[charcircuit]

>And the effort Honey expended, to conceal its behavior from industry insiders, makes it particularly clear that Honey knew it would be in trouble if it was caught.

The same could be said about yt-dlp. They know what they are doing youtube doesn't like. But yt-dlp itself is legal.

[rundev]

The difference being that yt-dlp isn't a business partner (and/or competitor) of YT.

[charcircuit]

Many people using yt-dlp have a YouTube account or even an adsence account. Yes, YouTube could ban their partner for breaking the rules. Youtube has issued 1 year temp bans from watching videos for accounts that have downloaded videos. Similarly Honey could be banned for breaking the rules.

[immibis]

Of course it's a competitor of yt. If you download a video, they don't get ad revenue.

[bluecalm]

I've had Youtube Premium since it was introduced and I still use yt-dlp because it's the most convenient way for me to make an mp3 from a video so I can listen to it offline. I don't think they care. They probably care about music industry getting worked up about it if it was more mainstream though. This is annoying because I don't even download music, just podcasts and interviews.

[kristofferR]

They care quite a bit, yt-dlp has had to undergo some drastic changes recently to make it faster for its devs to work around frequent changes to YouTube encryption.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898407