Microsoft GitHub: taking free software down, one DMCA notice at a time

Lately Microsoft GitHub caved to RIAA and blocked youtube-dl. This is bad for many reasons, but shows why using a centralized, corporate-controled walled garden is a dangerous thing.

Microsoft GitHub (and RIAA) should have known better — not least because Streisand Effect is a thing. So, here's a list of youtube-dl mirrors:

• https://codeberg.org/polarisfm/youtube-dl
• https://git.nixnet.xyz/Amolith/youtube-dl
• https://code.loranger.xyz/rob/youtube-dl
• https://git.hackers.town/The_gibson/youtube-dl2.git
• https://gitlab.com/nephros/youtube-dl
• https://salsa.debian.org/debian/youtube-dl
• https://git.marcg.pizza/~marcg/youtube-dl
• https://git.osuv.de/star/youtube-dl
• https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/
• https://git.nixnet.xyz/Amolith/NewPipe
• https://code.loranger.xyz/rob/NewPipe

Here's another source of mirror links, for good measure. And, you can still clone the original repo using:

git clone -n https://github.com/github/dmca.git youtube-dl && cd youtube-dl && git fetch origin 416da574ec0df3388f652e44f7fe71b1e3a4701f && git checkout FETCH_HEAD

Now, hilariously GitHub also decided not to fix a potential security issue related to how repository forks are kept on the back-end. This makes it possible to make it seem like an upstream repo contains content that never actually ended up in it.

In other words, GitHub has no issue with youtube-dl seemingly hosted in GitHub's own DMCA repository.