> 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 video

> 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...