Music Giants Ask EU to Label yt-dlp as Piracy
Music industry executives have found a terrifying new villain destroying their royalties: a neat little command-line script running on volunteer goodwill. The record lobby is officially crying to Brussels regulators.
The IFPI submitted a formal request urging the European Commission to drop open-source downloader yt-dlp straight onto its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch-List. In an awkwardly personal dossier, the lobby singled out the GitHub handles of four core volunteer developers: pukkandan, coletdjnz, bashonly, and Grub4K.
The music industry has been nursing this grudge since 2020, when the RIAA forced GitHub to pull down the original youtube-dl repository under the DMCA. That move triggered intense community backlash, pushing GitHub to restore the code and set up a $1 million legal defense fund for coders facing copyright aggression.
The community refused to back down and rallied behind the fork yt-dlp, turning it into the 32nd most-starred repository on GitHub with over 195,000 stars and 16,000 forks.
Now, the IFPI wants the tool categorized alongside commercial web rippers like SaveFrom.net and Y2mate, complaining that its open-source nature and public Unlicense make distribution practically impossible to stop. To add extra fuel to the fire, the federation warned regulators about new AI music platforms like Rythmix and MusicQ AI that pull tracks via download tools to generate synthetic vocal covers.
Watching multibillion-dollar record cartels mobilize international regulators against a text-based terminal utility exposes the utter disconnect between legacy copyright enforcement and modern open-source software. Striking at volunteer developers in public repositories will only ensure that a hundred decentralized mirrors emerge overnight.
Source: TorrentFreak
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