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If YouTube had any issue with people downloading freely available videos they should just put their content behind a paywall instead of masquerading as a video host

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If YouTube-dl let you bypass the paywall, that would make its main use closer to “obviously illegal”.

If it only allows a paying user to make a local copy against the company’s wishes, we would have about the same situation as today. And maybe also a lot of banned YouTube/google accounts when detected.

Yep DMCA exists for a reason. But YouTube doesn't want to loose out on Ad revenue by paywalling free content like Netflix does with paid content. The content itself apart from Trailers is mostly intended for public viewing regardless of whether YouTube has chosen to monetize it with Ads or whatever

I can pass local newspapers' paywalls by just renaming the URL into [_] amp [dot] html.

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