Youtube-dl had some good notes in their README about legitimate uses and an explanation about how they tried to avoid adding sites that specialized in infringing content, but they really did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. That will not help their argument at all. Youtube-dl absolutely has important and completely legal uses, reporting being among them, but the law doesn't care whether it CAN be used for legal purposes. The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose."
On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?
> did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests.
They had no alternative other than not having tests for that particular functionality. The tests were testing youtube-partner specific functionality: the procedure needed to download content from some youtube partners is different.
Moreover, the tests just throw away the downloaded material... it would be entirely reasonable for a court to conclude that there is no copyright interest involved in that activity at all and would be extraordinarily unlikely that any court would find it to be anything but fair use if they did conclude a copyright was involved at all.
If it hadn't been the test cases the RIAA probably would have dug up some old forum post advocating infringement by some occasional contributor. They were always going to argue something.
The fact that they had to have tests set to get around certain partners — partners who, it could be argued, had different provisions to try to limit the download of their content - works against them.
In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo.
ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.
Downloading copyrighted videos, just like home taping, is legal. There was a supreme court case deciding that the latter is legal. I have yet to hear any reasoning why "home taping, but on the internet" would not fall under that same precedent.
Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.
They allege that it circumvents a "rolling cipher", which (they say) is sufficiently DRMy that it comes under the law. The DMCA doesn't have much of a definition of what counts as an access control measure, but the "rolling cipher" that scrambles the download URL looks like one if you squint. Exactly what counts as DRM is less of a technical question than a legal one, so (not being a copyright lawyer) it's not obvious to me what the right answer is.
Because this is about distribution, not a home copy. You could copy and paste the test code into a terminal window and download the video. That’s not the same as a home recording.
> Because this is about distribution, not a home copy. You could copy and paste the test code into a terminal window and download the video. That’s not the same as a home recording.
The difference is that my home copy is my own work and action. The distribution, in this case, via source code, allows anyone to download that copy.
If the code snippet that downloaded infringing materials didn't exist and the user had to find the parameters themselves, that's fine. But it does exist and was included alongside a tool that makes that recording possible.
A better analogy would be like, if you had a video store that had a machine in the store that allowed people to make copies of a video tape using a duplicating machine. If someone wants to buy a duplicator for home use and use it in their home, that's one thing (though there was litigation around that too), but if you go to a store and can plug in a video tape -- and the example in the store is a copy of a Disney movie -- that's sort of what this is.
(Photocopy shops and libraries often have fairly strict rules about what kind of content can be photocopied, for what it's worth. The guy at Kinkos at 3am might not care that you're copying an entire textbook on the machine, but if you go to Office Depot in the daytime, they definitely will. Kinkos was sued and lost over a photocopy case in regards to excerpts/packets/anthologies for textbooks.)
> A better analogy would be like, if you had a video store that had a machine in the store that allowed people to make copies of a video tape using a duplicating machine. If someone wants to buy a duplicator for home use and use it in their home, that's one thing
If you have the recording device, then you can use it to record video that gets transmitted to you. But there isn't a place you can go to have the video duplicated for you. You do it yourself.
> The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose."
The first two elements have a mens rea implication behind them: you have to demonstrate the intent of the developers. That RIAA's strongest evidence of intent is buried in a unit test, and this seeming intent flies against the evidence in the far more prominent README that is discussing its unsuitability for infringing content. Furthermore, they can also demonstrate from their own practice in history that they refuse pull requests and close issues were people are clearly trying to use it only for infringing use cases.
On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?