YouTube is not the copyright owner (in almost all cases). Downloading a video with youtube-dl may not be a copyright violation if you already separately hold a suitable license, or are in fact the copyright owner yourself (as in the case of one of the grandparent comments).
If the license between the RIAA (or other licensor) and Youtube allowed visitors to make permanent copies of Youtube streams, then downloading a Youtube video would not be a copyright violation. But generally, having entered into streaming and downloading licensing agreements with the RIAA before, I would be extremely surprised if the RIAA would enter into such a license with Youtube, as it would kill sales of digital music downloads if people could just download permanent copies of Youtube videos instead for free.
If you own the copyright and upload a video to Youtube, then it wouldn't be a copyright violation to download that video from Youtube.
Owning the copyright means you don't violate the copyright in making a copy, but that doesn't mean you get to make that copy through any means; you still have to use legal means, and for a website, that means methods that are acceptable under the TOS of that website.
I'm not sure if this is going to be considered similar to taking a full copy but I'm also not sure what substantial purpose there would be for taking that full copy except for the (probably valid fair use) purpose of shifting access to manage time, location, or network conditions. Given that you pay separately for your bandwidth, and there is an incentive to conserve it, I don't see any way this isn't considered fair use without a sharing component.
Taking a copy is incidental to lawfully consuming the content that was provided in an authorized setting, whether that copy is stable or not. Nobody is hosting copies of YouTube content, paying the bandwidth and hosting bills so anonymous co-parties to the infringement can enjoy the content separately from the authorized channel, (it is not even suggested that anyone would want to do this.)
I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.
Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.
> I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.
> Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.
TV broadcasters do not give you a license to copy their content but it's legal to record TV. Why is youtube any different?
Today, there are a multitude of options for consuming TV content, and due to the (recent) creation of time-shifted licenses, the fair use justification for standalone-DVRs has mostly gone out the window (which is why they're not for sale anymore; for example, Tivo no longer offers standalone DVRs; Hulu, cable companies pay for time-shifted viewing).
As Youtube was always on-demand to begin with, the time-shifting justification for recording TV in the Betamax case never applied.
Yes, that is why 17 USC § 117 provides that making a transitory copy necessary to run the program (such as a RAM copy), or an archival copy of the data needed to run the program, are both explicitly not violations of copyright.
I think the question is whether the license YouTube implicitly provides to copy so one can stream also extends to downloading to a file. Probably not.
It does not. Youtube does not explicitly, or implicitly, provide the user a license of any type. Youtube has licensed the right to provide a temporary copy of a video to a user.
Why that should be youtube-dl's fault is yet another question, of course.
It normally wouldn't be...except that some idiot decided to include unit tests to make sure that youtube-dl could be used to download music videos covered by RIAA licenses. That basically makes the RIAA's case, especially since youtube-dl must be regularly updated to handle Google's countermeasures.
Yes, that is why streamed content is now generally covered by streaming-specific licenses, as noted above.
Downloading a Youtube video is making a copy. Whether it is a copyright violation depends on whether Youtube's license includes letting visitors make permanent copies, as this is considered a separate type of license. The TOS has nothing to do with it.
A person might share a video they don't own the copyright to, after downloading it from youtube with youtube-dl, but youtube-dl has no functionality in it to do such illegal sharing. It only has the time-shift functionality.
This is false. Also, time-shifting is not a a valid fair-use defense for material available on-demand, because the justification for time-shifting (as in the Betamax case) generally no longer exists. There are other fair use arguments that could be made, but time-shifting isn't one of them.
They had to cite a German legal ruling which found YouTube’s “rolling cipher” was an anti-circumvention device. But German court rulings have no bearing on US law, and Germany doesn't have a DMCA statute, so it is a specious claim, and the RIAA is just hoping an open source project won't be able to fund a legal defense.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but they cited a variety of US cases. Kazaa, Limewire, Napster, etc, are all US cases that all came down the same way: a tool intended primarily for copyright violations violates the DMCA, and in certain cases can even expose its developers to statutory damages under the copyright code.
It's Betamax time-shifting plus macrovision/video stabilizers all over again.
Nope, not even close for so many reasons already explained in this and other comments.