I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that the distinction is important. If you can demonstrate that those links were chosen because there were no viable lin

I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that the distinction is important. If you can demonstrate that those links were chosen because there were no viable links that were free of copyright, rather than to encourage users to pirate things, it would strengthen a fair use argument. Many people are pointing to those links as evidence that youtube-dl was intended to be a tool for piracy (under the assumption that downloading videos from YouTube is automatically a DMCA violation, which I'm not fully convinced of).