Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence.
Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.
Yt-dL is surely nicer and more convenient, but from an evidence standpoint, a one time $500 (to go wild) setup should have you covered, no?
(Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)
Suppose there is some legitimate non-infringing use of some material. Interoperability, law enforcement use, fair use, accessing public domain material which is distributed using the same technological measures, whatever.
You create and distribute a piece of software to interface with the material for those purposes.
It's the same piece of software as one designed for any other purposes, because the software has no knowledge of your intent and your intent has no technical effect on its operation.
If that is allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a dead letter? If you make the tool available for non-infringing uses, the tool is available.
But if that isn't allowed, doesn't that make 1201 a contemptible offense against all of those important interests? And possibly unconstitutional as a result?
* youtube-dl is not just for Youtube (ie. google). It supports heaps of sites, and youtube is probably less likely to have the sort of content I'm referring to than twitter, pornhub, liveleak, who knows.
* I am in Australia, so for a subpoena (or similar) my friends would need to issue an MLAT request, which would indeed take a very long time. In fact, this often does happen, but in the meantime a formal preservation request (to the service provider) and a local copy (via something like youtube-dl) are important steps.
* Many investigations don't go to court, for a litany of reasons (that's a pun I guess). In such cases, a subpoena isn't in context: law enforcement have to investigate what has happened, to figure out if it needs to go to court.
* Some investigations are important but do not meet the 'serious crime' threshold for forcing companies or parties to provide information. If you can imagine being the victim of a minor crime, that someone filmed and put on twitter, I'm sure you can imagine the local police may want a copy of the video before the tweet gets deleted - but also know that there will never be an international cooperative justice process. It's just a local issue.
* Publically posted video is very common and often important, and it is not surprising that the police need a tool to download it. There are so many sites and web browser technologies, and the cops are not efficient spending their time coding youtube-dl equivalents.
I feel quite strongly about youtube-dl being taken down for copyright infringement by the RIAA, but have tried to answer in an informative way. Sorry if it comes across harsh - no ill will intended :)
If I have a subject who has relevant video on a service like YouTube, and I decide to go the subpoena route, here's the process:
- Find the exact video, document the URL, Content creator's account name, and video upload date.
- Submit a preservation letter to Google to ensure the video will still be accessible when the subpoena is auctioned.
- go to my prosecutor/legal team to determine what jurisdiction the subpoena has to go through. It could be the county I'm in, the county the subject lives in, the county the video was uploaded in (unlikely), or the county where Google hosts the video.
- draft the subpoena and get it reviewed by whichever judge/magistrate applies.
- wait who knows how long for the subpoena response, hopefully it comes back with the real video and important content.
- face defense arguments in court that my subpoena was improperly obtained/submitted
Aside: Wonder how gitlab handles DMCA requests.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/dmca/
For a self-hosted instance, obviously it would be different. In that case, I assume the notice would go to the webhost.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
(I understand the environment variable convention but if you think about the reason for the above rule, it's clear what needs to take precedence.)
Imagine if source code was posted on some type of blockchain like ETH2.. Or a decentralized file sharing service, like IPFS. I wonder if websites or self hosted interpreters using some kind of services like those would make serving a take down request nearly impossible.
Well for now we can pay m$ to host code in ways people rely on for the long term. Until, they don't and the codes all taken down in something analogous to modern book burning.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-...
I find GitLab far superior in every regard: its UI, CI stack, Auto DevOps, K8s integrations, on-prem/self-hosting option, support options, pricing structure, customer service, communications and open nature, frequent updates with great release notes, and more.
MS has two hats in the game here: one as a member of the RIAA who have issues a DMCA take-down request, and on as the owner of GitHub which has acted upon that order.
1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos.
2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole.
The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you can easily see if an account or channel has been censored/banned.
Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnections or high latency spikes well.
May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
AFAIK, (good) browsers still give you the direct links if you know where to look, but the slow boiling of the frog is really evident with things like hiding View Source and such (often under the guise of "usability".) The demise of youtube-dl, along with Google's pushing of their proprietary protocols and other continued user hostilities surely paints a sad picture for the freedom of the Internet...
I self-host some things because I like the technical challenge, and what I've found is that the effort required to maintain the online presence of the data is quite demanding. Less so if it's outsourced, but without actively 'tending the garden', it will inevitably disappear at least from the public-facing internet.
