"Section 1201 provides for felony liability for anyone commercially engaged in bypassing a DRM system: 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense."

So it's even worse than the risk of being taken down. Way worse.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/drms-dead-canary-how-w...

iMessage is not DRM. It is not protecting IP.

The component that tries to identify that you're accessing it from the right device isn't DRM? I don't think courts would agree with that.

It's not done for the purposes of content protection/DRM. There may be other laws it falls under, but I don't think the DMCA is one.

Interestingly, the reference implementation does seem to reference FairPlay, which is very much a copy prevention/anti-circumvention system (used for iTunes content, but also video encryption via HTML EME): https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush/blob/main/albert.py

Assuming that DMCA does not cover API authentication (i.e. preventing unauthorized third-party clients from being able to access a server-side API – and I really don't know if it does or doesn't!), I wonder what the implications are if the same mechanism is used for both DMCA-covered DRM mechanisms, but also non-covered other purposes.

My intuition would be that it can't be good to "multi-purpose" a DRM tool from a DMCA enforcement point of view, but maybe that was never Apple's plan, and they just used the most secure attestation technology they had available on each platform, which for Intel Macs might just have been software-only FairPlay.

ROFL..

Yeah, and when exactly should everyone expect to stop seeing DMCA take down notices that didn't abuse the system, willingful harm creators, and an appeals process that is an unfunny joke?

Until then, it doesn't matter what the law says. They will abuse it, because PROFITS.