I'm Not Invidious
blog.thefrenchghosty.me
blog.thefrenchghosty.me
Ignoring the legal process can result in seized domains and servers, services being taken down, lawyers obtaining all kinds of personal information through the courts, and other stuff that gets very expensive very quickly. I doubt that this person will be extradited for making a Youtube frontend, but fighting Google can be certified Not Fun.
If you're going to ignore a cease and desist, consider getting legal advice from an expert with relevant knowledge first. They will tell you what can and cannot happen if you ignore letters like these. Perhaps they can word your protest in a more legalese form that Google will need to respond to if it wants to actually pursue the matter; it's certainly possible that getting actual lawyers involved to overthrow a realistic defence will be too much for Google to actually care. Youtubers certainly seem to get the velvet glove treatment after their message exchange with Youtube representatives mention lawyers.
There are probably ways in which the project can be defended (for example, if it really doesn't use the API in any way I don't believe it can be subject to their terms and conditions) but "you used the wrong opening for your email" and "Invidious *is*." isn't it.
1. Not using their API therefore not bound by their TOS
2. Wrong recipient
3. invidious.io isn't offering the service
It's possible that ignoring this is the best answer, but in any case consulting a lawyer is recommended.
In France, an e-mail have no legal value. You can just argue that you never received it. That’s why any legal document must be send via tracked physical mail.
However, it starts to have a value if you somehow admit to have received it. Most of the times it’s by answering, and here it’s because the receiver wrote a public blog post about it.
Also, France doesn’t extradite its citizens. It doesn’t mean that no action is possible but Google will have to sue him in a French court for violating the French laws.
Idk if he can be sued for violating the French law but I myself would totally ignore that e-mail. Maybe you can talk about it to your lawyer I you feel that can escalate but nothing else.
Lawyers want to be programmers. They are as bad at it is programmers are at the law.
The best you can hope for is that your own lawyer can make the law work for you. That is manifestly unjust but all of the other options are even worse. Start by putting any notion of fairness, compassion, or awareness on their part out of your mind, just as you would when debugging a program.
On Github[1] and invidious.io[2] they say they're the project manager and manage finances, which puts them in a leadership role, and therefore capable of directing the project, including cessation of its operation. Imagine if a CEO started nitpicking about how it's "not their product or service" and it was the company maintaining it, and how they weren't a low level employee and thus not responsible for the activities of the company.
And even if we are to assume that "project manager" is simply an honorary position, there is a level of implied responsibility even in these positions. As an example, CEO positions often inch closer to being honorary, as demonstrated by some CEOs being on the boards of multiple companies.
It is a different question as to whether the cessation of its operation is an effective measure or not, or whether running alternative frontends should be a violation of a law. Imagine a situation where Alice and their friends bully Bob. Bob gets a restraining order against Alice, and Alice argues that their friends like to bully Bob as well, so a restraining order against Alice won't help. "Other people can also do it" isn't a valid legal defense, even when it is true.
It's also interesting that they didn't release the full letter sent by Google. I wonder if it's actually a C&D but the author simply hopes that they can avoid complying with it only because it uses "To Whom It May Concern", which is standard legal verbiage.
Though I'm reluctant to add any fuel to this tire dumpster fire bum fight. This reeks of an odd sort of reverse troll play.
Why didn't the letter get a prompt introduction to the shredder? No HN post or other public discourse required. My mother does this to bogus mail literally all the time.
Nobody of consequence cares what this person or their strange little business is doing. Pay your taxes, beyond that, shine on and have a glorious life.
Their only really good point is that they don’t use the API so aren’t bound by its terns. That’s a good, solid, point.
The rest is… not.
But it’s not, so that’s moot.
In the UK, accessing a computer without permission is a criminal offence. To do so with the intent to commit further offences (e.g., copyright infringement) is an aggravated offence, punishable by unlimited fine and five years imprisonment.
It's a really bad idea to access an API without permission.
But it does load the videos from YouTube's media CDN - so if the author is making the claim that Invidious is not using YouTube "the service" when it still relies on YouTube infrastructure for the heavy lifting this seems... Actually worse? It takes a contract issue over the terms and makes it into something more like a CFAA issue, since Invidious is consuming YouTube resources without, the author claims, using anything intended as a public service.
Obviously this analogy is inexact but it feels like telling the electrical utility that they can't sue you because you aren't using their electrical service, you're tapping the wires before the meter. You kind of want to be governed by the terms of a service because that tends to mean that whatever you're doing is something you're allowed to do, and not outright abuse.
If I have a website where I host some of my own images, and I outline a terms of use regarding use and/or caching of those images, is Google obligated to follow those terms of use?
Also, I don't think Invidious (the software repository) loads anything from Youtube's CDN, any more than curl does, though it seems like the default configuration does do this, and they give out plenty of advice on how to make it work as a "proxy" for the youtube video data. If the people deploying Invidious are infringing, then I agree there's a good argument that Invidious (the software) has some liability.
Though it's not clear to me if people doing this are infringing. As far as I can tell, no one has been successfully sued for hotlinking images hosted by another website. This seems like the same precedent to me.
Furthermore, if hotlinking was considered infringement, then a case could be made that most websites would be guilty enough to be de-indexed from Google. Someone (in the UK) tried to sue Google a while back because Google was prominently displaying search results that hotlinked his website, and he lost the lawsuit (https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/16/google_search_image_r...)
Until there's clarity on whether it's OK for websites to embed resources from other hosts, I don't think it's clear that even Invidious instances are infringing here.
