haha. please understand that i’m not trying to get into a heated argument with you guys. we’re all good here 
. my pedantic take on it though
yeah, but only taken down because of scare tactics. there is a legitimate legal argument against their claims. at any rate, no one pressed on github further, and that says something. entities don’t come much thirstier and meaner than RIAA.
if you consider the EFF’s response as the prevailing legal argument/theory that convinced/emboldened github to reject the RIAA’s (spurious) claims, the real reason is more complicated than that and in fact even rejects the circumvention claim.
surely if legal experts do not believe youtube-dl violates the DMCA 1201(a) circumvention definition, spoofing a referer cannot be considered as such a circumvention.