This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime. Either way you're carrying the same lockpicks, but if the court decides that you were carrying them with bad intentions, you're in trouble.

I can't say for YouTube specifically (I haven't tried, I suspect they have the talent to make it actually difficult), but browsers do make it remarkably easy to extract most forms of media from a website. Even websites that attempt to hide it have to embed it somewhere. Whether you feel like it's easier to install Firefox and figure out how to extract the media, or figure out how to install Python and pip and then run youtube-dl is up to you.

There are likely even tutorials up by Mozilla somewhere about how to use the dev tools to pull an image (though I assume they're not stupid enough to do it on material they don't have rights to).

There are many reasons one might want to use youtube-dl. Furthermore, there are many creators that either don't care or are happy that you're downloading their stuff.

If we want to make analogies, every gun shop in America sells guns and human shaped targets. Do they have the intent to encourage people to murder other people? It is a tool that can be used for illegal purposes. They might even have examples of how you can do such a thing (as do gun manufacturers, lockpick manufacturers, security exploit announcements, etc, etc). Why would that make the tool illegal? The argument might hold if the only possible use of it is illegal; that puts it among the ranks of things we deem illegal to merely possess, like fully automatic weapons. I'm not buying the RIAA's argument that youtube-dl is so dangerous to society that we can't trust anyone to use it legally.

> This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

No one has demonstrated intent. The publishers have demonstrated that it could potentially be used in an illegal manner (depending on your jurisdiction). They aren't going after someone who downloaded youtube-dl and is trying to use it to pirate things. They're going after the lockpick manufacturer because they have a tutorial on using their lockpicks on their site, and people could use that to commit crimes.

Furthermore, the video and audio are served separately so that codecs can be mixed and matched on the client side, and the same audio can be used for different quality video streams, etc. One of the things youtube-dl deals with is grabbing both and muxing into a single container.

So yes, extracting things from YouTube is not trivial at all.

This is pretty far from lock picking tools. The crime commits with lock picking tools involves physically breaking into someone private property to either steal physical items or do physical harm to people. Breaking and entering and copyright law are not comparable. A closer analogy is smuggling a camera into a concert to break copyright law by recording a concert. Canon or Nikon are not responsible for what I did, just because they made the technology that allows users to record any content, which may or may not include copyrighted material. Even if Canon included how well their camera performed at recording concerts, that doesn’t suddenly make them responsible. Youtube-dl is much closer to a digital version of a camera than to lock picking tools.

  Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 
  U.S. 417 (1984), also known as the “Betamax case”, is a 
  decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which 
  ruled that the making of individual copies of complete 
  television shows for purposes of time shifting does not 
  constitute copyright infringement, but is fair use.[1][2] 
  The Court also ruled that the manufacturers of home video 
  recording devices, such as Betamax or other VCRs (referred 
  to as VTRs in the case), cannot be liable for infringement.

YouTube is an on demand stream. It would be comparable to recording a pay per view movie that you purchased. Is that legal? (The question isn't rhetorical, but I seriously doubt it.)

That's a kind of tech adaption of the streaming/playback mode (and I've done it a ton on previous laptops)

Right, this is the precise problem, and it has to be solved - not by a free-for-all but with proper equitabl copywrite laws.

As matters stand, it's only going to get worse. Say we assume that if somehow both YouTube downloads are made much more difficult to crack AND no downloaders are available, then viewers and downloaders will then use newer tech that's even easier to use to record the videos. With new hi-resonution 4k cameras becoming commonly available, they'll be able to record stuff with still-excellent resolution by just photographing the monitor.

Of course, that still won't deter the RIAA, I can see them trying to ban cardboard covers and jigs that hold cameras and monitors accurately in alignment.

One could argue that YouTube success is mostly about unlimited access to illegal copyrighted material uploaded by some unknown person in some unknown part of the world

After all the thing it's already on YouTube and on my HD after I watched it

If the videos were uploaded to Youtube with authorization, then accessing them through youtube-dl is not an example of the program being used for infringement.

Either way, the purpose of the software is to download anything publically available from YouTube. Its purpose is not copyright infringement unless the purpose of YouTube is copyright infringement.

The content is already available

The monetisation of the content depends on a lot of different factors, many have monetized unauthorized content over the years, many received money from the same unauthorized content by faking clicks and views and many avoid paying YouTube in the form of ads by using ad blockers

I believe youtube-dl users amount to a maximum of a single digit percent of the above (with the digit being between 1 and 2 with 2 excluded)

Good point. I quite like that argument.

Not that my opinion actually matters in this case.

They have these things called "streaming licenses" these days, that are very different from "download licenses" because streamed data is not the same thing as a downloaded file even if they both use the same codec and are derived from the same source.

It is irrelevant, legally, that one implementation of a streaming software may choose to download the streamed data to a temporary disc file, or that some content downloaders can structure the assembly of a partially downloaded file so that (some) content can be accessed before the download is fully completed. What matters is that a streamed file is intended to be consumed contemporaneously with the acquisition of the downloaded data however it is stored on the computer, and that caching for efficiency aside, each separate act of consumption involves a separate act of acquiring the content, whereas a downloaded file is intended to be downloaded once and consumed multiple times.

Also how is the betamax case not applicable. The user of a VCR isn't "licensed" to record whats on their tv

No, they are not licensed to record what's on TV. But the point of the Betamax case was that "time-shifted viewing" by a private viewer was deemed to be fair use because at the time broadcast TV content was transmitted on a fixed schedule and absent the private recording, was not otherwise consumable because many of these shows were not rerun or sold on cassette tape. Thus the court found that the Betamax had substantial non-infringing use (and indeed, that it's primary intended use was thus non-infringing).

However, digital content is provided on demand so there is no need for "time-shifted" viewing, and so the reasoning from Betamax no longer applies. Moreover, many content owners now make the content available for "connectivity-shifted" viewing (aka, away from internet connectivity) via a downloaded content license. Thus, downloading that content from a streaming source is generally no longer protected by fair use.

Consequently, using youtube-dl to download your favorite streamer to watch on a plane trip would probably be fair use because they probably don't make the content available for access-shifted viewing otherwise. But using it to download a music video would not, because the music and video owners make those available for download with a purchasable license. And the problem with youtube-dl is that they demonstrated that the primary intent of the tool was to download music videos, the evidence being that the README and parts of the code explicitly refer to downloading music videos subject to RIAA licensing. Under the Betamax ruling, this would be fine, because there are substantial legitimate uses...but the DMCA changed that and so it doesn't matter if there are substantial legitimate uses if the primary intended use was to violate copyright.

It beggars belief that people can be this stupid. Why the hell would one mention it here? Are they truly that stupid to believe that the RIAA wouldn't see it? Then they made matters even worste by putting it on Github instead of some obscure website in Eastern Europe?

Talk about shooting oneself in the foot!