Is that metadata protected by some sort of mechanism? Or is it just not queried by default using one's browser? I.e., is youtube-dl calling a public, unsecured API, or is it circumventing some sort of copy protection?

Because if it's just querying for metadata that anyone can already query for...your point seems immaterial as to the legality of the tool?

They're saying that sure, the name youtube-dl might well imply it's specifically for downloading things from YouTube, but that doesn't mean it's specifically for downloading video from YouTube.

How much of that metadata is not normally downloaded alongside the video?

Plenty of it? I regularly download the metadata and subtitles of entire channels or playlists so that I can search for specific words or phrases in thousands of hours of video. I know of no other way to accomplish this.

Subtitles are a perfect example of data that any normal browser downloads if you click CC, and can even be ^F'd if you click ‘Show Transcript’ on YouTube, but just happen to be orders of magnitude more useful if you control where they download to. I think you’re proving globular-toast’s point.

Subtitles are not video, so no. And I'd like to see you visit a thousand video pages with an RIAA approved browser and ^F on each of them. Nice joke!

Why should subtitles and video be considered so discretely? Are subtitles not copyrighted the same way as the audio and video portions of the work?

Beyond subtitles, there is certainly video metadata that youtube might have a claim on but the RIAA does not.

The principles are essentially the same, but they are discrete copyrights which could be owned by different people.

Thank you so much for writing this comment!

I've been in several situations where this would have been incredibly handy, but never realized it was possible.

`youtube-dl --write-sub --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en --skip-download [URL]` (Then just use grep)

There's all kinds of cool stuff you can do with youtube-dl. For example 'ytsearch20:kittens' will get a playlist of the first 20 search results for 'kittens'.

This sounds incredibly powerful. Wondering if c-span is on youtube and properly close captioned.

According to their FAQ, c-span.org's search uses closed captioning to facilitate search (but they don't provide copies of those transcripts.) Perhaps that might suite your needs though.