21–30 of 70 posts
Author says "I am not Invidious", but they are in fact the project manager of Invidious. 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 t…
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.
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.
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.
What a stupid request. An alternate front-end is essentially a custom browser.
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.
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…
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…
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
France doesn’t extradite their nationals. https://www.ibanet.org/article/22AF1681-37A0-487A-A660-3ACA3...
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.