Clearly whenever we discuss laws in the USA as they pertain to a small party versus a giant corporation, we do so in the context of a hypothetical fantasy where these laws are actually followed equally.

It's like everybody's playing hide 'n seek, and you're like "of course a real SWAT team would surround and find you in moments".

This might or might not be true, but even if it’s true it’s not (necessarily) a sign of bias or corruption on the part of the legal system, it might simply show bias (or rather strategic foresight) in what they bring to court.

In the spirt of Von Clausewitz’s On War, it is always easier to attack than to defend, because the defender has to maintain a solid performance throughout every inch of their line, while the attacker need only find a weakness and exploit it.

RIAA might’ve decided months or years ago that as part of their legal strategy they needed to curtail downloading an intact local copy of streamed content, since then they might’ve been seeking the perfect violation that, in the opinion of their lawyers, would show clear enough intent to break copyright law, be a core node in the ‘ecology’ of the downloading-streams strategic landscape, and have a hope of creating suitably broad and useful precedents to employ later. Maybe this case finally caught their eye. Maybe they’d been eying it for a while and only just recently something changed and opened the barn doors for attack (in the RIAA lawyers’ opinion — for example, was the example added to the test cases recently?)

A good question is: why didn’t they do this earlier? Another good question question is: could they do it to anybody else, and if they could, why haven’t they?

So you see it as the judges typically ruling in favour of the corporations. I see it as perhaps the corporations being very savvy in choosing what to attack and being willing to wait for ages for the perfect circumstances.

Yes, RIAA has all the savvy of a deranged stalker.

This is a result of money being a proxy for competence.

Infringement does not require distribution. The rights encompassed by copyright include reproduction, derivation, distribution, public performance, public display, and broadcast rights. Infringement of any of those rights is copyright infringement. For US law, see at least 17 USC 106(a) abd 501(a).

The tort of copyright infringement is as you describe it.

When people say copyright infringement requires distribution they mean you can't be tried in a criminal court for merely copying you can still be sued.

At least in the US, criminal copyright infringement may be for any act of infringement. The statute 17 USC 506(a) [0] describes the necessary conditions for a criminal prosecution, which are not limited to reproduction or distribution. Here [1] is a nice article from the department of justice about the crime.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

They might have a very strong case in court. One of the reasons youtube-dl is so active as a project is because they’re in an arms race with Google. Google regularly changes how videos are delivered in an effort to thwart downloading tools. The RIAA could seize on this and even have Google testify that they’re trying to protect against this unauthorized downloading. Given the revelations about the tests in youtube-dl’s own repo, it would be a very difficult legal battle.

In the criminal sense, you're correct.

In the civil law sense, you'd be wrong. Using a camera to record a performance is an act of copying and is subject to copyright law. Generally, if the performers and/or the owner of the copyright don't give you permission to record the show, you don't have the right to do so. (Note that taking pictures or recording short clips is usually but not always regarded as fair use. Recording an entire performance without permission is rarely treated as fair use.)

However, recording the performance is also an act of creation, resulting in a derivative work that has its own copyright, but one which is useless without a copyright license to the underlying performance.