The point is separate from what copyright law is or should be, or what activities should be or are criminal in nature.
Allowing downloads makes any sort of fair compensation mechanism impossible when distribution and discovery of digital media are centralized. Allowing downloads would hurt creators more than it hurts YouTube itself.
The answer is, as always, to crush capitalism. If we’re not worried about the money, then all these problems just go away.
You kept saying it! I don’t exactly recall the words, but the gist was “that’s not the infringing part of youtube-dl, the infringing part is…”
Yeah, they weren’t making an argument that the source code of YouTube-dl itself was infringing upon copyright of some other software. They were arguing based on the fact that YouTube-dl is a circumvention tool, and then would therefore be illegal. And at the very least it can absolutely be used for illegal purposes. Their claim was under a different DMCA section that the one that is usually used for takedowns of infringing content.
The right answer is public funding of the arts on a grand scale, coupled with compulsory automatic licensing for certain kinds of users of others’ works that are not handled well by the current system.
E.g., gratis licensing for samples and embedded game music where revenue from said use is below a threshold. Expanded “fair use” with more clearly defined conditions and prejudice against clearly spurious copyright claims.
I’m talking on a podcast with zero preparation, one take, no editing. You can’t judge it like it’s a journal article that’s gone through several drafts and revisions.