As long as it can be copied from the URL bar, there is no copy protection.
Since the purpose of the obfuscated URLs and JavaScript is to gate access to the video and audio through a browser hitting the YouTube site where they can't be saved, this scheme constitutes an "effective" copy protection measure. Bypassing this gating mechanism is thus circumvention, illegal under the DMCA.
Firefox is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request, download a video and then show it.
youtube-dl is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request and download a video
Youtube has no authentication, nothing is being circumvented.
Just open up DevTools, look for requests to googlevideo.com, find the request with the video or audio (i.e. content-type response of either video/mp4 or audio/webm), copy the entire request URL, remove the range parameter entirely, open the link, and voila!
The lie that Google et al. try to perpetuate is that if your user agent fails to put their interests over yours then it is illegal.
edit: some quick testing confirms these URLs are temporary, but they don't appear limited to the IP that generated them. Your IP is embedded in the URL though, and you can't modify it without breaking the URL, so I'm guessing some IP limits kick in at some point.
I do not interact with obfuscated URLS, JavaScript, opening any kind of console or dev tools, and no source code.
I save it just as I would save a photo or a pdf.
How is this circumvention? I'm using a feature offered by my browser and using it in a way intended by the creators. The media files are already on my computer (memory or storage, who cares, its been copied already) I am just renaming some metadata like its directory and filename.
But I'm quite confident you can't view or download YouTube videos if your browser doesn't run JavaScript. They require the client evaluate intentionally obfuscated JS in order to determine the video content URL's signature. Whether this counts as DRM or not, I don't know, and I hope it doesn't, but it's clear that YouTube is making it difficult intentionally.
I meant no JavaScript as in me meddling with the js.
You can right click on YouTube videos to download them? That sounds slick! How did you set this up? Is something YouTube-specific happening or is it generalized and just happens to work on YouTube? That's totally something I'd like.
I have no idea what that means legally, but to me it certainly supports the argument that doing something so simple clearly isn't bypass DRM/violating the DMCA. (though I'm sure the media industry would argue that whatever browser/extension making this possible is guilty of defeating DRM. )
What browser is that?
That is, any <video> HTML element can be right clicked and downloaded, at least in Chrome and Safari where I tested. Interestingly this even works when for `<video controls controlslist="nodownload" ...>` elements where the developer tries to prevent downloading. (in Chrome that removes the download option from the video player's controls, but not from right-click)