What?

Literally all those services have piracy problems, and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.

> and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim?

Music purchased on iTunes used to come with DRM. There were programs to get rid of it but they got shut down by Apple and were not easily accessible. Consumers pushed back on DRM and Apple eventually got rid of it.

Rather than leading to widespread piracy, most people just started renting their music from Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Counterexample: steam

They seem to be the only ones who get how piracy can be fought. And its no secret either, gabe newell has that "piracy is a service issue" quote for anyone to read. Its just that these companies dont want to consider not squeezing the life out of their users for shareholder benefit

Games have the best DRM of all though. They have extremely complex to crack software drm, integrate with 3rd party servers for online, and run the risk of installing malware if you get a bad cracked copy.

Steam does do a great job of making stuff accessible and convenient. But plenty of people would still pirate over paying $90 for the new game if it wasn’t so hard.

The DRM provided by steam itself is pretty basic and crackable.

Piracy isn't even the main use case of yt-dlp. It's archival of videos that you want to keep a copy of in case something happens to the video. There is literally no way to get that "feature" by paying Google. But you are correct that yt-dlp would not be necessary if Google offered an option to download videos (also in an automated way because many people have something set up to archive certain videos automatically).