In light of the recent takedown of the youtube-dl project by Github,
Because you don't need to be a weather man to see how the wind is blowing.
that is an irrelevant case. a project that is breaking the law (youtube-dl project) will obviously be removed from anywhere on the internet. but this has nothing to do with bitcoin.
Off-topic, and unpopular opinion, but worth mentioning: Youtube-dl is not an illegal project, because it’s intended to be used for downloading the m3u8 video files that make up the video stream, and virtually all video-hosting sites break up videos into small chunks that are easily downloadable on slow connections. Then these are put together by make the whole video. Browsers, and youtube-dl, both do this and there is nothing illegal about splitting and putting back together videos.
What
is illegal is decrypting the DRM and then downloading a DRM-protected video or music file. Spotify, Netflix and Hulu all protect their media with DRM; YouTube, however, does not. The music videos available can be geoblocked but there is no DRM protection implemented. And because youtube-dl doesn’t support these sites, and doesn’t implement any DRM, it isn’t breaking any law from the legal point of view. Even Google doesn’t have a legal issue with youtube-dl, they just change their protocols which breaks youtube-dl frequently and obviously Google does not support youtube-dl so this is expected from them. There is no clause in Youtube ToS that says “you are prohibited from downloading videos for offline consumption from our servers”.
I agree that people shouldn’t be downloading copyrighted videos. But the number of copyrighted music videos on YouTube is extremely tiny compared to the rest of the videos there, less than 0.01% (estimate). RIAA thinks youtube-dl is only used for piracy which is completely false, that’s equivalent of saying someone put copyrighted content on the blockchain and then because it’s downloaded by everyone, then RIAA thinks bitcoin is being used for piracy (also an absurd claim).
With that logic, why doesn’t RIAA issue DMCAs to browsers that internally download videos from Youtube? Because that’s crazy, and would create a huge backlash. And now everyone who uses youtube-dl legally are probably up in arms about this.
RIAA has a long history of DMCA’ing anything that remotely looks like piracy. Streamers regularly get DMCAs for playing music on their devices in the background while they record themselves, even if it’s only a few seconds (a bot listens to the video and makes the DMCA). As if anybody can recreate the original copyrighted song or if people are interested in listening to that. Don’t you think, that overzealous legal efforts like this current one are harmful?
(Yes, I am a youtube-dl user, but I never downloaded copyrighted stuff with it. That’s what makes me particularly upset about this DMCA.)
On topic, OP can make a private Git server and keep that in sync with Bitcoin’s Github repo, if OP is up to it.