As the American Record Association RIAA requested deletion under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA, the deleted project, youtube-dl, was revived on GitHub.
YouTube-dl is a project for the purpose of downloading videos such as YouTube or Billy Billy. Developer Ricardo Garcia living in Spain started developing it because there was no communication environment where it was difficult to watch streaming video.
However, the RIAA requested the deletion because it was evading the TPM, the technical protection measure for copyrights specified in the DMCA Article 1201 Prohibition of Bypass Provision, and the GitHub repository deleted it. Non-profit organizations that support open source software protested against this move, and the CEO of GitHub was also moving with the goal of reviving the repository.
GitHub officially decided to revive YouTube-dl because the Electronic Frontier Foundation provided information that YouTube-dl did not violate Article 1201 of the DMCA. In this case, GitHub announced that it would establish a $1 million developer defense fund to protect developers from unreasonable deletion requests pursuant to Article 1201 of the DMCA. For open source developers, it is clear that in the future, we will review the processing procedure for deletion requests, and technical experts will monitor all deletion requests pursuant to Article 1201 of the DMCA, and make it clear that github requests are rejected at the stage of arrival for unreasonable claims and exceeding the scope of the DMCA. did. Related information can be found here.