Is it the end of YouTube video download apps?

In Spain there are few platforms that are as popular as YouTube. Google’s free streaming video platform is also a source for many to listen to (and download) music, which is why for a few years there have been unofficial tools to download such videos.

That it is free to view does not mean that the content is completely free for you to download and do with what you want, since it is still subject to copyright laws. And because of this it seems that a battle against these applications begins that could endanger the future of downloads.

youtube-dl disappears from GitHub, what does this mean?

Having an extremely popular project can sometimes be risky for the health of the project, and this is exactly what has happened to the creators of youtube-dl, the most popular library to download YouTube videos and music. When we talk about popularity, we refer to popularity among developers, and even if you did not know about the existence of youtube-dl, it is likely that at some point in your life you have used an application that did use it.

The project for this tool, which was hosted on GitHub, was demolished a few hours ago by the RIAA (Recording Industry TOassociation of TOmerica) which is the American equivalent to the SGAE. According to the association:

Indeed, the comments on the youtube-dl source code make it clear that the source code was designed and promoted with the purpose of circumventing YouTube’s technological measures to allow unauthorized access to our members’ coypright works.

The closure of the library does not currently affect the applications that used it to download YouTube videos, but if they put an expiration date, since they cannot be updated in the future. Any changes to YouTube that invalidate the current version of youtube-dl will cause all these applications to stop working.

Does it affect Android applications?Initially, it shouldn’t, since applications like Newpipe, yMusic or Videoder are not based on the youtube-dl library. However, although it shouldn’t affect you initially, the RIAA may continue to insist on removing applications that are capable of downloading music or videos from streaming platforms.

At the moment the situation should not be worrying, and we hope that it will continue to be so for a long time.

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