YouTube downloader youtube-dl is available again on GitHub after code modification

The original repository youtube-dl is available again on GitHub. The well-known YouTube downloader went offline at the end of October after copyright claims from the American music industry. The developers then removed code.

The recovery of youtube-dl has been reported in a comment on the future of the software on Github and indeed the repository is back in its original place. Details about the return and the changes are not yet online. It is clear, however, that the developers were in the process of removing code that the industry representative of the American music industry, the RIAA, took offense.

The copyright claims of the RIAA related, among other things, to texts in the source code, which referred to artists and songs that can be downloaded from YouTube as a test. It was the song ‘I Love It’ by Icona Pop, ‘Tunnel Vision’ by Justin Timberlake and ‘Shake it Off’ by Taylor Swift. GitHub took the repository offline in late October due to the DMCA claims.

A technical analysis showed that the code referred to the numbers for the automatic testing of the functionality by developers, that it was testing specific videos such as those from VEVO and that the software in the test only contained the first 10kB of the tracks. Anyway, the passages have been removed, causing GitHub to restore the software on its platform. Youtube-dl is a command line tool for downloading videos on the internet, on which several sites and programs have based their functionality.