While its good to get a backup of the source code, youtube-dl is one of those projects that quickly becomes useless as Google mixes stuff around within YouTube, which they like to do. Without an active developer base, the project will quickly become less and less effective, which is one of the big concerns IMO about this lawsuit.
What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
Git seems like a great candidate for hosting through TOR; it's super low bandwidth. I often find myself wondering why DMCA'd fan projects don't just switch to anonymous TOR hosting. Obviously it's not bulletproof, but if it's just copyright holders you have to worry about and not state actors then it seems like a great solution.
In light of this DMCA, this seems like a site that needs to exist...but I don't know of one? Seems like as trivial a build as anything cryptographic actually
They should rename it to open-license-content-dl, paste warnings all over the readme about how it should NOT be used to download copyrighted content, post it to github, and see what happens.
> What if collaboration on opensource projects (i.e. hosting, issues and their comments) was decentralized instead of relying on a central entity like Github? That would keep the developer base active and make DMCA takedowns ineffective.
But decentralisation would also make it harder to verify the code is legitimate.
Would you trust a copy of something like this from an anonymous server?
Despite the project name, "youtube-dl" is a nearly universal video downloader. It contains hundreds of special cases for specific websites, which will gradually break without maintenance. It would be a huge loss.
I imagine someone can re-publish it on Github without it being taken down if they rename it, change the README and/or add some disclaimer saying this tool shouldn't be used to download copyrighted works.
Collaboration to keep it up to date hopefully follows soon after.
I have wondered why Real Player never seemed, over a period of years (some years ago, at least), to need updates to cope with downloading from YouTube, and yet youtube-dl seemed to need regular updates every few months.
It's an architectural difference, but it is unclear what it is. It cannot be because RealPlayer Downloader is a browser extension that provides a "download" button within the WWW page itself and youtube-dl works from URLs given on a command line, because other YouTube downloaders like iTube are also able to download a video given only a YouTube page URL.
Or maybe it isn't a difference nowadays. This was some years ago. But there does not seem to be much talk about having to update these downloaders frequently like youtube-dl.
I would go so far as to say the source code of youtube-dl is less relevant than its existence as a rallying point. The project can be disrupted by attacking its centralized points, but I doubt the general effort can be suppressed long-term.
Youtube is far from the only thing ytdl is useful for. I have a particular hate for youtube and basically don't go there, but still make plenty of use of youtube-dl.
Here's a list of sites that it supports (google cache link because the original seems down, potentially due to the DMCA). It would be difficult to find a reasonably sized site that it doesn't support.
