Just the other day I had a thought about this litigation against YoutTubeDL (now yt-dlp), the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) stepped in to help with an amicus brief, talking about how this could endanger culture and free press.
While I think they are not wrong in this regard, but I think that everyone is missing another very critical point here!
Let’s think this to the end, assuming yt-dlp would be declared illegal. What does yt-dlp in the end do? It sends requests to a server over the net, evaluates data it receives back and sends more requests. That’s it. Some of the data it receives is ignored some more gets evaluated, some other eventually stored. All that is done on the client side, all decisions concerning which data is to be downloaded from the server and what this data is going to be used for are made on the client side – or to put this into more direct terms: It is your software running on your computer being in control.
Now imagine yt-dlp loses the case. This would mean that we are not free anymore to choose which data to download from servers and what to do with it! It would mean that e.g. web browsers would be forced to implement anything that a web site requires and get forced to evaluate anything the server wants to. It could mean that e.g. web browser could be forced to implement DRM, could be forced to implement and always enable certain technologies (like enforcing JavaScript). It would also, again, threaten the existence of tools like ad blockers.
In the end it would mean that server / service providers could start to dictate how our free client software has to work. They could get into a position to dictate how we have to use the internet and worse, what can or can not be implemented as free software.
This MUST NOT happen! This is totally outrageous!