You can cite TFA all you want. I disagree with his legal analysis, as do most lawyers. His first paragraph is wrong. It's irrelevant who imposes the copyright

You can cite TFA all you want. I disagree with his legal analysis, as do most lawyers. His first paragraph is wrong. It's irrelevant who imposes the copyright protection scheme, only that one exists. And speaking as someone who has entered into an RIAA licensing agreement in the past, our license agreement with the RIAA did require us to put into place measures to prevent copying of licensed RIAA content, and I assume that Gootube has the same terms in their license. The next conclusion is also wrong, since the RIAA is the authorized legal representative for its members, and prior cases have already established that they can act in this capacity. His conclusion on the (a)(2)(B) test is not correct either. The sole purpose of youtube-dl is to download content from websites which do not make their content available for download through standard means of access. In fact, the whole point of using youtube-dl is that they constantly update the code to get around the changes that websites make so that content can't be downloaded. I would bet a lot of money that this will be the deciding factor if this goes to trial. Microsoft is listed on the RIAA's members page. Neither Google LLC, its Youtube subsidiary, nor parent Alphabet Inc. are. The RIAA are threatening a member for a §1201 violation against a nonmember. That's ... weird. I'm not sure why techies keep bringing this up like it means something. It's irrelevant that they are a member of the RIAA. Microsoft is receiving the takedown request because they are/were hosting the youtube-dl code through their subsidiary Github and legal procedure requires the notice to be sent to them. MS is not the subject of a DMCA infringement lawsuit. Repeat: Microsoft is not the subject of a DMCA infringement lawsuit. By taking down the youtube-dl repository, MS's involvement in this matter ended. Youtube-DL would be the target of the DMCA infringement lawsuit by the RIAA. If they keep working on youtube-dl from this point on, it's very likely the RIAA will file a lawsuit against the maintainers/programmers.