And even if they are, Invidious (the software) could very well make some small changes to their deployment, to make it configurable, for users to (theoretically) use their own video servers. Users can then configure their own instances to use Google's CDNs if they want, and I don't believe the people making Invidious would be any more responsible than Daniel Stenberg is for the ways people might use curl
To be clear I’d like projects like this to exist but I’m not convinced that it’s legal under current laws
In a lot of these situations there's not much wrong with doing it until you're told to stop. Invidious has just been told to stop.
Google used to have services that felt a lot more like this, like Google Images before it got aggressive about using cached versions and old, old Google Videos. But they got rid of all of those, I suspect because of thinking along these lines. It was very much an open legal issue around newspaper publishers, for example, and while Google is far from innocent they did make changes to mitigate their legal risk. Google seems to be pretty consistent in the idea that serving up content from someone else's service, in their products, is not acceptable. All of AMP kind of got built around that issue. And I don't think Google wanted it that way, but the legal landscape is the legal landscape. If Google is bound by these rules others have to be as well.
It isn't quite the same as the hypothetical case you lay out, but a number if news organisations have argued that Google should follow some rules about how they used the scraped information. Any ruling against Google here may be relevant against Invidious and similar products.
Some of the quotes are laugh out loud funny to me:
"Invidious received an e-mail from Google/YouTube to ask the project to be stopped.
...
I’m not stopping my work on Invidious, so here’s the explanation:
The e-mail is addressed “To Whom It May Concern”, the reality is that it doesn’t “concern” me.
...
If Google/YouTube want me to stop, they just have to ask me to stop"
Google clearly asked you to stop and you didn't. Continue at your own legal peril.
That aside, I imagine invidious (app) servers which allow users to watch content from Google's servers may be candidates for shutdown.
For example, here's a random video from the front page of an invidous server about the reddit blackout (I haven't watched it): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fBruoybHryU
But the video itself is coming from https://rr1---sn-ux3n588t-t8ge.googlevideo.com/
I assume this would be nominally legal under the same reasoning that hotlinking images is legal. If hotlinking images is found to be illegal though (which I think Google is powerful enough to force), then I think Google is going to have to do some reorganizing of their index (see case where someone sued Google, and lost, because Google was prominently displaying a website that hotlinked their image: https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/16/google_search_image_r...)
So it's an interesting one to watch for precedent, but I don't think Google is going to want to force courts to agree that hotlinking another website is infringement, because they'd potentially have to deindex 90% of the internet.
On the other hand, their search result quality has reduced so drastically of late, maybe they don't care about this.
That ain't gonna work, son.
No, saying "to whom it may concern" doesn't apply because they don't feel responsible is not a big 4D chess move.
But if someone decides to go nuclear you’re gonna have a bad time.
The person who authored this blog post hosts the docs which explain how to configure invidious to serve content from Youtube, and owns the domain. So they might be liable (if there is infringement) in ways the other authors are not.
The post comes off as a little idealistic and dismissive. I hope they have given enough thought and have sufficient countermeasures in place for the project if the law disagree with their view.
He might not soely be invidious, but from a legal perspective I’d wager all of the contributors are, and a “nuh huh” is not gonna fly in court.
yeah, they DEFINITELY DO:
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/blob/e7bed765/src/invidi...
not sure what backwards logic they are using to come to this conclusion, but its objectively wrong, and wont hold up in court. Granted, I am also guilty of this in my own project, but I dont pretend that I am not using the API, I just dont care because my project is tiny. They no longer have that luxury.
My name is right above my email address on the only page where you can find it. Please use it, and please spell it right.
I sympathise with the author. However I'm not a lawyer though.
Edit: I'll add that it centers on Youtube's API usage, which Invidious doesn't use so there's some ambiguity in how it relates to the project.
The letter does state that its referring to API clients, while invidious works via scraping instead, to not need to deal with the API terms. This is considered different legally. Dunno how this'll play out though.
https://www.ibanet.org/article/22AF1681-37A0-487A-A660-3ACA3...
They charged the megaupload folks with racketeering and money laundering before swatting them in a different country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload_legal_case
The notion of it seems a bit ludicrous to me.
Someone actually did that almost a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071132
Likewise, there is plenty of fair use content. I've watched tons of "film and TV critic" type channels, where your gracious hostess will sit through, say, an entire half-hour episode of "Murder, She Wrote" and she adds her commentary and snarky jokes to the soundtrack. But the copyrighted episode itself is reproduced nearly in its entirety. There is an entire industry built on this fair use content. They need to carefully observe the guidelines or they'll get strikes, but it's definitely a doable thing, and they can indeed monetize those videos for themselves.
I'm not really sure how it all works internationally, but I know that on a site such as Wikimedia Commons, which is 100% hosted in these USA, they are still mindful that every work they host is 100% free in all involved countries. So if a more generous Italian copyright, say, or an Australian FOP law, gets in the way of hosting an image, they will always respect that, rather than relying on the technicality that the image is only hosted in these USA and they don't strictly need to observe other nations' laws in that regard.
YouTube may have distributed content hosting in other nations, and so I don't know how they get along with international copyright, where as you say, fair use is less fair than in USA. Perhaps they do rely on hosting location as a definitive test for which laws they're going to obey.
You see similar things with Gutenberg e-texts; they'll be marked as "not available in Australia" or whatever, and the mirrors there won't have it.
No, I am Sebastian Bach!