Attacks on the devs would certainly be overkill and hard to pull off unless they are in a friendly jurisdiction. In the US at least, media companies wouldn't ne

Attacks on the devs would certainly be overkill and hard to pull off unless they are in a friendly jurisdiction. In the US at least, media companies wouldn't need a case they could win. They could bankrupt the devs in legal fees and billable hours before it ever reached a court room. Excessive way to make an example, but the RIAA has a history of being cool with using the court system to extort money from people and the justice department is stacked with ex-RIAA lawyers (thanks Obama). identifying a website vs a command line tool can be difficult. youtube-dl already supports custom user agent strings and cookies. youtube might check for things like installed fonts, look for randomly named web bugs in cache, or even try checking page load/render times. Once folks figure out what youtube is looking for they can try to correct for it but youtube can counter with something else and certainly make things complicated.