Sony Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music filed In Germany, a lawsuit against the Uberspace provider, which provides hosting for the official site Youtube-DL project. In response to the previously sent extrajudicial query YouTube-DL lock Company Uberspace I did not agree to disable the site and expressed disagreement with claims. The plaintiffs insist that YouTube-DL is a tool for copyright impairment and are trying to present the actions of Uberspace as a complicity of the dissemination of illegal software.
The Uberspace manager believes that the claim does not have a legal basis, since YouTube-DL does not contain opportunities to bypass protection mechanisms and only provides access to public content already available in Youtube. To limit access to licensed content in YouTube, DRM is used, but YouTube-DL does not provide means to decrypt video streams encoded using this technologies. For its functionality, YouTube-DL resembles a specialized browser, but no one is trying to ban, for example, Firefox, because it allows you to access video with music on YouTube.
The plaintiffs believe that the Youtube-DL program transforming the License Stream Content with YouTube into unlicenzion downloadable files violates the law, as it allows us to bypass the technical mechanisms of access organization used in Youtube. In particular, bypassing the technology “Cipher Signature” (Rolling Cipher), which, in the opinion of the plaintiffs, and in accordance with the decision on the similar case of the Hamburg Regional Court may be considered a measure of technological protection.
Opponents believe that the specified technology is not related to copying mechanisms for copying, encryption and restrict access to protected content, as it is only a visible video signature in YouTube, which reads in the page code and only identifies the video (in any browser you can View this identifier in page code and get a link to download).
From previously imposed complaints, you can also mention the use of links to individual compositions and attempts to download them from YouTube, but this feature cannot be considered a violation of copyright, as references are indicated in internal unit tests that are not visible End users, and during startups do not load and do not distribute all content, but only perform the loading of several first seconds in order to test the performance.