The ephemerality is also exacerbated by Google / Facebook account terminations.
Personally I've started locally saving anything I think I would want to watch or reference again. When favoriting something or saving it to a playlist, I download it too. I started off with using youtube-dl on the command line and have experimented with the "Import from YouTube" function on Peertube but ended up with a tiny cobbled-together video platform, importer (youtube-dl wrapper), and Firefox extension. I think the next step will be easily saving non-video things - probably recording WARCs?
I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?
In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.
I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates.
Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged.
I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection.
http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/
https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives...
Could you tell us more about this process?
If you use those tools, it's really straight forward process of using the tools. I didn't know about Audacity until I had spent most of my time figuring out ffmpeg/ffplay. It was an amateur effort, but I've done a lot of security analysis.
I produce/host a few weekly news shows focused on developer-centric news and updates and have a keyboard macro setup to run youtube-dl against a text file with URLs not to download the videos, but the thumbnails for videos, so I can use them in the on-screen graphics when talking about a specific story. Before I scripted that solution, the process of having to manually extract the thumbnail for any video I was highlighting was a major PITA.
Also, being frank, youtube-dl is significantly better than the official YouTube API for downloading past content from channels I own/manage. It’s faster and a lot more scriptable. I have automated scripts set to watch specific playlists or channels and auto-download stuff for archival purposes — and again, this is content that I either own or that exists on a channel where I’m one of the admins.
It’s unfortunate that the test suite had links to commercial music — we’ve seen in past RIAA litigation that that is enough to go against the argument that this isn’t encouraging download of copyrighted content.
But as a tool, for not just YouTube but so many other services, it’s invaluable even in non-data hoarding/grey area or straight up infringement scenarios.
To be clear, I’ve often used youtube-dl to infringe (as have the vast majority of its users), but that’s my choice/fault. The tool itself has plenty of non-infringing uses. I just wish they’d either linked the test file to another area or used other examples.
I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal.
Likewise for public domain videos.
youtube-dl et al are niche enough that it doesn't put a real dent in their ad business, but making it more convenient with a Download button might.
That's certainly something they can do; they just don't do it.
Compare movies on VHS tapes, which all roll ads before actually playing the movie.
The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to pay the bills (including stuff like cleaning jobs where they work at 4 or 5 different old people's homes) - and then wonder why outbreaks spread so fast.
Googlers have probably forgotten the olden times, when they didn't have Gigabit connections to their pockets and lounge rooms, and don't even remember last time they wanted to "save a copy into a hard drive locally, like a hilarious boomer!"...
Thankfully plenty of people were also using BitTorrent for things like distributing Linux distributions & creative commons material.
That, again, may perhaps save the day.
I use youtube-dl to view videos on other sites (such as vimeo) that don't display in my browser (due to compatibility or privacy settings), usually product support stuff.
I use youtube-dl to collect evidence about cryptocurency scammers, which often gets removed from youtube by the time the scam starts collecting. By collecting it when its online it makes it possible to hand over to lawyers so they know what to go subponea. At least once a video I saved probably personally saved me from a frivolous lawsuit (attorney fired his lying client after sending me a threat letter which I responded to with an archived video).
I sometimes use youtube-dl to buffer longer pieces which I'm watching which might suffer from infuriating connection interruptions.
I don't use youtube-dl to save copyrighted music (except incidentally), among other reasons: the audio on youtube is often pretty low quality.
h264 is still the only widely supported in-hardware decodeable codec out there (cheapest for the client) but google serves webm by default (cheapest for them and built in-house)
ytdl-format lets you choose
And I couldn't care less about VEVO and other copyrighted material, which, I wish, could find home in a completely different platform for all I care.
Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright? Most of us weren’t distributing anything, but I think most of us were aware this was at the very least a grey area, if not outright infringement.
I’m a huge fan and user of youtube-dl and think this action from the RIAA is ridiculous (though not surprising — I’m a little surprised it took this long) and that the law over this stuff is absolutely bonkers — but the commentary and false pretenses about not just how we use the tool but the purpose for why the tool was built is incredibly disingenuous.
