> … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Regardless of the name, the tool supports

> … these HN comments saying it's not for YouTube and it's not for downloading is silly. It's literally in the name. Regardless of the name, the tool supports over a thousand different sites, not just YouTube, and is routinely used for streaming rather than downloading, with no permanent copy saved. If you run "mpv https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY https://youtu.be/WhWc3b3KhnY" to simply play the Blender Open Movie "Spring" it relies on youtube-dl behind the scenes to stream the video. (Though of course the difference between streaming and downloading is a trivial one; getting the content to the end user's device is the hard part.) YouTube itself is the entity responsible for duplicating and distributing the content, and they have a license to do so, ergo there is no copyright violation here. The most any user of youtube-dl might be liable for, assuming they don't save a permanent copy or further redistribute the data, would be a violation of YouTube's TOS. Which is no concern of the RIAA. To call youtube-dl a "circumvention tool" is laughable; obfuscation of a video's URL is not DRM.