> The file sharing cases of the early 2000's have drawn some lines around the noninfringing use defense, though. Napster and Grokster both claimed, in court, to support noninfringing uses. However, both products promoted their products as offering free access to copyright-protected works, and the courts took notice of that in both cases-- I believe that the Grokster opinion may have noted that Grokster had never mentioned a noninfringing use outside the trial.
That's an excellent point. It seems like youtube-dl may have started as a tool primarily used for ripping music off YouTube, but it has grown into a tool that is used for so much more than that today (offline viewing of content, backups of freely licensed material, fair use such as extracting clips from videos, etc).
Given that no one is getting sued over this, at least not yet, perhaps it makes sense to not fight this and simply allow youtube-dl as it stands to be pulled and re-imagined as a new piece of software that is explicitly focused on the positive and legal use cases. If RIAA still wants to go after that software, the case against it would be far weaker than the current product that has "YouTube" in the name and explicitly references ripping copyrighted music in its source code.
Correct. Distributing and developing illegal software (as RIAA has declared youtube-dl to be) is a solved problem technically.
I'd like to see a case surrounding software like this actually defended in a court, though. It would be helpful to clarify what is legal and what is not on the modern Internet in terms of fair use and time shifting.
That's an excellent point. It seems like youtube-dl may have started as a tool primarily used for ripping music off YouTube, but it has grown into a tool that is used for so much more than that today (offline viewing of content, backups of freely licensed material, fair use such as extracting clips from videos, etc).
Given that no one is getting sued over this, at least not yet, perhaps it makes sense to not fight this and simply allow youtube-dl as it stands to be pulled and re-imagined as a new piece of software that is explicitly focused on the positive and legal use cases. If RIAA still wants to go after that software, the case against it would be far weaker than the current product that has "YouTube" in the name and explicitly references ripping copyrighted music in its source code.