First, it's not actually illegal, at least in my jurisdiction and in a great many, to make a copy of a copyrighted work.

Secondly, the author somehow gave permission to YouTube to make the video publicly available and downloadable, and YouTube is perfectly happy to provide to me the download URL.

It's illegal in the jurisdiction that Github and the RIAA operate in?

Laws don't exist in a vacuum, so it doesn't seem like a stretch for my comment to refer to the laws actually applicable here right?

Your second point is just remixing the same Stallmanist POV I call out above.

YouTube doesn't just provide you with anything. You go to YouTube, and you find a link, and you stick it in your unit tests.

The fact YouTube's server replies is neither here nor there in the eyes of the law (ironically Youtube does actually return 402 "payment required" and 429 "too many requests" of they figure out what you're doing)

You're free to make whatever esoteric argument you want, but after realizing they did something as silly as put copyrighted videos in the unit tests, there's not much of a leg to stand on.

Especially when there are literally dozens of YT downloader type projects of Github still up right now that didn't do that...

The DMCA is not intended for taking down such tools.

The proper procedure to do so would be to sue the authors, and from what I can gather none of the core authors are in the US.

You saying it's not for exactly the thing it is for... doesn't make it so. I don't know why you think it does.

> this Stallmanist "if the server returns 200 it's ok!" tarpit

That would be an Elbakyanist stance, not a Stallmanist one.

I can't tell if this is an attempt at a crappy joke or you actually think a) Stallman is not exactly the kind of person to make the argument and b) the overwhelming majority of people who prescribe to that line of though aren't aligned with Stallman in other thoughts on technology

Elbakyan doesn't hide behind these kinds of tired non-arguments and instead admits SciHub is illegal and pushes people to take action so it's not: https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/why-sci-hub-is-...

I mean supporters of Elbakyan, when I say Elbakyanism, not Elbakyan herself. Indeed, Stallman also asks for people to take action to end copyright entirely, but he uses a legal tool that twists the law to the opposite of intended purpose, instead of, say, creating a cracked software repository (like Sci-Hub does for scientific articles). Two opposite approaches that have the same intended result.

Ah so you've made up a term for supporters for a person, given them a collective philosophy that doesn't align with their "leader's" much less silly ideas.

My apologies for not divining the tea leaves on your made up term that I guess was not meant as a bad joke, but ends up being one anyways.