[14] youtube-dl was removed from Debian 12.0 and Ubuntu 23.10 due to stagnant development and replaced with an empty package depending on yt-dlp.

[15][16] In August 2023, German company Uberspace took down a web domain which they hosted at their premises for the original youtube-dl project, citing a regional German court order issued from Landgericht Hamburg which appeared to ban the mere hosting of information and GitHub developer links related to the cracking of (non-cryptographic) "rolling ciphers.

On October 23, 2020, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a takedown notice to GitHub under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), requesting the removal of youtube-dl and 17 public forks of the project.

For example, users posted images on Twitter containing the whole youtube-dl source code encoded in different colors on each pixel.

[25][26] On November 16, 2020, the repository was reinstated, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent GitHub a letter cautioning that its removal might set a precedent for other copyright holders to misuse the notice-and-takedown process to remove software tools from the Internet based only on the argument that those tools could be used for copyright infringement.

[27] GitHub also announced that future takedown claims under Section 1201 would be manually scrutinized on a case-by-case basis by legal and technical experts.