[Skybird]

The first of Neal'S two softwares is available as a Firefox app, and I would assume that Mozilla has a lawyers' backroom club taking care fo such things and checking them out. They have withdrawn apps for legal reasons in past years. Its in Mozilla's own interest to make sure its apps do not violate legal standards and by that criminlaise the behaviour of Mozilla. Why woudl they allow an app to compromise their legal status?

In Germany it is illegal only when the original material, the text you want to read, gets altered or manipulated in the process of evading the paywall. It is up to the website owner to install measures that make sure the paywall cannot be avoided. And some do it: as I said, the tools do not work with every website, some stay blocked with them.

If somebody wants to make sure nobody unwanted gets to read his texts, he can make sure that nobody can for sure.

Note that available common VPN software does allow you to access foreign content and streams that originally were blocked for the world region you live in. So far, nobody has taken legal action over that, too, AFAIK.

And youtube constantly alters its schemes by which it tries to neutralise currently existing video grabbers that allow you to download youtube videos. The availability of such tools/apps could simply be declared illegal by the lawmaker, but instead the companies must take the tougher way of constantly fighting the uphill battle and changign their technical ways to spoil it for the existing tools. So that new tools get developed and released. I think there are also mods for Android that allow you to shut down the screen on your smartphone but having the sound of youtube (music) playing on. Google does not want it, they want you to buy a monthly abo to allow you that. Still, the apps/mods existed last time I checked. I am just not interested in that noise.