The devs of invidious need to be more careful and circumspect in their language and response. I believe they have a good chance of fighting this, and continuing the project regardless, but Don’t. Tickle. The dragon tail!
First they went after Vanced, now Invidious. With the ongoing recession, companies are realising that less and less people would be be willing to pay for subscriptions and to increase their revenue they are going to tie all the loose ends they have allowed over the years.
the request won’t hold up in court. they scrape Youtube’s public site, so any complaint that claims they’re violated the API’s TOS is moot
This. They’ll still try and take it off github though which is still a big deal
What’s looking worse is the actual joke of a response from one of the developers.
“Lawyers hate this one weird trick.”
In my experience, thinking you’ve found a loophole legally because it is using boilerplate language usually ends really badly. If you’re not a lawyer, don’t assume you’re as smart as a lawyer when it comes to law, and definitely don’t think your flowery prose means fuck all in court. Just because it wasn’t addressed directly to this guy doesn’t make this magically go away.
Relavent related links:
Indeed, if I were the developers I would be threading much more carefully. While it may be true that the letter is not precise enough, access to YouTube implies a relative acceptance of the terms of service of providing the service, and it is not so clear cut as Invidious claims.
Absolutely. I’m not saying they should just fold and give up, either. However, for someone who is listed as their Finance Manager and creator of the website, it certainly screams they could be legally culpable in some way, even if the takedown notice is wrong about how Invidious works and not addressed to them directly.
The reality is, however, they need actual legal representation to fight it, and not just fucking first-year-English-student-bullshit like “Invidious just is.” Google has a fucking team of lawyers on retainer, do people really think they somehow don’t know what they’re doing or aren’t worth the money Google pays for them? Or for that matter, that a judge even understands the technical difference between API use and scraping, and their understanding hinges on Invidious’s lawyer getting them to understand the difference where Google’s lawyers entire play will be making the judge not understand the difference.
