No it doesn't follow at all, any more than had the repo owners included a couple of public domain recordings in the repo then the conclusion that the tool was clearly intended to download public domain recordings.
It's hard for a lot of techies to grapple with this, but courts and law are often decided by the intent of the offense. This shows intent, whereas public domain works would not. The difference, in court, is massive.
It's not that it's hard to grasp, we just think it's irrelevant, since plenty of people also have legitimate uses for this tool, and any other tool that allows them to do the same things is just as capable of downloading copyrighted youtube videos.
> since plenty of people also have legitimate uses for this tool, and any other tool that allows them to do the same things is just as capable of downloading copyrighted youtube videos
True, but _other_ people and _other_ tools aren't relevant to the intent of _these_ authors and _this_ tool. _Your_ intent is relevant in establishing whether _you_ violated the law (and thus whether an associated DMCA takedown is valid).
Intent does matter only if there's some action taken, or attempted.
The tool just sits there on github. Only the tool's users actually do download stuff or attempt to.
Also you'd be hard pressed to prove such specific intent from some random testsuite url, added by one or two authors, when the tool has very many authors/contributors and the README/manual for users just has non-copyrighted material sample urls, anyway.
RIAA just tries to make it harder to preserve regularly disappearing youtube content, like war crimes evidence, just to make some people richer on some stupid music. I can prove their intent, because that's what this tool is used for, and they're trying to remove the tool from the internet. /s This is the same stupid argument they're using. They will fail, but why not try to make other people's lives harder, right?
I do hope they fail, but regardless I think your analysis here is completely off base.
The intent or action taken in this case is the creation, maintenance, and publication of the tool itself. At issue isn't the intent of any particular end user, or even the majority of end users, but rather of the authors themselves.
To the best of my knowledge, it simply does not matter how the tool is used in practice. AFAIK, all that matters is the intent of the authors in creating and distributing it.
And that intent only shows that authors like to write code and contribute to such a tool. You really can't show much more from the act itself.
For example I authored and maintain megatools, a tool to download/upload from mega.nz that many people probably use to download the same kind of content that's being the issue with youtube-dl. I have no way of knowing.
I haven't used megatools myself in about 4 years, aside from quick testing prior to release/update. And I never really used mega.nz that much even before. I just wanted to learn a bit about cryptography, and return back to C programming after a few years of just doing PHP/JS, and writing a first mega.nz third-party client was an interesting opportunity at the time. Yet the tool is somewhat popular, and distributed as one of mega clients in various Linux distros.
It's ridiculous to assume intent from some test cases. The only intent I can extrapolate from the actions of authors is that they like to code, fix bugs in other people's code, and want to ease their maintenance burden by having tests. The rest is just speculation.
I don't believe the general principle is limited to either software or tools. It is my understanding that the courts generally operate based on intent, particularly when it comes to criminal law.
(For an arbitrary example, consider the difference between a gas station selling to the typical customer versus someone who asks the clerk for help filling some gas cans and in the process openly admits an intent to use them to commit arson later that night.)
From a practical perspective, it's hard to wish for or imagine a legal system that doesn't rely upon judicial interpretation of intent. An example would be causing the death of another human being. Would you want all four of these incidents to be treated the same from a legal perspective?
- A surgery, which is known to have a 50/50 chance of success even at the hands of an excellent surgeon, goes poorly and the patient dies.
- A serial killer spends six months plotting the murder of his victim before executing them.
- A shoving match breaks out at a bar. Somebody slips, falls, hits their head on the ground, and dies.
- You accidentally frighten somebody by sneezing in a quiet library. They have a heart attack and die.
From a purely logical perspective, these are literally the same thing. A person dies! Realistically speaking, any legal system needs to consider intent.
If the law reached a point where the defendant in all of those scenarios would be found not guilty provided they were wearing a t-shirt at the time saying "My intent is to not kill someone", then we would probably agree that the law is not fit for purpose.
Similarly, if the difference between illegal software and legal software is the value of a random ID in a unit test, or the presence of a boilerplate "Please don't use this for copyright infringement" message in the README, then the law isn't really "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts", it is just a gotcha trap for developers who forget to copy-paste a piece of text.
The equivalent from the Prohibition Era would be the warnings on "grape bricks" that told buyers "not to leave that jug in the cool cupboard for 21 days, or it would turn into wine".[0]
If you would put aside your emotions for a second, you would see that this is clearly just an issue of different priorities and values -- on both sides. And the side that has the power has priorities that presumably, given your phrasing, disagree with yours. I understand that can be frustrating and that that frustration might lead you to questionable rhetorical devices, but it won't change the fact of the situation.
No, the court looks to facts to establish intent. It's not possible to look into someone's brain, but courts are very, very comfortable with looking at facts to determine something about what's going on in there.
Crimes like first-degree murder have intent as a requirement. People are convicted of it all the time, and it's based on facts and evidence from before and after the killing.
