Does the thing being bypassed prevent you from saving the page, or from making in any other way a copy of any content you've already fetched?

If not, how could it be classed as copy-protection?

Edit: One other thing: if spoofing UA headers was a problem, all the browsers in the world would fall foul of it - because non-Mozilla browsers all say that they're Mozilla, and Opera said it was IE, and Chrome said it was Safari, and now a bunch of browsers say they're Chrome - at the same time as saying they're Mozilla. Except it's more complicated than that.

I guess it's less copy-protection and more access-control.

this is basically the "computer scientist" view of the world in https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23, especially the Monolith bit. spoofing UA could be legal in general or when done for interoperability but illegal when done with intent to bypass access control.

Right, the UA spoofing browsers perform is historically done to bypass sites not wanting to serve them content.

Well the UA spoofing I perform is done to bypass sites not wanting to serve me content.

Those looking into the history or the user agent, and why it happens to advertise itself as Firefox, Safari and Chrome ate the same time, can look into this article: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/comment-pa...

Maybe it's fraud? The user claims to be reading an article via a facebook reference but in fact does not use facebook.

Hard to see how to police that from the web site's perspective though.

To be clear I'm not advocating for anything here.

I'd also worry about a CFAA violation too.

https://www.nacdl.org/Landing/ComputerFraudandAbuseAct#:~:te....

The question is: do you actually want to spend time dealing with that or just nuke anything that gives you a legal headache?

When big corpos tell you to jump you jump.