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> You can't even take a screenshot of a Netflix show, thanks to DRM; but you can download Spotify tracks?

There's also a lot of tools to rip movies from Amazon Prime or YouTube to MP3 sites. It will never be possible to take down all of them, especially if they are not located in the US.

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If done cleverly, it will be indistinguishable from normal use, so it is technologically infeasible as well, to try and prevent it entirely.

I would have thought it's easy to distinguish when you download a 250MB video in 10 seconds without opening the YouTube client, so I'm always surprised those clients work.

Some use headless Chromium/Chrome like Puppeteer or other to mimic usage directly. At that point only pattern detection would work i.e. downloading too many files one person could consume or other fingerprinting.

Heh, that's not what I would call "clever" though ; ) You can add delays artificially, you can add random, but seemingly human pauses (people sometimes pause playback) etc. I am surprised as well though, that tools still work without having to go to these lengths. perhaps because devs on the other side of the thing know, that they would only trigger a more sophisticated tool to be created.

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