[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?