It was built and designed to download content that the creators or sites that host the content either didn’t want people to download or outright didn’t allow. The program has support for username/passwords for TV Everywhere SSO’s for premium services. There are ways to tunnel in via a proxy to avoid region block downloads. Again, I’m a huge fan, and I’m someone who absolutely used these features, but let’s not pretend the purpose wasn’t exactly what it is.
That doesn’t make the RIAA’s actions any better or anything — but I really dislike pretending like we weren’t all using the program for the exact purposes the complaint laid out, or that they use case wasn’t the primary reason this tool existed.
So how was I infringing copyright by downloading something from a public website where copyright holder left the content publicly accessible to anyone?
I'll give you that it may or may not be against ToS of the distribution service, but that's all. But it's not a distribution service causing the ruckus around youtube-dl, but the copyright holder, so that's kinda beside the point.
For example, the first thing he did after I helped him set up OBS was to fire up a game + Spotify to make a live stream. I had to explain to him why he's not allowed to stream music like that. He doesn't do it now, but there's still a decent chance his channel that gets 5 views per video will get struck or banned for a similar misunderstanding in the future.
He doesn't know much (under 10) beyond using the Windows Game Bar or OBS to upload something and doesn't have a bunch of spare storage, so he doesn't keep copies of videos anyway. I download them so if he gets banned I have an archive and can help him set up a new channel on another platform.
I know it'll be easy for someone to say "do X, Y, and Z" then, but the reality is that it doesn't take much for it to become "not fun" for younger kids and the opportunity to encourage them to learn valuable skills like video editing, etc. are lost when they lose interest.
I had a feeling I was using youtube-dl to avoid ads (not blocks), but after some retrospective, I don't think I would have seen ads on most videos I watched from youtube and I think most were freely available videos, often embedded on author's pages - except people have an understandable habit of hosting them on youtube.
To conclude, I would disagree that we are all using youtube-dl as complained.
Just because someone isn't an RIAA member doesn't mean they don't have copyright over the content they upload to YouTube. There are some YouTube creators that would be totally fine with you downloading their content but you can't assume every creator is the same. Just because a user filmed, edited and uploaded some video from their own house doesn't mean they have any less rights than music or video from major labels or Hollywood studios.
Note, I'm not arguing copying small-label stuff is OK, I'm rather more OK with copying RIAA stuff.
AFAICT, if a DRM prohibits fair use, breaking it is legal. In some jurisdictions. Or at least it should be. That should be enough of a reason for youtube-dl to exist.
Speak for yourself. I used it to pull down youtube videos to watch on a 14 hour plane ride over the pacific.
https://www.playon.tv/blog/playon-legal
As long as you don't rebroadcast copyrighted material, you should be fine.
(I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)
... funds OTA television. Also funds YT.
With OTA, it is okay to record OTA broadcasts using a VCR, so I'm not sure why youtube-dl would be different.
This is how John Deere got away with prohibiting farmers from repairing their tractors, etc. This is why time-shifting and format-shifting were just fine for OTA/cable television/CDs/etc but are practically nonexistent today.
But really, if the VCR were invented today, it would be made illegal.
Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware.
If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
> In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony could continue to sell its Betamax videocassette recorder, overruling the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judgement that held Sony liable for consumers’ copyright infringement.
https://consumerist.com/2014/01/17/on-this-day-in-1984-the-s...
Same s*, different decade.
On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?
They had no alternative other than not having tests for that particular functionality. The tests were testing youtube-partner specific functionality: the procedure needed to download content from some youtube partners is different.
Moreover, the tests just throw away the downloaded material... it would be entirely reasonable for a court to conclude that there is no copyright interest involved in that activity at all and would be extraordinarily unlikely that any court would find it to be anything but fair use if they did conclude a copyright was involved at all.
If it hadn't been the test cases the RIAA probably would have dug up some old forum post advocating infringement by some occasional contributor. They were always going to argue something.
In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo.
ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.
The first two elements have a mens rea implication behind them: you have to demonstrate the intent of the developers. That RIAA's strongest evidence of intent is buried in a unit test, and this seeming intent flies against the evidence in the far more prominent README that is discussing its unsuitability for infringing content. Furthermore, they can also demonstrate from their own practice in history that they refuse pull requests and close issues were people are clearly trying to use it only for infringing use cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
The headline on the article should reflect the fact that Microsoft/Github pulled youtube-dl offline by choosing to respond to a DMCA takedown order that is not procedurally valid. The privatization of law enforcement through DMCA takedown orders does not extend to alleged circumvention tools; it includes only copyrighted material that is allegedly 'pirated.'
