Hosting provider Uberspace has suffered another setback in a German court. The court of appeal ruled against youtube-dl’s former hosting provider, holding it liable for alleged violations of YouTube’s copyright protection measures. The owner of the company is currently considering further appeal options. Meanwhile, youtube-dl remains available on GitHub.
by their logic, right clicking an image and clicking save is illegal.
Give it a few more years and it will probably be over there. I don’t know whether it’s an ongoing thing or what since I haven’t kept up with it, but there is/was(?) a case of some Springer Verlag trying to say that an ad blocker violates copyright law, going after Eyeo/Adblocker Plus.
To be fair, Eyeo/ABP deserved everything they had coming at them. They not only blocked ads, but there was code found to replace Amazon affiliate links with an affiliate id from them. (German report here - look for the part about typoRules.js.)
Fair enough.
I mean, that was Getty Image’s whole case against Google’s “view image” button. And Getty won that legal battle, so clearly they have some legal ground to stand on, even though most people would think it’s bullshit.
The Hamburg Regional Court ruled that youtube-dl violates the law as it bypasses YouTube’s anti-circumvention measures.
Many Hamburg court not know shit on technology and listen to big company instead.
While Uberspace hoped to overturn the lower court’s judgment, the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg decided to reject the appeal in full.
And appeal rejected by same shit people. Wait until arrive at proper court.
Yeah, OLG Hamburg is known for making bad judgements. There’s a reason many companies choose to file a lawsuit at this court.
This seems like a good time to remind people to update to yt-dlp 2024.11.18, if they haven’t already.
why? for me it shows some warnings but still works
You can click on that link and view the changelog if you want. There didn’t seem to be a whole ton related to YouTube specifically, although that version does remove oauth support for YouTube as it’s irrevocably broken by Google apparently.
What a shitshow. And there is a lot of harm done to everyone if this comes true.
Were they hosting the youtube-dl source?
Even then, are shops selling kitchen knives (mind you, despite the name, youtube-dl can be used to download videos from various sources) held liable for people doing murders with them?
EDIT: On a sidenote, the Hamburg courts are renowned to know jack shit about technology and often produce rulings against any common sense.
“GitHub initially complied but later changed course. After consulting legal experts, including those at the EFF, it restored the youtube-dl repository. GitHub also launched a million-dollar defense fund to assist developers in similar disputes.”
Why is Github protecting them? They removed bypass paywalls, no?
