YouTube's Legal Team sent me a letter [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The app is on a .app TLD, and that's ran by google. So theoretically google just pull the domain registration. I wouldn't put it past them. Hooray for vanity domains!
He needs to get better about posting the link to whatever he's talking about so I can read ahead and be more informed.
- The creator, representing Futo, responded by stating that the GRJ app does not use the YouTube API services and is therefore not subject to those terms of service.
- The creator expresses frustration with how YouTube and other platforms often arbitrarily delete creator accounts and content, threatening people's livelihoods.
- The creator sees the GRJ app as a solution to help creators connect with their audience even if their accounts are deleted from platforms.
- The creator is critical of how the more users are willing to pay for content and software, the worse the experience and more abuse they face.
- The creator shares a personal example of being unable to play downloaded YouTube content offline, despite paying for YouTube Premium.
- The creator is done accepting the concept that the more one gives, the worse the treatment they receive in return.
- The creator states they have the resources and intention to legally fight YouTube over the GRJ app, unlike "four kids in a college dorm room."
- The creator emphasizes that Futo is a serious company, not just a hobby project, and is willing to spend significant money on legal representation.
- The creator is committed to continuing to offer the GRJ app to serve their customers, despite YouTube's demands to cease and desist.
that's not cool. i would much prefer, since they are not two kids in a college dorm, they worked with fdroid to get properly vetted and included.
All of the v26 releases are missing. F-Droid's maintainers just did not build or publish these, leaving F-Droid users with a broken app since early December 2023 until 2 weeks ago, basically 5 months of shipping an app that did not consistently work.
> We have no record of ever entering into any agreement or business relationship with Google. If our records are mistaken, please send us a copy of the contract you believe we signed.
Google are not the police and they shouldn't be able to enforce their arbitrary terms on other companies just because they exist on the same internet.
> YouTube claims he violated their API terms of service and he [Louis] explains that GrayJay doesn't use the API so they never agreed or accepted those terms.
The point (of the person you replied to, too, presumably) is not that they don't have an agreement with Google, but that they're not violating these specific terms (as claimed by Google) because that's not what they signed up for. They run a channel, not an API client. (My understanding of their words, not saying I can judge the legal merit of this.)
Not that it seems like a (at least short term) beneficial move to get this type of cross with the platform that can probably terminate your account at their sole discretion, but I'm happy he's trying to get Youtube content more liberated. For instance, you can mark your videos as having a creative commons license, but that means nothing because it's not like it spawns a download button for the users to exercise their granted license. Anyone besides the uploader still has to violate YT's ToS (which I'm sure forbids these third-party video downloaders) in order to get at that creative commons video data
Google pretends not to know or understand this by asking the GrayJay devs to honor the terms of an API they actively avoid using.
GrayJay is being developed by a team at FUTO (dot org) that Louis Rossmann is affiliated with. His personal 'Louis Rossmann' YouTube channel is seperate from FUTO and GrayJay, and isn't part of this issue, nor is his personal channel mentioned in the letter.
I hope I remember correctly, I listened to his video while falling asleep ^^
I'm sure he'd like to believe that but YouTube seems pretty happy to ban accounts for spurious reasons.
https://9to5google.com/2019/11/09/google-account-bans-youtub...
Any UI is an API with extra steps.
Is the non-password protected end of the site really fair game for scraping? I’m sure the terms of service say not to, but are those enforceable?
To some extent, you have to expect that anything with an open port 80 on the public internet is accessed by strangers. First because it’s the technical reality, but it’s also part of the principles of the web in some deeper philosophical sense.
What isn't an API with extra steps? This argument also applies to scripts, extensions, and for that matter, web browsers as a whole.
YT can't make demands of a company just because one of the company's employees happens to have a YT channel. It's true if some random gaming youtuber has a job at IBM, and it's also true if you're a public figure like Louis Rossman.
IBM can say they have no business relationship with YT, even if one of IBM's employees runs a youtube channel. And Grayjay can say they have no business relationship with YT, even if Louis Rossman has a channel.
This is in addition to lucb1e's comment about the API terms specifically. Even if YT's lawyers are confusing the individual Louis Rossman with the company he's associated with, they still seem confused about which set of terms he agreed to.
That might be a good reason not to have a legal entity in the US but a jurisdiction with more sensible laws.
GRJ is not preventing anyone from maintaining a business relationship with Google.
That Google might -choose- to end a business relationship is on them, but they weren't prevented from having a relationship with their YouTube 'customer', or vice versa.
It's dumb, but that's the legal system.
That's not actually the contract though. You're not breaking contract if you get up to use the bathroom during an ad break, with TV or YouTube.
Honestly, he wasn't wrong: if content is provided on an ad-supported basis, there's a give and take. The content was provided with the understanding that the advertisers who paid the network in lieu of the viewer would have the viewer's attention during ad breaks. If the viewer should screen out the advertisements, they are getting the benefits of programming while depriving the network of the benefits it hoped to realize by providing the content. This is morally equivalent to stealing. Everybody seems to understand this except for tech nerds, who for literally half a century have been creatively interpreting IP law and its philosophical underpinning in their favor.
I expect some browser fingerprinting and remote attestation tech to be deployed by Google in order to catch content thieves, and some scathing DMCA lawsuits to result in the wake of the inevitable attempts to circumvent said tech.
>If the viewer should screen out the advertisements, they are getting the benefits of programming while depriving the network of the benefits it hoped to realize by providing the content.
