>You didn't download it through publisher-blessed means. In fact, the publisher and their proxies expended effort in shutting down the expected, "normie" ways of downloading it.

Except that doesn't fly. Get back to me when they stop curl or wget with "Access by this User-Agent not supported", and I'll buy it. You are explicitly, not implicitly telling the user I don't support access via that mechanism. Then if they tamper with the User-Agent string anyway, you've got solid mens rea. Then have fun with your IP case. How this stands, is "oh, we want you to walk our little maze and view our adds as a prerequisite to viewing this particular content", but we'll tell you where to go afterwards (I.e. pay the toll, get the secret location to view your prize.) The toll for access is the add to a very large proportion of the world, that's you buying it. You have the right to back up what you buy.

It is a special defect of American jurisprudence that corporate entities reserve the right to shape the behaviors of everyone around them through something as flimsy as "well, we intended, your Honor." Guess what? You can intend in one hand, and poorly implement in the other and guess which one is real at the end of the day? The legal system is not an excuse for poor communication with large numbers of people. It simply does not pass my bar for actually implementing a technical safeguard. As it stands, YouTube was an unexpectedly successful platform for growth hacking, and the RIAA is attempting to roll up the ladder behind them.

My major contention, all else being equal is if you're doing the decoding step in the clear in JavaScript on the client you aren't enacting any control.

If the industry would like to produce a hardware platform where they can guarantee perfect IP law conformance, they are welcome to do so, but they haven't, or their attempts to do so have produced far less adoptance because gasp people aren't so gung to about spending money on things they can't own or functionally make their lives more difficult in order to make someone else's life easier.

They bought into the YouTube environment because they wanted their artists to reach the widest audience possible. They got that. And way more. It's a bit underhanded to come back and say "Hey, you people using that thing we deliberately switched to to make fat stacks of cash knowing it'd be leaky, and knowing we could have developed something better fit to the job, but not wanting to because there was business to be done now, stop using your machine in ways we don't like!"

They made their bed, let them sleep in it! Stop letting the tail wag the dog! This is also why IP is largely self defeating. IP doesn't incentivized actual furthering of the Arts and Sciences half as much as it does incentivizing litigation on whether a long enough period has gone by where a work or discovery can finally be considered endemic enough to build off of without being sued. By putting in place these established lines of legalized cartelry, the question of innovating becomes one of "how long do I have to wait to get this knucklehead out of the picture so I can build on common sense without inviting a bunch of lawyers into my life."

I can assure you. Legal issues for the everyday person is more than a generous reason not to try to push forward the state of the art, because for every guy that gets it right, there's someone who gets stomped on too.

Though, thank you, Temporal, and know you are not just shouting into the wind. I do hear and understand what you mean on the color as applied through the lenses of legalistic reasoning. I just object that the direction the legal profession is starting from were sound in the first place, and while I know that answer yields "Go talk to Congress", it's nice to occasionally have someone throw things at to see how they hold up when exposed to ration scrutiny.

So thank you.even if this seems like an inconsequential Internet argument, I appreciate it.