Yout Threatened by Section 1201's ‘Overbroad Application’: EFF

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 1201 ban on circumvention tools is “strong medicine” that risks “interfering with First Amendment-protected speech and with lawful commerce in innovative technologies,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s amicus brief Thursday (docket 22-2760) in support of Yout in its 2nd U.S. Circuit Appeals Court fight against the Recording Industry Association of America. The district court’s erroneous finding that Yout’s software platform was a circumvention tool under the DMCA should be reversed, said EFF. Yout’s platform is an example of one technology “that is threatened by the overbroad application of Section 1201,” it said. Yout and programs of its ilk “fulfill the same function that videocassette recorders once did,” it said. They enable ordinary people “to make and retain copies of videos that have already been released to the world at large by their creators,” it said. The RIAA and its member companies “are engaged in a campaign to make streamripping tools a contraband technology, unavailable even to lawful users.” They sought to block, censor and demonetize providers of these tools “because a subset of their users infringe copyright,” said EFF. The RIAA claims streamrippers “necessarily circumvent access controls on video-sharing sites like YouTube in violation of Section 1201, a position adopted by the district court in this case,” it said: “That position is wrong.” The district court adopted an “extremely broad construction” that effectively applies “the strictures of Section 1201 to any copy of a work in digital form, not just the subset that rightsholders have chosen to protect with technological means,” it said. The 2nd Circuit “should take a different approach,” it said. Text, legislative history and precedent “suggest clear limits on the definition of ‘technological measures,’” it said: “YouTube’s user-uploaded video service and its web-based player fall outside those limits.”