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      GitHub agrees RIAA claim is bunk, restores popular YouTube download tool

      Kate Cox · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 17 November, 2020 - 21:18 · 1 minute

    A sign in the shape of the YouTube logo juts out over a glass wall.

    Enlarge / A sign featuring the YouTube logo, outside the YouTube Space studios in London on June 4, 2019. (credit: Olly Curtis | Future | Getty Images )

    GitHub has reversed its decision to boot YouTube-dl, a popular tool for archiving YouTube videos, from its platform. The company restored repositories this week after "additional information" convinced it that an archiving tool is not in and of itself a copyright violation—no matter what the music industry says.

    The repositories in question got shut down in late October, before coming back yesterday. "We share developers' frustration with this takedown—especially since this project has many legitimate purposes," GitHub explained in a corporate blog post . "Our actions were driven by processes required to comply with laws like the DMCA that put platforms like GitHub and developers in a difficult spot. And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM), was inline with our values of putting developers first."

    The initial takedown occurred after the Recording Industry Association of America filed a claim with Microsoft-owned GitHub arguing that the code in those repositories was inherently illegal under US copyright law. At a high level, the law in question basically makes it illegal to crack or bypass DRM in any way, except for a handful of enumerated exemptions .

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