"[The DMCA] criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM)."
The question is: Is it really DRM if they provide access to google for free? After all, this is the loophole that these addons use. They pretend to be a crawler, or they block some kind of javascript the bots don't parse.
"Article 6 of the Copyright Directive requires that Member States must provide 'adequate legal protection' against the intentional circumvention of 'effective technological measures' designed to prevent or restrict acts of copying not authorised by the rightholders of any copyright."
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_Directive#...
Ok. Mozilla is in the US, so they are choosing not to host this as hosting it may cause them to be violating the DMCA and subject to criminal prosecution.
> Is it really DRM if they provide access to google for free? After all, this is the loophole that these addons use. They pretend to be a crawler, or they block some kind of javascript the bots don't parse.
That's pretty clearly working around the intent of the access controls, yeah.
Is it? Youtube-dl had the following argumentation [1]:
For a subset of videos, YouTube employs a mechanism it calls a "signature." Here is our understanding of how it works: when a user requests certain YouTube videos, YouTube's servers send a small JavaScript program to the user's browser, embedded in the YouTube player page. That program calculates a number referred to as "sig." That number then forms part of the Uniform Resource Locator that the user's browser sends back to YouTube to request the actual video stream. This mechanism is completely visible to the user simply by viewing the source code of the player page. The video stream is not encrypted, and no secret knowledge is required to access the video stream. JavaScript is a ubiquitous technology found on millions of websites and understandable by numerous software programs. Any software capable of running JavaScript code can derive the URL of the video stream and access the stream, regardless of whether the software has been approved by YouTube. To borrow an analogy from literature, travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says "say 'friend' and enter." The travelers say "friend" and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.
And yes, ROT-13 wouldn't be an adequate protection either.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
Bypass Paywalls Clean is, by definition, solely to subvert paywalls and thus copyright.
youtube-dl is a general purpose YouTube video downloader. You are not working around any access controls, since the videos are free and available on the web. Furthermore, you could use it to download a video you yourself created, or you were granted explicit permission to download. Just because it happens to work for copyright-protected videos is not relevant, since the tool is not specifically for working around copyright.
A soft paywall that can be removed by modifying HTML elements on a page doesn't seem like an actual control for copyrighted material, since the server has already provided you the entirety of the copywritten work and it exists on your computer in plain text (within markup). That they're choosing to do that is on them. I am lawfully accessing their website and how I interact with the local copy of data that they send me is 100% my business as long as I'm not redistributing it.