IANAL but as far as I know, if you think you've found some kind of technicality or gotcha in a legal letter or email that means you can ignore it, you're probably wrong.
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.
Well, to be honest, for now, he would be in a better position by having just ignored the mail.
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.
I have ignored plenty of CADs and threats from lawyers over decades. Sometimes I work on open source stuff that pisses people off. Lawyers know all they can do is bark in cases like these.
If you're american they can bankrupt you by forcing you to pay a lawyer to defend you in court. Not sure if France is in that category but there are countries out there where corporations can't abuse the legal process to bully people into submission. Where I live they can't get away with that since citizens have a right to legal representation, there's no "speedy trials" to minimize their own costs and they could be ordered to pay for all costs if they lose.
Imagine being extradited because you wrote a free software replacement for YouTube's shitty frontend. Surely the justice system cannot be this out of touch.
The "justice" system is indeed that out of touch. Every lawyer everywhere will concur that the only "justice" they can deal with is implementing the law. Actual justice plays zero part in it.
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.
While I'm sympathetic to people running alternative frontends and I use another such project (nitter) myself, nitpicking on the language is unlikely to help the author of this blog post, and I think they'd be better off consulting a lawyer on this one.
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.
> 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.
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.
They offer the documentation to install the software. The software itself is hosted on github (at least I didn't find a download link). I mean I get what you want to say and of course he sounds smug, but imo he is right at least with invidious.io not offering the client or service
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.
There are a lot of problems with this response, but it makes one argument in particular that seems very foolish and I have not seen otherwise mentioned: that Invidious is somehow not subject to YouTube terms because it doesn't use the public API.
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.
So Google scrapes the entire internet, and even caches thumbnails of images.
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
Sure, but Google's crawler (mostly) obeys robots.txt and other directives. It seems to be one of the most responsible crawlers this way. Here, Invidious is explicitly being told to stop and refusing to do so.
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.
> So Google scrapes the entire internet, and even caches thumbnails of images.
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?
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.
I’m the other hand you could claim a DDoS is just visiting the site a lot of times but that’s illegal, I think this is somewhere in between so it’s not that clear
And that’s the thing here as well: linking to a website has a different intent to embedding an internal resource from it that isn’t meant to be accessed through anything other than the main site in a way that takes away revenue from the site
To be clear I’d like projects like this to exist but I’m not convinced that it’s legal under current laws
It's not clear to me why they would stop contributing to an open source video player, just because Google wants them to.
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
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.
Not that I think Invidious is necessarily doing anything wrong here, but I think in this case, who owns the copyright to Invidious is besides the point.
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.
> Invidious isn’t my project, I don’t own the “Invidious” trademark, I’m not Invidious, I don’t represent Invidious. I’m just… me.
> Invidious is.
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.
This is silly. IANAL but if there’s no legally registered entity that owns the copyright and trademarks to the project, with code signed over with CLA then as far as I know the copyright belongs to all of the authors of the code by default. So to “whom it may concern” applies to everyone who has ever worked on the project.
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.
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.
I chuckled at this one. I get a lot of those emails that are specifically addressed to me by a human contacting me through my website, but start with "Dear sir or madam".
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.
A person owns their contributions unless they release them.
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.
Yeah the French are the only western Europeans who exercise any real sovereignty, except for maybe the Swiss, sort of. I reckon they have Charles de Gaulle to thank for that. They’re certainly in a privileged spot when it comes to NATO.
If you want to consider non-extradition as measure of real sovereignty, then you’ll note from your parents article that a lot of European countries are on that list. In Germany, extradition of German nationals is barred on constitutional grounds (1) with the notable exceptions of extradition to other European states on the basis of the European Arrest Warrant and to the International Court. Similar exceptions apply in France, which is also bound by the European Arrest Warrant.
In Germany German nationals can be “voluntarily” extradited (the Bundesregierung does the volunteering) and guess what, when the USA wants the person they get him or her.
This. It's either a custom browser/user-agent, and/or also a proxy. The idea that services can mandate what software/hardware you use to access them is IMHO a horrible overreach that came along with the "API" concept (see the ongoing Reddit API debacle for another example of this.)
Hmmm, interesting point. Hypothetically speaking, should someone successfully create a full-fledged browser using Javascript that can operate both independently and within web pages, 'custom browsers' could be displayed anywhere.
google has made the lives of people easier by providing free services like youtube, maps, email and a few others. They have the right to put ads on their stuff and make revenue out of that. what this guy is actually bad for people. imagine if people all of a sudden start using invidious and stop using youtube then there will not be youtube in this future. A lot of people feel the same.
This feels potentially a bit duplicitous. YouTube is filled with copyright infringing material, which Google capitalizes on to bring in viewers to ads. Granted, they have hosting costs. I wonder what the legal situation is for such instances.
Very, very little of YouTube infringes copyright. The content that you think is infringing copyright has in fact been licensed and monetized by the copyright holders. YouTube will often permit uploaders to keep their copyrighted content; the automated fingerprinting systems recognize it and notify the copyright holders, and ask, "what do you wanna do?" and often, the answer is to keep it, and give us the proceeds.
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.
Very little of YouTube infringes copyright in the United States - other countries don’t have the same transformative free use privileges that the US has.
I suppose it matters whether YouTube content is hosted in these USA or outside of it, for purposes of international copyright.
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.
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.