Having just been sentenced in early April for refusing to block the site of a YouTube video downloading tool, a small German host is sounding the alarm about the risk of censorship represented by this court decision.
This is a dangerous court decision for the small German company. On Monday April 3, the website host Uberspace was sentenced by the Hamburg court for refusing to block one of its customers: the download manager for streaming videos YouTube-dl.
Since 2006, this command line executable program is developed in open-source by volunteers on the GitHub collaborative platform. Fully in the public domain, it’s one of the site’s most popular tools with nearly 120,000 fans.
Although Uberspace only hosts a web page presenting the tool, redirecting to GitHub, the German justice found it responsible for illegal activities. The company announces to appeal and denounces a threat of private censorship.
Three record companies against one website
Although a simple blocking of the site by the courts would not surprise anyone, it is above all the context of this court decision which pushes the boss of Uberspace, Jonas Pasche, to denounce a draconian procedure in an article from the specialized media Torrent Freak.
The conviction follows a complaint by three major record companies (Sony Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Universal Music) to the German courts. They believe that the YouTube-dl tool allows in particular to download YouTube videos containing titles of artists signed with them and would therefore be responsible for piracy.
The Hamburg court finally agreed with them on April 3, 2023, ruling that “ YouTube-dl violated the law because it circumvented YouTube’s technological protections“, preciseTorrent Freak.
But above all, the judge considers that by hosting the YouTube-dl site, Uberspace is legally responsible for its so-called “illegal» if he refuses to take the site offline at the request of the rights holders.
Downloading YouTube is not necessarily illegal
For Jonas Pasche, it is this justification that opens the door to a much wider risk of censorship. First, he challenges the very basis of the German court’s decision: the illegal nature of YouTube-dl, which the company had defended before the judge as being able to “be used for countless purposesciting, for example, the human rights NGO Amnesty International, which recommends its use for “document or preserve evidence“.
But above all, he believes that a host should be able to refuse a request to delete a website if it doubts its illicit nature. This is what Uberspace did: after this request, the company tried to verify whether downloading YouTube videos was illegal, as much by press articles as by experts and lawyers specialized in law. digital… to finally come to the opposite conclusion.
Because of his conviction despite this legal vagueness, Jonas Pasche warns of the danger it represents: in the future, private companies could force other hosts to self-censor in a similar case.
“They’ll think maybe it’s illegal, so better get rid of it, without a court order. […] That they may have to pay damages for helping thems “, provides the German boss.
Tackle the small host rather than Microsoft
This is not really the first time that rights holders have attacked YouTube-dl. If the record labels are attacking the simple host of the video download tool website, it is because they first failed to bring down its main source of development: its GitHub page.
In October 2020, the Record Industry Advocacy Association of America (RIAA) tried to have the program’s page removed from the site, before giving up in the face of opposition from GitHub management, backed by a powerful NGO providing legal advice on digital rights.
If Uberspace was also supported by a specialized German organization, that was not enough to convince the Hamburg court. For the boss of the company, the rights holders preferred to tackle “an easy target» rather than the platform owned by the giant Microsoft: «this is exactly the behavior of little bullies.»
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