YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA

The true purpose of the DCMA is to control the distributors via the use of tools like DRM.

The fact that you can view music on YouTube at all is something of an anomaly. The recording industry would love to dispense with YouTube entirely if they could.

But decentralisation would also make it harder to verify the code is legitimate.

Would you trust a copy of something like this from an anonymous server?

There is no reform because reforming or fixing it is antithetical to the current intent - nigh unlimited power for a fortune 500 companies mob of lawyers (or affiliate) to take down and sue with impunity.

The moneyed interests here have a trillion dollar industry on the line. The people just have... freedom? and sanity? to gain in return. And those are nebulous, unfocused interests. If the collective citizenry cannot unanimously push for police to not crush windpipes on the street anymore its never going to voice disdain for a thousand page book of artificial made up scarcity built up over hundreds of years.

I can't say for YouTube specifically (I haven't tried, I suspect they have the talent to make it actually difficult), but browsers do make it remarkably easy to extract most forms of media from a website. Even websites that attempt to hide it have to embed it somewhere. Whether you feel like it's easier to install Firefox and figure out how to extract the media, or figure out how to install Python and pip and then run youtube-dl is up to you.

There are likely even tutorials up by Mozilla somewhere about how to use the dev tools to pull an image (though I assume they're not stupid enough to do it on material they don't have rights to).

There are many reasons one might want to use youtube-dl. Furthermore, there are many creators that either don't care or are happy that you're downloading their stuff.

If we want to make analogies, every gun shop in America sells guns and human shaped targets. Do they have the intent to encourage people to murder other people? It is a tool that can be used for illegal purposes. They might even have examples of how you can do such a thing (as do gun manufacturers, lockpick manufacturers, security exploit announcements, etc, etc). Why would that make the tool illegal? The argument might hold if the only possible use of it is illegal; that puts it among the ranks of things we deem illegal to merely possess, like fully automatic weapons. I'm not buying the RIAA's argument that youtube-dl is so dangerous to society that we can't trust anyone to use it legally.

> This is not far off from how it's legal to carry lockpicks but it's often not legal to carry lockpicks around with the intention of using them to commit a crime.

No one has demonstrated intent. The publishers have demonstrated that it could potentially be used in an illegal manner (depending on your jurisdiction). They aren't going after someone who downloaded youtube-dl and is trying to use it to pirate things. They're going after the lockpick manufacturer because they have a tutorial on using their lockpicks on their site, and people could use that to commit crimes.