I suspect that you can thank the 1984 Landmark Case of Universal Studios vs. Sony Corporation of America for your freedom to screenshot and save images through the web browser.

Back in the 80s, Sony made a video player that ran Betamax tapes. You might remember the HDVD vs BluRay wars of a decade ago when both formats were battling for dominance to become the new standard for playing HD movies on disc. Well, before that was the VHS vs Betamax wars. During these battles, Sony was trying to make Betamax the new standard for home movies. They wanted to distinguish themselves from VHS in some way and they ended up distinguishing themselves with an amazing and unheard of feature (for the time), you could not only watch movies with Betamax tapes, but you could RECORD movies to watch later. You could record anything on TV, in order to watch it later. This is 20+ years before DVRs, 30 years before streaming services. It was a crazy idea.

But Universal Studios didn't like the idea that someone could record a show on TV and watch it later, or watch it however many times they wanted. Someone could theoretically even sell that Betamax tape to someone else. So Universal Studios sued Sony over this invention. Universal Studios claimed it violated copyright. Sony claimed it was protected under the "fair use" clause for copyright.

The lawsuit ended up tipping in Sony's favor, but only barely. One of the most popular kids shows at the time was "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood". The supreme court heard from Mr. Roger's himself who testified that he was ok with people recording his show because it allowed them to be with their family and not controlled by the schedules dictated by the television studios. He said he was against the studios controlling people's schedule. The supreme court ultimately mentioned that this testimony is what tipped the case into Sony's favor.

But it didn't just tip in Sony's favor. This landmark case is what opened the door for all recording media in the future. The Betamax eventually died, but the VHS later made the same features available. Radios and boomboxes in the 90s had a recording feature added. DVRs came about in the early 2000's to record TV to harddrives. Then computers had screenshotting, and web browsers likely got "save image as" because of the precedent set by this landmark case.

Where the DCMA differs is that it protects tools built with direct intent to circumvent a specific copyrighted content. So the linked tool for example is a script built specifically to circumvent Instragram's access control. It doesn't circumvent anyone else's access control, and its primary purpose for existing was to gain access into Instagram. So I think Instagram can make a reasonable case to go after this tool.

However, going after a general tool like screenshotting would go nowhere, because it is considered a general good. It provides value that far surpasses the damage Instagram can claim from it.

Again, we can probably thank Mr. Rogers. Without him, recording might not be something we could take for granted today.

Sources:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-c...