YouTube legal team asked Invidious to take down the service within 7 days | Hacker News Reader

YouTube legal team asked Invidious to take down the service within 7 days

alternativeto.net

114 pointsKoftaBob51 comments

> In response, the project manager of the Invidious project replied on GitHub that they never agreed to any of YouTube's Terms of Services or Policies, and that Invidious doesn't use YouTube's API to fetch and display the videos. He added that “Things will continue normally until they can't anymore.”, implying that they're not going to comply with YouTube legal team's request.

As they should

Just wanted to plug my favorite browser extension lately. It will auto redirect many corporate services to alternative, privacy preserving frontends.

https://libredirect.github.io/

I've been looking for something like this forever thanx a ton!

If this isn't antitrust behavior going on in broad daylight, then what is? Are the competition commissions of US sleeping in blissful ignorance while enjoying on taxpayer's salary? The least they should do is shut down those commissions to prevent wastage!

In previous debates on this very site, people said that scraping/calling an API without service owners permission is not allowed and even illegal in US (if I remember correctly).

In light of that, how can this be an antitrust case?

> people said that scraping/calling an API without service owners permission is not allowed

I think it is legal, the API is public data and accessing it should be protected by the First Amendment as far as I know.

Otherwise scrapping in general would not be allowed and search engines couldn't just crawl sites and list them as they'd need the permission of every site operator they list.

I don't see why APIs would be treated any different, and in Invidious' case they are actually scrapping the HTML page and not using the Android YouTube API. So it's a slightly different case but I do think that using that Android YouTube API should be OK as well, it's all public anyway.

Scraping is legal.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharysmith/2022/04/18/scrapin...

There is no API call that returns a direct link to the video file. To get it, you have to defeat encryption measures, and that is illegal under the DMCA.

Couldn't you just scrape HTML from YouTube's site? That's not the most efficient route, but a public API call returning enough info to generate the site's viewer URL gives which info to go scrape the page for the video itself

That doesn't work. The video URL is not in plain text in the HTML. They send you encrypted data and you have to decrypt it using javascript that they also send you. It is, therefore, an encryption measure, which is illegal to break under the DMCA

The DMCA was a huge mistake

Are the devs American? If not, does the DMCA even have jurisdiction?

Non-Americans are obviously not subject to US law. However unfortunately most countries have patent/copyright/dmca-like legislation for no reason whatsoever

Encryption isn't broken by Invidious, nor by youtube-dl or anything else. Youtube sends a bunch of Javascript, Invidious interprets it and runs the code. Unless Google wants to prove that running secret_youtube_sauce.js can only be ran by specific user-agents on their own website otherwise it's DMCA infringement, they can try. If they win, you've got a bigger problem anyways, since they would win the right to only allow Chrome to access Google properties.

The OP used a misleading term. It’s not “breaking” encryption that’s illegal, nor is it occurring.

What is illegal is circumventing any measures at DRM that involve encryption.

> Unless Google wants to prove that running secret_youtube_sauce.js can only be ran by specific user-agents on their own website otherwise it's DMCA infringement, they can try

This is exactly the implication here. It’s not copyright infringement, it’s DRM bypassing which is a separate law. The implication is that google wouldn’t have sent you the content (encrypted or not) if the user agent (or whatever) was different. Therefore, you’re deceiving them and illegally bypassing DRM.

> If they win, you've got a bigger problem anyways, since they would win the right to only allow Chrome to access Google properties.

IIRC YouTube used to not work right on Firefox, intentionally. Also lots of Google properties are behind a Chrome-wall (eg their LLM generative search results)

IANAL, but that’s the gist of what’s happening here.

Ah right, it's been years since I delt with DRM'd video and I completely forgot the URL itself wouldn't be visible in the html

Imagine that I write my CV in a plain .txt file, but then add it to self-extracting rar and send it to you. If you open the file with notepad it will be kind of unreadable. If you execute it, you can read the .txt file. Did you just broke my encryption?

It is the same, they may send you the URL encrypted (more likely obfuscated), but then they also send you the code. In this case, they are giving you all you need to decrypt it. You just run their code that they sent to you.

IANAL, but if I post my username/password here, I should not be able to sue you that you hacked my account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876321#24876567

https://torrentfreak.com/deciphering-youtubes-rolling-cypher...

... or you build an User Agent that executes whatever 1mb_garbage_ytplayer.js and let google code give you decoded links

people get on here and say things all the time that are wrong though.

