You won’t find the source code for YouTube-DL, a popular tool that can be used to download videos from YouTube, and for some of its forks and copies on GitHub anymore. When you visit their pages, you’ll find a notice that says the “[r]epository [is] unavailable due to DMCA takedown” instead. That’s because the Microsoft-owned code hosting platform took them all down after getting a legal request from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer explained on Twitter that the letter wasn’t exactly a DMCA takedown notice despite what GitHub posted on the source codes’ now-empty pages. The association said in its letter that YouTube-DL violates section 1201 of the US copyright law and hence is illegal in and of itself. It argued that the tool violates copyright law, because it’s clearly meant to “circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube” and to “reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by [RIAA’s] member companies without authorization for such use.”
