Google has consistently maintained in legal proceedings and terms of service that its technical measures, specifically its "rolling cipher" and signature mechanisms, constitute technological protection measures under the DMCA.

The most prominent public declaration of this stance occurred during the legal battle over youtube-dl (basically the ancesor of yt-dlp). While the RIAA initiated the initial 2020 DMCA takedown, Google's own technical implementation of the "rolling cipher" was the core of the argument.