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> Does copyright law end with HEAD on master?

With regards to copyright law and "distribution", there's no distinction. The tests are still being "distributed", just from a different URL. If youtube-dl was in violation before, they still are now.

This is a confusing result. I would not expect any copyright litigant to sacrifice legal advantage for the sake of an adversary's convenience in maintaining complete version control history.

Could there possibly have been a miscommunication over what "remove the tests" meant? Or an offer of compromise outside of legal necessity? Or a bad-faith fulfillment of a promise to "remove the tests"?




Does the fact that the RIAA is packed with stodgy, old corporate lawyers who most likely lack even superficial understanding of the term "version control" lack appropriate explanatory power?


Such "stodgy, old corporate lawyers" are going to become extremely antagonized should they discover that somebody pulled a fast one on them. All you'd have to do is open a web browser and click around to show them that the tests were still accessible.

So what's confusing is the youtube-dl side's strategy. Are they really trying to pull a fast one? That would be incredibly unwise, so I doubt it.


Everything just points to the dmca takedown request being treated as if it was invalid; the repository was restored more quickly than needed and without any real changes.




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