This takedown notice does not necessarily spell the permanent end of youtube-dl. GitHub always immediately takes down any source code project that receives a DMCA notice like this, but the project’s creators will have an opportunity to file a counterclaim in the hopes of restoring youtube-dl’s status on GitHub. We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as it develops.
YouTube-DL is pretty simple to use: you give the command-line program the URL of any YouTube video, and it will fetch the material and save it to your computer for future playback.
Microsoft GitHub has removed all traces of the very useful youtube-dl utility for downloading videos from YouTube and other websites, including this one, following a questionable DMCA request from the Recording Industry Association of America.
youtube-dl is a simple command-line utility that lets you easily download audio adn videos from just about any website with a file file embedded in it. It works on sites like this one. A lot of software, including the popular video player mpv, can use it to download video fragments on the fly so videos embedded in web pages can be opened and played as if they were local files.
The Recording Industry Association of America submitted a DMCA request to Microsoft GitHub demanding that youtube-dl gets removed from the Internet on October 23rd, 2020. The complaint contains this rather misleading claim: [...]
Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) sent a notice to GitHub for hosting youtube-dl source code. Microsoft’s GitHub took immediate action to disable the repositories. But was it the right thing to do?
The Microsoft-owned source code repository GitHub has taken down the repository for youtube-dl, a popular command-line script that can be used to download videos from YouTube and many other videos from the Internet, following a DMCA takedown letter sent by the Recording Industry Association of America.
GitHub has removed the open-source YouTube-DL repository as well as several forks. The developer platform took action following a takedown request from the RIAA. The music group argues that the code is primarily used to download copyrighted content and also violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions.
Popular open source tool to download video from YouTube is no more available at GitHub as Microsoft has disabled it’s repository after the notice from Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA).