The music industry is taking action against the German hosting provider: Three major labels are suing Uberspace for hosting the open source site youtube-dl. With this software available on GitHub, users can download video and audio files from YouTube. According to the plaintiffs, this violates copyright law. The controversy between the music industry and the creators of youtube-dl has been going on for over a year, and there was even a lull when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) managed to get the youtube-dl project removed from GitHub. Now the copyright holders have taken up the hosting companies that host sites with youtube-dl.
German hosting provider Uberspace received a letter from a lawyer representing Sony Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music. It contained a warning about responsibility for hosting a site that infringes copyright. Online services such as Uberspace are protected by the so-called provider privilege. This means that they are not directly responsible for possible violations of the law by users. However, the question of whether the youtube-dl software is illegal remains highly controversial. Lawyers for Uberspace are confident that downloading content from YouTube is generally acceptable as long as no one has attempted to bypass copy protection. Obviously, the record companies were reluctant to follow this argument.
YouTube only protects paid content with DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption. Most of the service catalog is provided with elementary security or the so-called sliding (permutation) cipher, which is easy to bypass. This does not require any programming knowledge or special tools. YouTube does not give an exact answer to the question of whether downloading videos from the service is allowed. In its terms, it disallows downloading unless explicit permission is given. However, the help section states that “by submitting the original video licensed under a Creative Commons license, you are allowing the YouTube community to reuse and edit it.”
The music industry is very aggressive against potential copyright infringements. Disabling tools like youtube-dl would free her hands and prevent this kind of activity. Hosting providers can be another target for copyright holders. It is easier to simply comply with their demands and remove the content than to insist that the illegality of the content concerned is in fact determined by a higher authority. In this regard, we should pay tribute to the Uberspace hoster, which did not go on about the music labels and is trying to resist them. This could cost him 100,000 euros, not counting legal costs.
In any case, users don’t need to worry about youtube-dl, whose source code and files are on Github. In November 2020, the platform owners restored the project repository.
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