The recorded music industry has asked the European Commission to name the open-source downloader yt-dlp on its next piracy watch list, the first time the tool or its predecessor has been put forward as a target in such a submission.
IFPI, the international trade body for recorded music, made the request in its submission to the consultation for the 2027 EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. It asks for yt-dlp to be added to the list of stream ripping services, alongside Savefrom.net and two Y2mate sites.
"YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation," IFPI writes.
The submission then sets out why the software is hard to stop. "Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale and depriving right holders, artists and licensed services from legitimate streaming and downloads."
There is history behind the request. In October 2020 the RIAA used a DMCA notice to remove youtube-dl, yt-dlp's predecessor, from GitHub, arguing that the software circumvented YouTube's rolling cipher. GitHub reinstated the repository weeks later and set up a $1 million defence fund for developers facing similar claims. In Germany, labels won a case against Uberspace, the host of youtube-dl's website, and the Hamburg Court of Appeal rejected the host's appeal in November 2024.
Development largely moved to yt-dlp, which launched in 2021. It now has more than 16,000 forks and more than 190,000 stars on GitHub, making it the 32nd most-starred project on the site. The submission identifies four developers by their public GitHub handles.
The watch list is aimed at marketplaces and services outside the EU. IFPI notes that GitHub is yt-dlp's official source, "the main platform for accessing the scripts latest updates, source code, pre-compiled binaries and installation instructions", while adding that forks and copies exist elsewhere. GitHub is owned by Microsoft and based in the United States.
The submission also flags two AI music apps, Rythmix and MusiQ AI, which let users paste a YouTube link and produce a cover version in a cloned voice. Both are in Apple's App Store, and Rythmix has been downloaded more than five million times on Google Play.
Beyond the listing itself, the yt-dlp section asks for nothing. There is no takedown request, no call for blocking measures and no proposed action against the developers. TorrentFreak notes that the submission does not mention that the software has lawful uses.
It is worth setting the diagnosis beside the remedy. The stated problem is that the software cannot be contained or removed, because it is open, widely distributed and maintained by a large community. The proposed response is to write it down.
This newspaper regards the choice as sound. Of every measure available to a rights holder, a list is the only one that cannot be forked.
A takedown can be answered with a mirror. A block can be answered with a copy. A list is unaffected by the existence of 16,000 further copies, and would be unaffected by 16,000 more, because the number of entries required stays at one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that this makes listing the most reliable intervention in the field. It does not remove the software, but nothing removes the software, and the list is the only measure that was never going to.
The Commission will decide next year which of the proposed targets appear in the 2027 edition. Whatever it decides, yt-dlp will still be there, and so, now, will the entry.