It’s a common misconception that the word “effective,” as used in the respective legislation, was intended to mean “successful” or “always cause.” Rather, it’s always been interpreted to mean, “is designed or intended to have the effect of.”
The fact that the measure is not always successful or is breakable does not make the law no longer applicable; that would be an absurd result. The law isn’t interpreted literally when the result would be absurd; this is doctrine that goes back to at least 1892 and even further back to English common law. See, e.g., Holy Trinity Church v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).
> a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
17 U.S. Code § 1201 (a) (3) (B)
I highly doubt that. Keep in mind that age restrictions which make you hit a single button to circumvent them are much worse in keeping the wrong users out, and afaik legally they're perfectly fine.
"Effective access control" means they have to do something which may work to some degree and doesn't have to be a burden financially or technically.
17 U.S. Code § 1201 (a) (3) (B)
IMO Effective access control works both ways. you can't send the ALL of the content back and then have the access control work on the client machine. What if i just used curl and viewed the HTML raw to read the article?
Checking user agent doesn't meet the requirement to be considered an effective access control technological measure.