Ah, just you wait. If ever the analog loophole becomes the dominant way to reproduce copyrighted works, it will be difficult to get a camera without a content-recognition and blocking system.
For the same reason, I had trouble making a digital copy of my daughter's birth certificate. Before I found the gray scale trick, I ended up taking a photo with our iPhone instead.
It's not like there are no better alternatives. Instead of making it illegal, just setup a fee and a distribution scheme.
In Germany, we do pay some additional fee (0.5€?) on usb-sticks, printers and hard drives, etc, because those things could be used to copy copyrighted material. These fees go directly to associations that represent copyright holders, like GEMA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization) ). This happens since forever.
So there is already precedent for blanket-regulation of and compensation for possible use/misuse of copyrighted material. In fact, this is what some people proposed as a kind of reasonable alternative to the Upload filters of the EU Copyright directive ("Article 13" and so on)
I'm noticing that this is not really a coherent argument, more of a braindump, sorry.
youtube-dl works on many other web sites, not only YouTube, and downloading YouTube videos, even if copyrighted, is not a crime per se in many parts of the World
In the same way youtube-dl is a tool used to download videos from hundreds of website and there is nothing inherently illegal in it even if the majority of users used it to download illegal material from YouTube.
I think what this supposed DMCA is best compared to is making cameras illegal because people take photos and record videos of copyrighted material.
The key difference is in what the real world contains, versus the virtual world — the virtual world is so dominated by intellectual property that it is almost hard to argue that youtube-dl isn’t meant to copy IP by the fact that almost everything on Youtube is copyrighted.
The desire for a library style free archive of important videos, I think, is just, but youtube-dl is not a that. I’m not sure what it is, it seems to me unquestionable that it should be legal, though.