I suspect the problem is the counter notice. You must agree to be held to US law and the maintainer resides in Germany.

According to the DMCA, the entity that files a counter notice consents to jurisdiction of the US district court of their residence. If not a resident of the US, jurisdiction is the district where the service provider is located. Once a counter notice is filed, one cannot argue the law doesn't apply because of lack of jurisdiction.

Probably my fault. For the first hour or so, this is what my top comment to the original HN post claimed. Fortunately I caught it before the edit window closed, but I imagine it was seen by a lot of people by that point. I suspect the RIAA intended on being misleading about exactly how prominently the references existed to push the argument that it was part of the “marketing.” They reference the README a couple paragraphs up, but then become very vague about the references to copyrighted material.

It does in the sense of intent -- if they built the tool for the express purpose of avoiding copyright restriction, they would do more than hide it in a random unit test or code comment.

Putting it in the README itself would be a far stronger signal of intentional malfeasance.

In the unit test... it's pretty clear the original developer's intent was simply to pick a video, and chose a trivially popular one (taylor swift), with likely no mind towards copyright (or its avoidance).

That is, the tool happens to be capable of the job, because it simply has purpose to download videos, with no awareness of copyright law.