No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person’s knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
I'm not a lawyer but how does youtube-dl fit any one of these criteria? despite the name, it's not "primarily designed to circumvent copyright", nor is copyright circumvention its only use (though "commercial significance" seems to be doing a lot of work here).
Reading this I wonder if a computer program falls under "any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof". Has it been established that a computer program can be a protection circumvention tool?
It's not "circumventing copyright", it's circumventing copy protection. The RIAA alleges that YouTube rotating their URLs is a copy protection measure. If that's true[0] then youtube-dl would fit plainly in category (A), since downloading YouTube videos is all it does. Category (B) is there to prevent someone from selling, say, a "DVD decrypting can opener" and then arguing that the can opener part makes the DVD part legal. Category (C) is there to prevent people from selling you the analog hole.
My objection to the RIAA's copy protection argument is that they did not actually create the copy protection measure. They are alleging that some third party's product feature happens to look close enough to copy protection that it should count as such. Would they be able to sue YouTube if they were to stop rotating their URLs? Do social media platforms suddenly have an obligation to continue to maintain features that accidentally frustrate illegal copying of text? Do I have to reimplement spacebar heating?[1]
Another potential objection would be that rotating URLs are not copy protection. This may work, but keep in mind: 17 USC 1201 has no bounds on the scope of copy protection beyond "it has to somehow stop you from copying a thing protected by copyright". Encryption and scrambling systems are explicitly named, but the way the law is currently drafted, anything can be a copy protection measure. There's a lot of language defining existing copy protection systems they wanted to grandfather in (e.g. Macrovision) but nothing limiting the scope of future systems.
[0] If accepted, this would be the widest reading of DMCA 1201 that I've seen accepted by a court of law (as a non-lawyer). Yes I am counting the printer cartridge and garage door opener shenanigans of yesterdecade. Those were bog-standard "designing the product to commit three felonies a day" kinds of copyright abuse and the courts smacked them both down.
I took a minute to read up on this rolling cipher thing and WOW. This is not copy protection, this a complex protocol for content delivery behaving as designed. What exactly is bypassed here?