The RIAA is engaging in an abuse of process that Microsoft has no obligation to cooperate with. The fact that Microsoft didn't tell the RIAA to go Disney themselves means that 100% of the blame lies at Microsoft's feet. No exceptions.
. .
That said, the youtube-dl maintainers should file a bar association complaint against the RIAA lawyer(s) who wrote the DMCA takedown. Filing invalid motions is an ethical violation that should result in sanctions.In a normal, procedurally valid, DMCA the only harm to the host for not following the procedure is that they lose the safe harbor.
In this case because it isn't a question of infringement there isn't a safe harbor at all.
In either case a company can choose to take something down because it wants to reduce its exposure to litigation.
I'm disappointed that even after acquisition github has continued with the beyond-industry-standard level of aggressiveness with takedowns. But I don't see how you conclude that the anti-circumvention complaint makes github more in the wrong for complying.
For that particular instance or permanently?
I completely agree, on the other hand, that a takedown notice issued knowingly without proper grounds should be penalised severely.
Regardless, I think they takedown without giving the "DMCA" complaint much scrutiny because the risk of penalty for NOT taking action is greater than just taking down the repo(s) risk-free.
Github's ToS: which says "we have the right (though not the obligation) to refuse or remove any User-Generated Content that, in our sole discretion, violates any GitHub terms or policies." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
I have to say it IS strange they took down content based on a letter that doesn't prove or even really suggest copyright infringement has taken place (only that it COULD, as a result of using the software), and their own ToS says "There may be legal consequences for sending a false or frivolous takedown notice." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
Except, by choosing to honor it, they decided that it is legally valid.
The appropriate response to a copyright claim against material that the claimant clearly does not own is 'unless you can prove that you own this material, come back with a court order.'
I want to chew Microsoft out for this one, but the US-based copyright mafia have built themselves an unbelievably vicious draconian set of laws that prevent any sort of challenge, including those coming from scientific inquiry or examination. Anti-circumvention is the most world-hating corporate-owned-world flaming garbage that could be devised, and violating it comes with unbelievably mercilessly cruel criminal penalties.
The menace of this threat has silenced science & speech, has prevented mankind from examining the world about them, learning of it, & discussing it. We have outlawed knowledge, outlawed idea, literally criminalized knowing something about the world with steep jail time. This is a farce, of the highest order, one of the greatest shames the law has done unto itself.
Great recent thread from Doctorow on this: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/105090187888073250
I also recommend Bunnie Huang's "Why I'm Suing the US Government", https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4782
Anti-circumvention laws must be stopped.
> Like the parable of the frog in the well, their creativity has been confined to a small patch, not realizing how big and blue the sky could be if they could step outside that well.
That was posted in 2016; does anyone know what happened with that lawsuit?
What you said is clearly correct, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect any company to insert themselves in the middle of these disputes. At scale it's impossible.
Imagine you run a forum with millions of members and tens of thousands of posts per day. You get a stack of DMCA takedown requests every day. Do you think it's feasible for you to scrutinize each and every one, and take a moral stand on those you deem 'not procedurally valid' ? How much do you think that might cost? What happens when you call one wrong and the law comes to YOU?
For anything to really change, it's clear someone will have to go after the RIAA.. (EFF maybe?)
At one point Microsoft was issuing DMCA takedowns against (then) openOffice.org mirrors, allegedly on the grounds that any large file with a name that contained the word 'office' must be a 'pirated' version of MS Office. Taking these takedowns at face value would have ended the openOffice.org project and absolutely could not have been respected in good faith.
These kind of abuses are ongoing from multiple parties, including bots, copyright trolls, and crazed ideologues who file completely fraudulent DMCA takedowns to force anonymous personalities to disclose their identities. There is no alternative but to consider DMCA takedowns on legal merits because so many of them have no merits whatsoever.
Having the funding to do this 'at scale' is just as much a cost of doing business as paying for power and connectivity. If hosting platforms don't want to do this, then they should purchase an amendment to the DMCA to impose criminal sanctions on entities that serve fraudulent DMCA takedowns.
