> The interesting thing about this is that YouTube is clearly trying to make it more difficult for non-official clients to stream video, as is evident from the required workaround described here:

Can not reply with the entire situation but I would not be surprised if Google does not care enough to stop the project through other means but tries to reduce mindless zombie-bots from sucking up bandwidth all day long. If you have access to a fast connection you may notice even the web player is throttled sometimes.

Irrespective of that, the complaining party is the RIAA and not Google or YouTube in name.

> I 100% support youtube-dl and I want YouTube to stop interfering with it, but I also think we're being a little too cute when we pretend like ytdl isn't circumventing anything

I think the optics are a little different when it's a third party internet service as the medium, but 'we' are still arguing what constitutes fair-use of DRM protected physical media. :-(