It seems to me that they are making the claim that this tool is expressly for doing something that is forbidden by the YouTube TOS and breaking the music licenses provided.
Of course YouTube has other videos that are under different licenses so it isn't clear that this is the only use case of the software.
Wait a minute, there's a difference between distributed copyrighted works, and merely copying it for yourself. In France for instance, we have this notion of "copie privée" (private copy), that says we are allowed to copy anything as long as we don't distribute it back. We even pay taxes on persistent memory for the privilege.
Up thread there's also a citation of the Betamax case, which says that it's okay for people to record shows so they can watch them later, and it's okay to sell video recording devices.
This is different from Bittorent, which automatically distribute any content you download. With this too, when you are downloading, you are also distributing, which is a much clearer case of infringement in most jurisdictions.
That's a very common misconception of private copy; the existence of the private copy tax is not excusing copyright violation.
What private copy wanted to cover is more like "I bought a physical CD and I make a cassette copy because my car doesn't have a CD player" or because I want to listen to a mix of my favorite music (so you paid a tax on cassettes and later on CD-R and CD-RW media). This was later extended to "I copy all my collection of music to a hard drive and stop flipping CDs in and out of the player" (so you pay a tax on hard disk drives).
It seems kind of the same to me if the result isn't being distributed again: "I want to view this YouTube video on the airplane when I don't have internet access." (Let's assume no international travel is involved to avoid questions of regional licensing rights.)
YouTube's paid offering in some countries includes this feature on Android and iOS, but for computer users there's no built-in way to do it. Wouldn't it fall within the spirit of the private copying rule for a subscriber to YouTube's paid service to use youtube-dl in this way?
> That's a very common misconception of private copy; the existence of the private copy tax is not excusing copyright violation.
You are wrongly assuming that a copyright violation has taken place. If a country's laws say it's legal to make a copy under specific circumstances, it's not a copyright violation to make a copy under those circumstances.
The issue here isn’t that youtube-dl infringes copyright, it’s that (according to the RIAA claim) its purpose is to “circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services.” Even if youtube-dl was tested exclusively on public domain videos, so that the developers never infringe copyright, it could violate 17 U.S.C. 1201 [1] if the RIAA succeeds in proving that it was “primarily designed” or “marketed” for circumventing technological protection measures.
Of course YouTube has other videos that are under different licenses so it isn't clear that this is the only use case of the software.