It's pretty ridiculous. They might argue that a browser is a technological measure to protect a copyrighted work which youtube-dl circumvents since the DMCA is written so vaguely. Cases like this demonstrate why anti-circumvention litigation really has to go.
Except the licensing under which the copyrighted works are uploaded explicitly allow for access via a browser, so no you couldn't. That's like saying that a DVD player "circumvents" DVD encryption, or a key "circumvents" a lock. It's the intended use case.
You misread or misunderstood my comment. I'm saying according to the RIAA, the browser is the technological measure which the command line program is circumventing.
Meh, pretty good claim of fair use. They are just picking a smaller file that unlikely to disappear or move. The fact the file is downloaded and then deleted via a script isn't a substitute for actually viewing the file and has zero commercial impact.
And the take down could have been targeted against the particular files they found problematic rather than the whole project.
And the whole thing is ceded to the public domain. Anyone can remove the examples and unit test, call the code webvid-dl and be golden.
Fair use doesn't apply to DRM circumvention unfortunately. You can't even circumvent DRM for reasons completely unrelated to duplicating a copyrighted work.