Everybody has forgotten the Great Padmapper Debate in the desire to pretend like the answers are simple and obvious.

What competition is this preventing? Your complaint is similar to being angry you can’t sell beer in someone else’s bar.

Youtube itself is a monopoly, alternative frontends is the absolute minimum we can do as anti-trust legislation isn't applied

What hurtful aspects of the so called monopoly would be solved by those alternative frontends? The inability to watch YouTube without ads?

But why does that monopoly exists in the first place? If it's owing to their piggy backing using the search engine arm, this is certainly the competition or anti-trust commissions should take notice of and act upon it?

Why answer the question, if you can just spin some innuendo around it?

What innuendo?

Alternative frontends can at least reduce a bit the control of the platform on what you see.

That makes me think it’s somewhat like putting up my own website with a restaurant’s menu, taking orders, picking it up and delivering to the customer.

And we’ll call it Grubhub! And then it gets banned.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/It-s-now-illegal-fo...

Didn't know invidious, now I do - thanks, Ms. Streisand!

Looking at the project, I thought "it would be so cool if this could have a distributed backend that automatically caches videos from other platforms when someone asks for them, so they could bootstrap a YT alternative"... Sadly, even though it would probably save YT millions in bandwidth costs, the instant one of the videos gets served from cache it would also fall afoul of copyright law.

That sounds like copyright infringement.

Is using a web proxy with cache copyright infrigement?

It definitely can be, yes.

If you're just mirroring Youtube's content and not somehow plugging into their Youtube Premium nor advertisement stack, I don't see how that's very defensible nor comparable to a cache.

https://w4.cuevana3.ai "Oh look, it's totally just a cache of movies. What, you think caching should be illegal now?"

Kind of dishonest reasoning tbh because it's not the impl detail (cache or not) that anyone cares about, it's whether you're ripping content. Are you the Youtube creator or not?

Caches are infringement if you don’t have consent, yes.

“I wasn’t pirating those videos when I used torrent, I was just caching them for those with legal rights to them”.

You can’t have a copy of copyrighted content without permission, and you can’t distribute a copy of copyrighted content without permission.

Is this true around the world?

If you don't upload them, there is very little risk (XDCC for example).

Only if it is a public cache.

Here you go: https://docs.joinpeertube.org/use/channel-sync

Direct: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872

This sounds like just scraping information that openly available on the internet.

Isn’t Google search doing the exact same thing? Or their scraping with Bard?

And those are commercial products; this one is not. I would not start this fight if I were Google..

Are there any legislative pushes to create a legal framework for the web, or are all countries just letting the courts decide what goes? There are so many edge-cases, free-speech and moral implications that shouldn't be left for the courts to decide and overturn and a whim.

Scraping data is legal right now, an integral part of research and journalism, and therefor important… until it's used to create a facial-recognition system and every citizen and sold back to the government. Also, when scraped data is published, isn't that a clear copyright violation? If not, how would you feel about it, if it was your content?

Nobody wants to get tracked online, so I get the moral site of Invidious, but on the flip side, they also remove the ads, taking away YouTube's and the creators profits, while still making them incur the infrastructure costs.

When google does it it’s not an unauthorized breach of a computer system as defined in the DMCA.

> There are so many edge-cases, free-speech and moral implications that shouldn't be left for the courts to decide and overturn and a whim.

At least in the US this is kinda what the courts do, and some of these are even intended aims: Courts are basically the intended recourse for most edge cases because it’s unlikely legislation will cover all of them.

Has anyone heard of Piped? It seems to be an even superior invidious alternative.

I agree with and respect the decision of the Invidious team to not close down shop, but wasn’t it just last week that the creator of Invidious said something like “If Google just asks me to shut it down I will”?

Edit: From 4 days ago- https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/

What was said was actually “ If they still ask me for whatever reason to stop working on Invidious, I’ll stop.”

The respectable thing to do would be to call it quits, just as they explicitly stated four days ago. The only reason their overly smug tone works in that blog post is predicated on the fact that they've made peace with this possibility. Seriously, did they really expect YouTube's legal team wouldn't seize this opportunity presented on a silver platter? Meh, this comment isn't really intended as a response. I just wanted to get rid of this bad taste in my mouth.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722

Yawn. Call me back when the YT layout is no longer bloated instead of taking things down not within their vision.

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