are doing is legal under the jurisdiction of that country.

[feanaro]

I partially agree with you. This seems like a very good argument to start competing with the US harder.

As a counterexample, I'd like to offer you sci-hub which doesn't seem to significant hosting problems. Remember, we are not trying to replace an entire industry and all possible use cases at once. We're simply discussing the hosting of a few git repositories which some US entity might consider unsavoury due to a borked and unfair law.

[mschuster91]

> As a counterexample, I'd like to offer you sci-hub which doesn't seem to significant hosting problems.

They have to change domains all so often as the copyright mafia has a "blanket" seizure grant (https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-gets-carte-blanche-to-sei...), Cloudflare won't touch them as a result, their founder has (at least!) one court judgement of 15 million US$ by Elsevier in New York and another 4.8M$ by ACS against them and I bet that there is some sort of secret indictment floating around that gets unsealed in the case Elbakyan ever travels out of Russia so an extradition warrant can be put out.. the relatively unique advantage they have is that their founder is possibly linked to the Russian secret service GRU: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dep...

Effectively, Elbakyan's right to free movement is restricted to those nations that don't extradite to the US and have friendly relations to Russia. And for what we learned from the Snowden and Assange cases, it's safe to assume that even flying over a country that has extradition agreements with the US in a passenger flight is grounds enough for intervention.

[im3w1l]

Can you elaborate your last sentence?

[dlgeek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

[aequitas]

You can consider it a worldwide law:

  - a lot of big tech companies are based in the US
  - a lot of companies want to do business in the US
  - DCMA can become part of a trade agreement with the US, I don't know if the E.U. will save us at this point.

[feanaro]

No, you can't. Let's not weaken words in order to make a presumed point.

I do appreciate that these are factors which make DMCA more relevant than if these factors did not exist. But your last point is not even a current fact but a hypothetical future.

I always invite people not to be defeatist but proactive in materializing the future they want to see. Citing unfortunate potential futures is not the right way to solve our problems.