The music industry’s campaign against stream rippers has a new venue: the European Commission’s Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. In its submission to the consultation for the 2027 edition, the IFPI asks for yt-dlp, the most popular open-source YouTube downloader, to be added to the list’s stream-ripping section, 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,” the submission says.
What the submission says
The document walks through the project’s history, its capabilities and its Unlicense, which dedicates the work to the public domain, and it explains why the software is hard to stop: its open-source nature, developer community and distribution make it “difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale.” GitHub gets called out as the hosting platform, which matters because the Commission’s list focuses on marketplaces and services outside the EU.
The part that got people’s attention is the names. The submission identifies the project’s founder as GitHub user pukkandan, who it says was lead maintainer from 2021 to 2024, and lists three current core maintainers: coletdjnz, bashonly and Grub4K. All four handles are public on the repository; what is new is seeing them in a regulatory filing.
What it asks for, which is little
A watch-list entry is a spotlight rather than a mechanism. The submission does not request a takedown, a block, or any action against the developers; the Commission reviews submissions in the months ahead and decides what makes the 2027 list. TorrentFreak notes that this is the first time yt-dlp, or youtube-dl before it, has appeared in a Watch List submission. The background is years of the music industry trying other venues: the RIAA’s 2020 DMCA notice got youtube-dl briefly removed from GitHub before the platform reinstated it and set up a million-dollar defense fund, and German labels won a ruling against the downloader’s website host that was upheld on appeal in 2024. Meanwhile the thing itself keeps growing: yt-dlp launched in 2021, has more than 16,000 forks and 190,000 stars, and is the 32nd most-starred project on GitHub.
My read
A watch-list entry changes nothing about how the tool works, and the IFPI asked for nothing that would. What it does is put four maintainer handles into a regulatory record, and records like that outlast the consultation that made them. If the goal is to make the people behind the software visible, that will work. If it is fewer copies of yt-dlp, the years since the first takedown attempt say otherwise.
Source: TorrentFreak’s report and IFPI’s submission.