In its submission to the EU's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, the group calls yt-dlp "a major problem for the music industry" and names four of its maintainers by their GitHub handles.
Ok, so add YouTube to the list.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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It would have made an interesting ST: TNG episode where the Federation orders the Enterprise to attack a planet where the National Potato Council claims there are pirates writing replicator software to distribute free food. Meanwhile, the B plot is Data struggling to manage his subscriptions to holodeck sims.
Tricky to make that work in the (moneyless) Federation. Maybe the Enterprise gives a Whateverian ship asylum against the Ferengi just inside Federation borders, and then the Nagus (Wallace Shawn's Nagus, of course, I can't imagine that Rom would do such a thing) demands that they extradite the Whateverians to face prosecution for theft. An investigation ensues, and it turns out that they didn't actually take anything physical, they just pirated a replicator pattern for the Whateva root, the root of an extinct plant which the people of Whatever III desperately need and are running out of. So now Picard has to figure out how to not cause an interplanetary patent incident and still make sure that the Whateverians get what they need.
The B-plot is pretty solid, though. That can basically stay as-is.
That's just politicians caving to their financial sponsors. The American entertainment industry tried and failed to make the same case against VCRs in the 1970s, and audio cassette recorders in the 1960s. Downloading by itself isn't "piracy".
Bypassing ads is already technically piracy as the concept of piracy is the idea you are stealing potential revenue.
So YT-DLP would be piracy aswell since it denies them revenue by allowing you to download the media.
Just wait till they start sueing people for each YouTube clip they download like they did with mp3s.
However, If you incorporate... feel free to pirate everything, unless youre Chinese...
Bypassing ads is already technically piracy as the concept of piracy is the idea you are stealing potential revenue.
No, piracy is about distributing unauthorized copies of copyrighted works. Revenue has nothing to do with it.
Thats what it used to mean for physical shit. For digital media is purely just denying revenue. Also yarrrrr
No, piracy is about "Yaaaarrrr!"
An association has to always look like they are doing something for their members. that's all.
This is the equivalent of calling right-clicking on a picture piracy. Utterly insane.
There are scripts on some sites that attempt to block right-click saving, you know.
Next up: uBlock Origin filters get called piracy
Fyi, if you didn't know: Shift + Right Click in Firefox always brings up the context menu, even if JavaScript tries to block it.
They already have been
OK. Is ffmpeg piracy or are they gonna continue to use it and not fund it?
of course they are crying about piracy again.
the music industry cries about piracy every time their sales slump.
Couldnt possibly be 90% of music is copy and paste slop. not to mention the rise of actual AI slop "music"
I don't think these assholes understand that its a VERY useful tool for archiving the internet, which helps keep powerful people accountable. We must fight to keep this tool so that journalists and activists can keep speaking truth to power.
They are the powerful people, and they know why they don't want to be kept accountable.
These assholes understand that perfectly. They represent rich and powerful people who don't like being held accountable, and who treasure the ability to keep selling you shit without you actually owning it.
Man fuck them. A garden hose is a tool, just because I can choke my asshole neighbor to death with it doesn't make it a garrote.
This sounds like one of those Internet comments that eventually winds up getting entered as evidence
Now can the IFPI treat genAI vendors as "commercialized piracy outlets"?
When I first got into emulation as a very early teen, I've heard a rumor about an admin of an Amiga ROM site being shot to death for piracy. However, nothing similar comes to against those who do it on an industrial scale, specifically to destroy a portion of the human experience.
The justice system will continue to be two-tiered until the ruling class decides that they want to stop being corrupt, sorry
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In Sweden you are allowed to make copies for private useage. I can record and save whatever piece of media I want, as long as I don't distribute it to other people and the material itself is not illegal (abuse material for example).
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There aren’t enough bullets going through their corrupt faces, apparently.
They describe the tool as an application that retrieves content by parsing web page data and interacting with platform playback endpoints, with GitHub serving as the primary delivery method for its source code, pre-compiled binaries, and installation instructions.
Omg, web browsers will be next!
You joke but killing general purpose browsers to sandbox everyone into curated apps would give most middle managing MBAs a priapism.
more than that, they want it filtered through their ai agent
Nice use of the word priapism.
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Just so you know, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) represents around 8,000 music labels across 70 countries.
Chucklefucks. Some unsigned artists, especially underground rappers, uploaded their tracks to Youtube, long before Facebook video and Spotify. That I also use DLP to grab very interesting videos before they can be unlisted or deleted.
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There’s an EU piracy watchlist? Did anyone submit Facebook to it?
Sounds like a spam this agency project.
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Company happly sends media to my computer when requested.
Company angry my computer do what I want with the media it got.
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cassette tapes are going to melt their brains
Wait till you learn that most European countries require you to pay a protection fee to these fuckheads every time you buy anything capable of storing data including hard drives, SD cards, blank CDs etc. just because you could maybe store pirated music on them.
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Yeah, the content mafia really hates everything that makes us actually own something.
content mafia
Oh man, I just had flashbacks to the days we used to refer to the riaa/mpaa as the MAFIAA
Ridiculous horseshit, fuck these clowns.
Nah, bro. I'm using it to train my ai. Trust me bro.
Allow me to explain why piracy can’t die in a way buisness majors can understand.
She’s gorgeous. She’s fantastic in bed. She pegs you and won’t tell anybody. You want to marry her.
You will be subjected to nonstop crazy bullshit for the rest of your life. She’s no longer fun, just expensive. She’s abusive. Nobody is happy.
And now she has ads.
You drink more. You stop coming home after work until she’s asleep. You refer to local hookers by their legal first names.
One day she throws a clot and dies. And you feel relief. The abuse, the lies, the manipulation, the pretending to be happy is finally done. You are free.
This in an anolgy for streaming services.
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And here we see copyrighta blightus, the copyblight firm to the rest of us, looking to expand it's territory.
This species is, of course, an invader to the quiet widely watched waves; an invasive element that can, and will, upset the local ecosystem.
If you listen closely, you can hear the call of these parasites; it sounds a little like "you wouldn't steal a car".
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