- RIAA counters the piracy and copyright infringement of digital media
- YouTube-DL, a GitHub code allowed users to download YouTube videos
- RIAA sent a notice to GitHub to remove YouTube-DL from its site
RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America, is a trade organization that represents the recording industry in the United States. It has been actively sending takedown notices to tackle piracy and counterfeit production. RIAA has issued a notice to the creators of the Youtube-DL, a YouTube downloader. It is a Python library with over 72K stars on GitHub and was used for youTube video ripping tools and services.
What is RIAA?
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is an organization to support and promote the creative and financial vitality of most major music companies. About 85% of all legitimate recorded music produced and sold in the United States is created, manufactured, and distributed by RIAA members. It protects the intellectual property and First Amendment rights of artists and music labels. It also conducts consumer, industry, and technical research.
With its latest move on GitHub, RIAA objects that YouTub-DL has violated Section 1201 of the U.S. copyright law. This law bans all the content that bypasses the Digital Rights Management (DRM). In the early 2000s, however, RIAA issued DMCA notices that point at the hosting of protected content and requests its takedown. But this removal of infringing videos has become more and more automated, like that on Youtube.
Youtube-DL, which is a command-line tool, takes the YouTube URL and targets the raw video and audio files to be downloaded and stored. But under Section 1201, “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” Thus it makes YouTube-DL illegal and thus needs to be taken down.
RIAA’s Actions
But the RIAA does not tackle the methods by which users can still circumvent the DRM placed on the videos. It can still be copied by using a screen recorder or placing a video camera to create an offline copy. Thus, this takedown will end up preventing nothing. YouTube-DL has been downloaded and forked many times till date. And RIAA will definitely need to take action towards several other sites and apps which do the same as YouTube-DL.
The removal of GitHub code is a temporary and short-sighted reaction to the problem of privacy and infringement. YouTube might be at a greater loss due to people sharing logins.
