The RIAA is already trying to push for YouTube downloaders to be considered DMCA 1201 circumvention devices. The thing is, a lot of us here have the understand

The RIAA is already trying to push for YouTube downloaders to be considered DMCA 1201 circumvention devices. The thing is, a lot of us here have the understanding that "encryption equals technical protection", and that's not quite true. The law was drafted to talk about any sort of copyright enforcement mechanism, not just ones that employ cryptography. For example, we could imagine a legal argument in which the Linux linker's license check[0] is considered to be a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure, and proprietary modules that lie about their license[1] or modules that wrap proprietary code[2] would be considered circumvention tools. If you're thinking, "wait, Linux is GPL, the courts should interpret that to override any spurious 1201 claims"... well, version 2 didn't explicitly mention the DMCA, which was signed a good decade after GPLv2 was released. Version 3 fixes that by explicitly saying none of this code is a DMCA 1201 technical protection measure. But this is Linux we're talking about. Linus Torvalds views the TiVo clause as changing the deal, which he does not want to allow, so they're never relicensing to v3, and so this legal argument can still stand. And yes, advertisers have already used this legal theory to harass uBlock Origin. This is specifically why they don't block paywall enforcement scripts. The developers were threatened with a 1201 suit if they didn't back down. There's other examples of things which could be retroactively turned into DMCA 1201 circumvention devices as well. Remember those old right-click scripts that yelled at you if you tried to open the context menu? Well, the purpose of blocking that was to keep you from copying the content on the page, which under this legal theory makes it a DMCA 1201 circumvention device. Doesn't matter if it's hilariously easy to disable, or if browsers already disable it. If copyright owners can just will technical protection measures into existence, rather than them being very specific and obvious things like media encryption or software license keys, we're screwed. [0] When loading a kernel module, Linux checks a license string field. If the license is not a GPL-compatible one, the linker will refuse to resolve "GPL-only[1]" symbols for that module, and it will also mark kernel bug reports as "tainted", i.e. "please don't bother LKML about it unless you can repro it without proprietary code in kernel space." [1] Linux ships with a special GPL exception that says that the user-space API does not trip GPL copyleft. So the symbols that proprietary modules are allowed to access are ones that are equivalent to user-space. [2] One particularly egregious example was to store nulls in the license string, e.g. "GPL\0 for everything in the GPL folder" (which was empty). [3] e.g. NDISWrapper