Link: https://itsfoss.com/news/yt-dlp-ifpi-piracy-watchlist/

yt-dlp has over 195,000 stars on GitHub, supports thousands of platforms, and is actively maintained by a global developer community. Unfortunately, the IFPI would like to see it on the EU's piracy watchlist.

Just so you know, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) represents around 8,000 music labels across 70 countries.

In its submission to the EU's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, the group calls yt-dlp "a major problem for the music industry" and names four of its maintainers by their GitHub handles.

A Piracy Watch List?

Run by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade and Economic Security, the Watch List identifies online services and physical marketplaces outside the EU reported to engage in or facilitate copyright infringement.

While it sounds serious, the undertaking isn't meant to gather legal findings and does not mandate any form of direct action. It's closer to a naming exercise intended to pressure operators and governments outside the EU into addressing the identified services.

The 2027 edition is being compiled from submissions received through September 2026, with the final list expected in Q2 2027.
What does their submission say?

IFPI's submission covers a wide range of copyright enforcement concerns, from AI music generators and cyberlockers to streaming fraud services and domain registrars. yt-dlp appears under the "stream ripping" section, grouped with commercial websites like Y2mate and Savefrom.

They describe the tool as an application that retrieves content by parsing web page data and interacting with platform playback endpoints, with GitHub serving as the primary delivery method for its source code, pre-compiled binaries, and installation instructions.

IFPI names four of the project's maintainers by their GitHub handles: pukkandan, who founded the project and led it between 2021 and 2024, and some core maintainers mentioned in the project's Maintainers.md file, like coletdjnz, bashonly, and Grub4K.

The same submission also flags X, Discord, Telegram, and Vimeo as platforms facilitating copyright infringement at scale.

It's a tool, not a service

The Watch List, as described by the European Commission, targets online service providers and physical marketplaces located outside the EU. yt-dlp fits neither description in any conventional sense.

IFPI acknowledges this by noting that the project's open source nature, its Unlicense licensing, and an extensive international developer community make it "difficult to contain and/or remove."

From their point of view, there's no central domain to block, no payment processor to cut off, and no hosting provider to strongarm into complying with a takedown request.

The source code is distributed globally and can be compiled by anyone with the skills to do so. But that doesn't mean yt-dlp is a piracy platform.

It's a command-line tool for downloading audio and video content, and categorizing it alongside dedicated ripping or piracy websites conflates a general-purpose downloader with services whose primary purpose is facilitating unauthorized copying.
Closing thoughts

The Watch List has been used in connection with enforcement against commercial stream-ripping platforms before.

Y2mate.com and eleven other stream-ripping sites were shut down in Vietnam in 2025, and Y2mate had previously appeared on the list.

Before that, in 2024, a German court held the host provider for youtube-dl.org liable in connection with facilitating circumvention. This shows that grouping an open source command-line tool with those commercial services in the same breath does not, by itself, make the tool one of those.

Put it on radicle and watch them try to take it down. It'll be hilarious.

I just finished Enshitification by Cory Doctorow.

In it, he points out that your right to record what is on TV for your personal use was hard won and completely legal only for it to later be uninvented.

And now we're back to debating if it's legal.

I'm thankful for the project.

I spend 4.5 hours in dialysis, three days per week.

I was previously using a family Youtube membership provided by a friend. They recently killed my access for geographic reasons, thus meaning that I couldn't play the playlist I normally play without leaving my phone screen on, killing my battery.

So I used yt-dlp to download the playlist and put it on my phone, using VLC to play it now.

Fuck these people who want to shut that project down. Youtube is getting money for a service I was using and can no longer.

Be like Valve/Steam. Make it easy to give you money and make the service better than piracy, not worse.

By that logic ffmpeg is a tool for piracy 🙄

Windows is also a tool for piracy, we should absolutely make it illegal.