After the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had the popular open source program Youtube-DL deleted from Microsoft’s code hosting platform GitHub last week, the platform is now overwhelmed by copies of the program .

The open source community is traditionally not a friend of interest groups like the RIAA, which try to defend their copyright claims through copy protection measures, which are then built into all possible software systems. And the fact that the RIAA had obtained the removal of the popular tool with a DMCA cease and desist statement does not seem to suit many GitHub users at all. Youtube-DL is a software library that is used by many other programs in the background. With these programs, or from the command line with Youtube-DL itself, you can download videos or just their audio track from YouTube and other video sharing platforms. This is used by users to download videos for offline viewing, rip music from videos and convert video broadcasts into audio podcasts to take away.

But many journalists also use software or websites that are based on YouTube-DL to archive news-relevant videos before they are deleted by governments, law enforcement agencies or by means of a DMCA cease and desist declaration. The Freedom of the Press Foundation also points this out in a publication on the RIAA’s approach. The software has “secured a permanent place in the toolbox of many reporters, newsroom developers and archive employees,” it says. Even the author of this message would not have been able to report several dozen security vulnerabilities and a handful of other topics for heise online if he was at the beginning the research could not have saved material from primary sources with Youtube-DL, which had already been deleted when the report was published.

Do you know the Streisand effect? ​​ Of course, Youtube-DL is also used for less socially recognized copyright infringements. Often, however, these are private individuals who download content for their own use and do not pass it on – a type of copyright infringement that in almost no country in the world has serious legal consequences. And it is precisely these private users who are now venting their displeasure by uploading the software to all possible GitHub repos. In the meantime there are hundreds of such alternative repos.

The RIAA seems to be a bold

with the publicly effective deletion of the open source software.