YouTubeIt seems unable to make net calls from inside Rspec

If I disable VCR and allow YouTubeIt to freely call the net from within RSpec,
I get the following error:
    REXML::ParseException:
           #<RuntimeError: Illegal character '&' in raw string "...">
I do not have problems using YouTubeIt to make net calls from within cucumber,
rails console, and localhost.