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"[The DMCA] criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted wor

"[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)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA

boomboomsubban 4y ago
DRM circumvention requires a court order to take down, despite the recent YouTube-dl takedown. So yes, it could be that, but the software author should get more than a message from Mozilla.
wkat4242 4y ago
Fair enough, I didn't know that. This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen. 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.
- ddtaylor 4y ago
  There's a good chance that the EU has an almost identical law or interpretation.
  - megous 4y ago
    Copyright is governed by individual countries' law.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    Indeed: "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#Technological_protection_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_Directive#...
- coldpie 4y ago
  > This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen. 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.
  - super256 4y ago
    > 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. Why shouldn't this apply to this addon? They are not decrypting anything, they don't have secret knowledge to access the article and plaintext JS is anything but unreadable bytecode. If you can merely change your referrer to "facebook.com" or your user agent to "googlebot" to get the article text, then it is hardly any serious DRM. This addon is NOT sharing cookies or using stolen logins. If publishers really wanted to stop people from freely accessing the articles, they could just make a login-wall or token-validation like the German publishers spiegel.de, bild.de etc. And yes, ROT-13 wouldn't be an adequate protection either. [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
asdff 4y ago
DMCA should really then have a case of the century on their hands suing every web browser shop on earth for all they have, since they all have these features that circumvent these paywalls too: the stop button you can hit before the paywall loads.
- beeboop 4y ago
  Or the inspect panel. Or the ability to download a local copy of a page for later modification. Or tools that allow you to inspect HTTP requests. Or screen readers that look at underlying page data instead of what's visually present. Or web crawlers.
  - asdff 4y ago
    We need legislation to outlaw wget and curl
beeboop 4y ago
> services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works 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.

boomboomsubban 4y ago

DRM circumvention requires a court order to take down, despite the recent YouTube-dl takedown. So yes, it could be that, but the software author should get more than a message from Mozilla.

wkat4242 4y ago

Fair enough, I didn't know that. This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen. 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.

ddtaylor 4y ago
There's a good chance that the EU has an almost identical law or interpretation.
- megous 4y ago
  Copyright is governed by individual countries' law.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Indeed: "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#Technological_protection_measures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Society_Directive#...
coldpie 4y ago
> This law doesn't apply to me though as an EU citizen. 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.
- super256 4y ago
  > 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. Why shouldn't this apply to this addon? They are not decrypting anything, they don't have secret knowledge to access the article and plaintext JS is anything but unreadable bytecode. If you can merely change your referrer to "facebook.com" or your user agent to "googlebot" to get the article text, then it is hardly any serious DRM. This addon is NOT sharing cookies or using stolen logins. If publishers really wanted to stop people from freely accessing the articles, they could just make a login-wall or token-validation like the German publishers spiegel.de, bild.de etc. And yes, ROT-13 wouldn't be an adequate protection either. [1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...

asdff 4y ago

DMCA should really then have a case of the century on their hands suing every web browser shop on earth for all they have, since they all have these features that circumvent these paywalls too: the stop button you can hit before the paywall loads.

beeboop 4y ago
Or the inspect panel. Or the ability to download a local copy of a page for later modification. Or tools that allow you to inspect HTTP requests. Or screen readers that look at underlying page data instead of what's visually present. Or web crawlers.
- asdff 4y ago
  We need legislation to outlaw wget and curl

beeboop 4y ago

> services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works 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.