Suppose there is some legitimate non-infringing use of some material. Interoperability, law enforcement use, fair use, accessing public domain material which is distributed using the same technological measures, whatever.

You create and distribute a piece of software to interface with the material for those purposes.

It's the same piece of software as one designed for any other purposes, because the software has no knowledge of your intent and your intent has no technical effect on its operation.

If that is allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a dead letter? If you make the tool available for non-infringing uses, the tool is available.

But if that isn't allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a contemptible offense against all of those important interests? And possibly unconstitutional as a result?

Now, if what you really mean is that is is vague, then I agree. But I don't see any case for it being incoherent.

Except that it isn't, as already discussed, because the code doesn't change based on the design intent. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's used for interoperability or fair use or to rip songs for The Pirate Bay. The technical operation of the tool is identical whether it's produced by a university researcher or the developer of a media player app or a literal sea-faring pirate with a parrot and a peg leg who is the founder of a political movement to abolish copyright and promote civil disobedience.

But prohibiting a specific person (who may have had a particular intent) from distributing it is incoherent (or at least futile) if it means you can just get some other person with some other intent to distribute the exact same thing. And it's also incoherent to say that the other person can't distribute it even if they genuinely do have a different intent, if the intent is supposed to be what matters.

None of which depends on what you judge a give person's intent to be after the fact, because it's a defect in the legislation, not the judgment in any particular case.

It requires that the piece of software is meant primarily for circumventing technical measures in place to prevent infringement. Just infringing copyright isn't a violation of the section.

A tool designed to be used by police and marketed towards police is legal, as its intended purpose is not infringement. A tool advertised as "hey, kids, use this to infringe those copyrights" is totally different, even if it's literally the same tool.

Moreover, that would save the law from being a dead letter in the sense that there would be circumstances when it could theoretically be enforced (i.e. when someone is overtly marketing it as a tool for infringement), but wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that? It's still exactly the same tool. And then what does the tool have to do with anything anyway, when what you really have is a law against speech promoting copyright infringement?

HN is not a court of law, most people here are not lawyers, let alone well-paid and competent lawyers like the ones the RIAA can afford.

> wouldn't anybody making the tool then just not do that?

Sure - which is why you're not seeing many ads for tools to steal cars or pick locks. But it's not only about the way the material is promoted, it's also about how it's obtained, whether the seller could reasonably know what it would be used for, and a bunch of other stuff.

You can't look at this from a binary perspective; despite depictions in popular media, the law is typically not about "aha" moments, but rather about putting a number of coherent pieces together to paint a certain picture.

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As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (i.e. that has been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion to youtube-dl.

A note on the service that they don't host the infringing content, but just link to those who do, is evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. The same goes for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization.

Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the legitimate purchase of content.

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