I for example, use it to download large amounts of material for when I am offline while sailing. Programming tutorials to learn some useful stuff while offline, entire university courses on interesting topics, etc. There aren't many practical ways for me to do it.
Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.
Can they takedown my web browser and operating system too? These are general purpose tools.
It's sad that the conversation is all about justifying its use - I think the takedown is absolutely unjustified.
GitHub should have let it go to court.
I hope they put it up onn a Github-like site outside the US.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyy7Csjpl8/?igshid=s29gkfosrt2q
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBV9SKQZzAWuIXspogOq3...
I can simply record my screen with audio (for example using QuickTime Player) and save that as a video. I do that as a last resort if video download software doesn’t work. This method can never be stopped. If I can see it and hear it, then I can record it, with close to perfect quality. And it will get even easier with more user friendly tools.
Sorry, technology wins.
I'm thinking of Widevine level 1 DRM, for example. If I remember correctly, it mandates that all of the decryption has to happen in a "Trusted Execution Environment", which seems to mean a hardware enclave. I think this effectively locks the user out of the whole decryption phase, which means that you don't get to record your screen.
I might be wrong about this, though. Might have to do a little research.
(Funnily enough, just looking for information right now turns up this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307308 HN post, which does contain some interesting information)
If I stream a file for an hour, I tie up a bunch of network resources for an hour. If I can legitimately DL that in 2 minutes, I'm using less net resources for a shorter time. Why in the hell should that be denied because some material is not in the public domain? Completely illogical result.
I watch a lot of long-playing material (I think is non-copyright but WTF do I know?) that I DL to timeshift and watch offline in chunks as time allows. Is that music concert from Poland that's up on Youtube copyrighted? That amateur history/science/education channel that asks for Patreon help? Screw RIAA (again)
> The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use.
(i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case?
(ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization.
I feel like this is a YouTube ToS violation, not a DMCA-strike-worthy copyright violation.
The README file doesn't encourage any downloads of any copyrighted works. All examples included in the README point to their own example video. The only thing that comes close to this is that they say that they will not support any services that are violating copyrights. The copyrighted content is used in test cases, that are not meant for users to see.
> (i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case?
What's being "circumvented" is the encrypted URL to the content. But it's not really circumvented, YouTube decrypts it with javascript. All youtube-dl does is that it interprets the javascript that's on their website, just like a web browser does.
> (ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization.
Correct. Not sure what "reproduce" means in legal speak, but youtube-dl doesn't even have any functionality to distribute anything.
And I use youtube-dl to download content from other sites, like nrk.no, svt.se and bbc.co.uk.
Why do companies like MS, Google, Amazon etc acquire smaller companies if they cant protect the values these small companies stand for and made them attractive in first place.
It's the RIAA: Racketeer Industry Association of America.
Either way you can host git yourself (or just use git format-patch) there's not a single thing github really does for you other than integrate a bunch of self-hostable tools behind a flashy (and increasingly less usable) web GUI.
I guess it's time to do sudo apt install youtube-dl
I'm so sick of hearing this "investigations want to be free" nonsense from law enforcement. Just because they want to pirate their investigations without paying they think it's ok for content creators to go hungry?
Get a job hippies.
I write my own downloaders. The one I use for YouTube is currently less than half a page of shell script. I never download VEVO or other videos that have enciphered signatures (most videos I encounter on web pages don't), so there is no need for Python or any other slow scripting language and fiddling around with Google's Javascript player. Funnily enough, my scripts hardly ever break. When they do break because of some YouTube change (only once so far), I can fix them in a fraction of the time it takes for the yt-dl project to respond to user complaints and make necessary fixes.
I doubt the press nor anyone else really needs yt-dl if all they are doing is downloading unprotected videos.
Even if someone wants to download VEVO or other protected ones, they don't need youtube-dl to do it. It is trivial to get the download URL for these videos with any "modern" browser. For example, in Chrome, open Developer Tools Network tab, type "videoplayback" in the search box, copy one of the URLs (alt-click) and remove the &range= parameter from the URL.
I wonder if the RIAA will ever go after persons trying to make money by offering anti-circumvention services, e.g.,
I find all those websites trying to sell so-called "video downloaders" very annoying.