Hi Dan! Personal opinion here:
It’s disproportionate to ‘ban’ tools like these. Once something is ‘out there’, and a platform allowed it to go ‘out there’ without decent reward for creators it is digitally public. Criminalising the devs or maintainers of the tools isn’t the way to go.
There are copyright laws and important ‘right to be forgotten’ protections which govern what people do with material they download and personal information they manage.
A lot of this is property law. Somehow property law is allowed to eclipse basic fairness and even human rights. If folks were to abide by basic principles of human decency and dignity in reward for effort and creativity, and honest attribution, there would not be a problem. Unfortunately, property law doesn’t help here.
It drives complexity and futile expense in digital rights management or disproportionate attempts by platforms and big rights owners to ban tools which are mostly in legitimate use, but are inevitably abused, in contravention of decent behaviour.
Sometimes it’s better to reinforce good behaviours and make it easy for folks to comply… an easy API, a fair download fee and a no onward sharing agreement. If there’s an agreement between parties, in most cases people stick to it. People know when they are cheating. If the platform commoditises the content so much that people no longer care they are cheating, then everyone loses, except the platform owners. If there’s a human connection between artist and listener, people are generally decent, and the few that aren’t are seen for what they are.
Monetise the API at the YouTube end, license for free journalism use? Pay a decent amount to the artist for the download. Ask for better authentication before download. Or put a big fat advert in the middle of it for those who don’t want to pay.
Sorry for the long ramble, I think this is a great topic. Personally, I think the RIAA have the wrong target: not the small, go instead for the big guys who devalue the content, like YouTube.
I’m not an artist… probably more of an IT guy so please forgive any of my bias… Happy to be corrected.
(Personal opinion only)