I very much appreciate your thoughtful response. I think the points you raise are fair, but none of them strongly and clear-cut in RIAA's favour. In fact, I wou

I very much appreciate your thoughtful response. I think the points you raise are fair, but none of them strongly and clear-cut in RIAA's favour. In fact, I would call them weak and cannot imagine RIAA would want to really press this matter in court using any of them. To answer very shortly: to my knowledge, there are no such exemptions for browsers specifically. Point 2 would actually work against DMCA, as you observed. I think point 3 is defeated by the fact that there are websites which require JS support to initiate video reproduction but which do not use it as an obfuscation technique. Instead, RIAA is counting on this matter not to reach the courts and everyone submitting to their will out of fear, which ever so slightly modifies public opinion on the matter and pushes the Overton window. From my experience, in cases like this the law turns out to be somewhat arbitrary and devolves into "whatever the judge(s) of the highest order think". It is extremely important not to get self-defeatist at this point and argue aggressively for the outcome you want to see play out. Of course, I am not sure how this would in fact play out in court, but I think no one is. If anyone is aware of a concrete fact which makes my reasoning outright invalid, I invite them to cite it.