But it's perfectly legal to screencapture a video platform in full-screen, and previous courts have ruled that recording a stream you otherwise have access to is allowed (the VCR/TiVo lawsuits). The question here is whether youtube-dl is a tool that allows for the bypassing of DRM, as the RIAA is asserting that youtube has DRM on their videos that prevent automated tools from scraping the website.

> The intent matters. Browsers don't make it easy to get ahold of a copy of the file that you can share, youtube-dl does. Add that to a bad README and that's something that a court might treat very differently from a web browser.

I can't say for YouTube specifically (I haven't tried, I suspect they have the talent to make it actually difficult), but browsers do make it remarkably easy to extract most forms of media from a website. Even websites that attempt to hide it have to embed it somewhere. Whether you feel like it's easier to install Firefox and figure out how to extract the media, or figure out how to install Python and pip and then run youtube-dl is up to you.

There are likely even tutorials up by Mozilla somewhere about how to use the dev tools to pull an image (though I assume they're not stupid enough to do it on material they don't have rights to).

There are many reasons one might want to use youtube-dl. Furthermore, there are many creators that either don't care or are happy that you're downloading their stuff.

If we want to make analogies, every gun shop in America sells guns and human shaped targets. Do they have the intent to encourage people to murder other people? It is a tool that can be used for illegal purposes. They might even have examples of how you can do such a thing (as do gun manufacturers, lockpick manufacturers, security exploit announcements, etc, etc). Why would that make the tool illegal? The argument might hold if the only possible use of it is illegal; that puts it among the ranks of things we deem illegal to merely possess, like fully automatic weapons. I'm not buying the RIAA's argument that youtube-dl is so dangerous to society that we can't trust anyone to use it legally.

> This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

No one has demonstrated intent. The publishers have demonstrated that it could potentially be used in an illegal manner (depending on your jurisdiction). They aren't going after someone who downloaded youtube-dl and is trying to use it to pirate things. They're going after the lockpick manufacturer because they have a tutorial on using their lockpicks on their site, and people could use that to commit crimes.

YouTube uses things like DASH, where they download pieces of the video from the server a bit at a time and feed into the browser's video pipeline. There's no single link to the entire video, necessarily; you have to piece together the bits. This is one of the things that allows changing quality mid-video, btw.

Furthermore, the video and audio are served separately so that codecs can be mixed and matched on the client side, and the same audio can be used for different quality video streams, etc. One of the things youtube-dl deals with is grabbing both and muxing into a single container.

So yes, extracting things from YouTube is not trivial at all.

> This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

This is pretty far from lock picking tools. The crime commits with lock picking tools involves physically breaking into someone private property to either steal physical items or do physical harm to people. Breaking and entering and copyright law are not comparable. A closer analogy is smuggling a camera into a concert to break copyright law by recording a concert. Canon or Nikon are not responsible for what I did, just because they made the technology that allows users to record any content, which may or may not include copyrighted material. Even if Canon included how well their camera performed at recording concerts, that doesn’t suddenly make them responsible. Youtube-dl is much closer to a digital version of a camera than to lock picking tools.