I find this idea disgusting. There are many kinds of contracts we don't allow - for example you can't sell yourself into slavery, even if you want to. Similarly I think that the "contract" you describe should not be allowed to exist, even assuming it's legally binding right now (and I doubt it).
>Everybody seems to understand this except for tech nerds
In my experience it's the other way around - everybody disagrees, except a tiny minority of people who benefit from the ad-supported monopoles.
Not my app, here's a summary: https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/dqTYg6vnQvw?si=PLdzW5-ew...
It is too often that I get linked a 30 minute video that reading an abstract like this for most of them would really help me prioritise whether to watch it or not.
Now I guess I just need it in an extension to appear below the video automatically or something :)
The name of the organization is FUTO. It's not just Rossman, it's also the rich guy that came up with the concept and hired Rossman and other people who are building multiple FUTOish software programs.
As for Grayjay. Yeah, this is exactly what we need: an application which allows us to watch video (offline) without being tied to a platform.
We have a name for that: it is called a web browser. In a web browser, we use standards such as HTML and CSS. The user decides how a website looks, not the website (those are merely suggestions, the user is the one who in the end decides if they want to follow these).
Something like Grayjay is following the spirit of the WWW.
Vanced is a hacked original YouTube app and made to be more user friendly.
Also what's nice about the government is that they are compromised of citizens where we can vote in new people to lobby the changes we want. How can I do this at Google or Meta? That's something only the privileged can afford.
They turn the filter to 11. You can't even swear on YouTube anymore.
I should have clarified and specified that I was only referring to these trillion dollar multi-national corporations that can obviously afford to regulate their platforms themselves.
Regulations can be targeted you know, they don't have to be full-stop.
It won't. If Youtube had no moderation, it would have no ad revenue. This would effectively kill every single website where users can publish content without having to go through a publishing contract first.
Youtube, Medium, Newsgrounds, every single comments section on news articles, all web forums, Discord, reviews on Amazon, Steam. I'm not even sure websites like buy me a coffee and patreon would be able to survive, because if they can't moderate their posts, that doesn't mean mastercard can't ban them, as mastercard isn't subject to publishing laws.
And when you have sites like Youtube that retain a strict moderation policy, there is going to be absolutely 0 incentive for them to cave to whatever new niche sites crop up that try to play the "we can't enact moderation" card, exactly as happens today.
> ramp up their moderation hard
Not good enough. Every claim about a person in every video posted to youtube would need to be fact checked prior to being visible on youtube. You are underestimating the degree to which this kills youtube qua youtube. This is subtantially more true for facebook, or for comment sections.
>still have liabilities in countries that aren't the US
Already most sites that are required to censor content for a certain locale only block it for IPs from that locale. I doubt this would change.
No it doesn't. Defamation requires some form of mens rea of the statement being made (negligence or actual malice depending on who it's about), so liability for defamation in a no-§230 world largely means "will take it down after someone complains" as there's a pretty solid defense that not verifying the statements before uploading doesn't constitute even negligence, much less actual malice.
The liability rules in a no-§230 world aren't entirely clear since we're basing everything on just two court cases that existed pre-§230, but the social media companies are going to be extremely willing to throw down millions of dollars in legal fees to persuade judges to evolve liability rules that make their moderation policies feasible.
And this comes back to the main point again: no moderation just doesn't scale, not even in channels of merely a hundred people, let alone hundreds of millions. It is naïve to think that companies are going to suddenly decide that "no moderation" is less risk than "tailor both our moderation policies and the law to find some middle ground that is actually feasible."
And an unmoderated site isn't going to be all that fun for users. If there's no curation, you're going to mostly find dreck, which will turn users onto platforms that actually have content worth consuming. If there's curation, well congratulations, content creators still have to pander to the curation rules which is effectively the same moderation environment anyways.
Anyone who has moderated a forum in their lives know how exceedingly stupid this idea is.
What it shouldn't be regulated for is the content itself. I don't like congresspeople of any party wanting to regulate something because they see less of the news they like on one platform, regardless of if it's factual merit. These are voluntary entertainment sites. If you want to see a platform that carries your news, then instead you free to talk with your wallet, to petition the company and get other users on board, and totally free to start your own platform (or, as seems to be the trend nowadays, free to buy someone else's if you can't make one yourself)
I can only assume their legal team in the background advised them that they do not believe Google will take action (probably because of antitrust fears, etc) and thus no actual response is warranted.
If I was them I'd actually provide a constructive response arguing that their app is just like a browser (not too dissimilar to Google's own Chrome) and doesn't seek consent from the platform owner just like Chrome doesn't seek consent from the visited websites.
Yes it does. YouTube claims he violated their API terms of service and he explains that GrayJay doesn't use the API so they never agreed or accepted those terms. They had no need to.
just because they say it does not mean they can enforce it
Also, youtube itself is just a website. Websites can be accessed through multiple venues, aka browsers. Browsers don't always guarantee the way it will render or present html will be as the author would expect.
Now, how I would have responded, THAT would have been childish.
“Dear Sir or Madam, Your company policy’s aren’t law, kindly go fuck yourselves.”
> You claim you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without their permission. What about Warner Brothers — do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. When Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, we were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers and even before us, there had been other brothers — the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazoff; Dan Brouthers, an outfielder with Detroit; and “Brother, can you spare a dime?” This was originally “Brothers, can you spare a dime” but this was spreading a dime pretty thin so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other brother and whittled it down to “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
https://lettersofnote.com/2011/02/21/i-had-no-idea-that-the-...
You send a web request, you get a response, designed for a piece of software to read.
It's an API.
The fact that it's not optimised for what they are using it for is not relevant.