I'm not sure if "leeching copyrighted content" was the kind of motivation that Eric Raymond had in mind for future open source projects when he wrote Cathedral and the Bazaar.
It's the opposite of what you've stated.
Authors, composers and publishers needed protection against cheap printing presses that would just print anything that was popular and flog it in the marketplaces.
The limitations I mention are the difficulties and cost of the printing itself.
What authors wanted was to restrict who can print their work -- but it's not true that authors "needed protection" because printing presses started appearing.
That makes it sound like authors were paid for the work until those "cheap printer" pirates appeared. But on the contrary it was the invention of the printing presses themselves that gave authors an industry in the first place -- for millenia authors just wrote for free.
Yes; a good read is "The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World" [1] which I think is from Karl Fogel, the author of the (Free, Libre, CC-BY-SA) book "Producing Open Source Software" [2]
[1] http://questioncopyright.org/promise [2] http://producingoss.com
"it's not unlike an anti-capitalist punk rocker STEALING her clothes at H&M".
That said:
First, I fail to see the contradiction from being an "anti-copyright freedom fighter" and "downloading stuff from YouTube".
Someone somehow convinced you than anti-copyright people only like copyleft works? The very idea of being anti-copyright is wanting to abolish all copyright.
Second, what's witht the "anti-copyright freedom fighter" strawman? As if someone needs to be that to want to download stuff off of YouTube?
Might as well have written "like it or not, the South's engine is slavery" in 1850...
The one place I can see where this breaks down is in advertisements, but I consider that to fall into the incidental results. (Although Youtube-dl does have a --include-ads option)
You have opportunity, that's not the same as a right. The content supplier is under no obligation to provide content to you, ergo no "right to see" that content.
That said, personal time-shifting and format-shifting should IMO be a normally allowed part of the copyright deal.