Section 1201 (a) (1) (A) says:
"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter."
So circumvention itself is also illegal under the DMCA. But this issue is about trafficking in circumvention devices.
To over-simplify, you just need to implement a streaming client that saves to disk. That's the reason there are a gazillion youtube downloaders and custom, also open-source, clients that can "show" Youtube.
Thus, unless I've been misinformed and, extrapolating a little, they could just as well take down 'wget' in the same go because it also downloads potentially copyright-infringing files over various protocols.
I'm actually more interested in what this could mean for Adblockers, which often need to employ a variety of tricks to get around anti-adblocking tech on websites.
There's really is no way around this. YouTube videos are protected by technological copyright restrictions. ANY attempt to get around those restrictions is a crime.
Even if this were not the case, you would be committing copyright infringement by downloading the videos for unauthorized use anyway. The DMCA just gives legal teeth to technological attempts to prevent casual infringement.
This is incorrect. The website implements the protection mechanism, browsers execute it, just as youtube-dl. The implementor is the person writing the code, not the system executing it.
> Certain YouTube videos are licensed only for streaming playback by the YouTube site or app.
The meaning of this sentence is unclear. What does it mean for playback to only be allowed by the (web)site? Websites alone cannot do anything -- they require a web agent which fetches and executes them. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and youtube-dl are examples of such agents.
> Even if this were not the case, you would be committing copyright infringement by downloading the videos for unauthorized use anyway.
Luckily for me, I am in a jurisdiction where this is not the case and where DMCA plays no role.
In other words, there's a catch-22 in how strict we are about the definition of effective protection. 99% of the public won't even open their browser tools so I guess if youtube-dl is put behind some very generously documented JavaScript that is easily bypassed then it is not actually out in public because it is effectively DRM protected, right?