It cannot.

Then it’s not piracy.

It’s not piracy anyway even if that worked as the owner isn’t being deprived of what they own.

That’s not what piracy is, though. That’s why piracy isn’t theft.

Piracy is an act of robbery on the high seas.

Robbery is larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat.

Larceny is the unlawful taking of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it permanently.

In this context, we are referring to the “Copyright or patent infringement” definition, which is not theft.

That’s not directed at you specifically.

Is that the government?

Media mostly.

So, yes

technically it can, but not for free. if you have a subscription to access the media, the site is supported and drm-free, and you have a way to pass the account credentials to yt-dlp, it will download. if it plays inside a browser with drm disabled, yt-dlp can likely get it for you. you could download stuff from crunchyroll that way before they added drm. if it does have drm, you can still download the encrypted stream and decrypt it later with something like gpac if you have the keys, but that’s a bit besides the point.

however there’s very little supported sites now that have paid subscriptions and no drm. and in neither case is yt-dlp circumventing anything, it cannot access something you had no access to in the first place.

Even free streaming services like Tubi often use DRM for large portions of their library. So in turn nearly every paid streaming service also uses DRM.

I would expect it can as long as you can provide a cookie for a login that owns the movie. But you know what can also do that? Firefox with OBS running, it just takes the full runtime to download.

AFAIK, most streaming services have some sort of a DRM system that won’t let you screen capture a video. Not like it is impossible to circumvent. Not even hard, I may say. But it is still there.

I mean technically speaking unless you have permission of the copyright owner to download their video any tool you use to download (almost) any YouTube video would be a piracy tool.

Nnnnnnope. Time shifting.

Time shifting?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting

It’s why DVRing is legal. This tool is no different functionally than a screen recorder pointed at the video. That’s how they used to work, but that changed once TV went digital (they don’t reencode, they store the pre-compressed segments.

Ok that’s fun I was unaware of this term. It’s kind of interesting though to apply the term to something like digital streaming media that’s already, for lack of a better term, pre time-shifted.

Interesting idea. If i subscribe to a streaming service for one month, i can save 31 days * 24 hours of content for later viewing. That would keep ke going quite a while since i only have the time to watch tv for a couple of hours per night…

Your web browser necessarily has to download a YouTube video in order to display it to you. It just doesn’t provide an easy way for that data to be more than ephemeral.

Going to YouTube and having your browser download the video so you can watch it would be an approved way to download the video, making further copies of it more than likely not.

YT-DLP doesn’t make further copies. It downloads a video file from YouTube the exact same way your browser does.