// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
YT-DLP is Being Treated as a Piracy Tool By The IFPI
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.
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.
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.