Hamburg District Court: Uberspace may no longer host Youtube-DL
The Federal Association of the Music Industry (BVMI) and the international umbrella organization IFPI celebrate a legal success before the district court of Hamburg. This judged on Friday that the Mainz-based provider Uberspace is no longer allowed to host the website https://youtube-dl.org. The 10th civil division of the court ordered the person responsible for hosting to stop the offer. The German offshoots of the three major international labels Universal Music, Warner Music Group and Sony Entertainment sued Uberspace for hosting in early 2022 (Ref.: 310 O 316/21).
The website actually only serves as a kind of calling card for the program library, which has been a hot topic for years: It offers a link for downloading and further development via the source code hosting platform GitHub. Youtube-DL allows users to download videos or just their audio track as MP3 from YouTube and other video sharing platforms. For example, you can watch videos offline, rip songs from videos, and convert shows into audio podcasts to take away. Activists and journalists often use software or websites built on top of YouTube DL to archive newsworthy videos in order to forestall possible takedown requests from governments, law enforcement agencies and rights holders.
Allegations from three record companies
The three record companies accused Uberspace boss Jonas Pasche of giving users access to YouTube DL. The defendant thus makes a significant contribution to the fact that users can use the software to download content that is not intended for download. Uberspace also accepts payments for the open source project. In March 2022, the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF) filed a statement of defense at the Hamburg Regional Court. She saw the initiative as another attempt by the music industry to illegalize legitimate network activities such as download tools under the pretext of copyright. The download tool is legal because it does not circumvent any effective copy protection measures.
According to the judgment available online, Pasche must also refrain from assisting third parties in circumventing “effective technical protective measures” of sound recordings by the artists Mia, Wincent Weiss and Robin Schulz represented by the labels. Basically, the judges also see him obliged to pay damages for unauthorized downloads through the use of Youtube-DL, provided that users have downloaded the software via the controversial website. The chamber assumes that the program is mainly used to download content from YouTube, where “rolling cipher” is a technical measure intended to make such downloads more difficult or to prevent it.
BVMI boss Florian Drücke spoke of an important signal: stream ripping is one of the most popular methods of listening to music in an unlicensed or illegal way: “This is unacceptable and harms all players in the industry as well as the music fans themselves.” But it is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory, since Youtube-DL could simply move to another server in distant countries and the GitHub developer directory is still available.
(mack)
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