I love the explanation about why he (TheFrenchGhosty) won’t stop working on the project: https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/
This really is the next era of the web, after the tech bubble just can’t get enough money, people are taking it in their own hands again.
That strongly feels like the tone of those “sovereign citizens”, feels as legally flimsy as a soap bubble
Well sovereign citizen argument is just plain stupid; “I live on your soil but your laws don’t apply to me because I say so.”
Here, youtube is claiming something specific (that Invidious violates a TOS agreement which Invidious agreed to) which is verifiably false - Invidious never agreed to the TOS for the API, and doesn’t have to, because Invidious doesn’t use the API. Invidious works by communicating with YouTube and scraping data from the responses. There’s legal precedent that this is legal (although, LinkedIn’s ongoing battle with HiQ may overturn that precedent, but it hasn’t yet). That’s one of the reasons that most services like youtube offer an affordable API in the first place - 3rd party tools using web scraping is much more expensive for them.
YouTube could still potentially legally force them to stop by changing the TOS of the service itself, but there could be other implications of that, so we’ll see what happens. As FOSS, it’s unclear what they would even do, there are hundreds of hosts.
That explanation is the most amount of nonsense I’ve read in a long time. The amount of mental gymnastics you need to non-ironically believe that is just unbelievable
i’d appreciate it if, for outsiders, you could explain why it’s “the most amount of nonsense” and “mental gymnastics” in actual detail instead of just saying that. as is, this is a very unproductive comment.
Because of course Invidious calls YouTube APIs. They call the internal APIs the same way YouTube official client calls the API. They even have the API Key of one of YouTube client’s in their repo. The guy’s argument is that since they reverse engineered the calls, which is fine, they don’t have to agree to YouTube’s TOS to call it, which means YouTube’s cease and desist invalid. I host my own private instance of Invidious to stream youtube audio to my phone. Of course reverse engineering is fine, scarping is fine, even the code is fine, and I’d agree that YouTube going after repos on github is wrong. But of course hosting Invidious is a violation of YouTube’s TOS.
I’ll admit I hadn’t seen that, and that I was just echoing what TheFrenchGhosty said. That sure does look like official API access. They also seem to make calls through that wrapper to access comments and plenty of other things, so it’s not just sitting there unused.
Thankfully, TheFrenchGhosty is on the Fediverse, so let’s ask them: @[email protected] @[email protected] (not sure which one of these to use) How is this not using an official YouTube API?
The README and the refute of YouTube’s C&D letter both claim that Invidious doesn’t use YouTube’s APIs at all - not merely that the response creation/interpretation was reverse-engineered. Obviously, the TOS applies to the fact that you interact with the API, not whether you access it manually or with the help of some code pre-prepared by Google. Yet it seems that other people have vetted you and not raised this issue. So I’m assuming we’re simply misunderstanding here, and hoping you can clear it up.
Hello,
The thing is that the agreement they linked apply to the official YouTube API (the one that you have to register for).
Invidious uses the InnerTube (a completely different “API” used by all official YouTube clients). Invidious basically acts like a web browser that access the YouTube website. It is therefore not required to agree to any TOS/policies.
well, there was a long thread about this on /r/selfhosted where @[email protected] @[email protected] was saying pretty much what I said, but with a tad more mental gymnastics mostly about EU laws regarding reverse engineering and lack of a formal agreement between them and YouTube.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), /r/selfhosted is private atm due to the blackout, so I’m unable to find and share thread link.
The facts are:
- Invidious (as an OSS project) calls undocumented internal YouTube APIs (they call it InnerTube).
- Anyone can host an Invidious instance.
- The main Invidious instance, i.e: https://invidious.io/ received a cease and desist from YouTube.
@[email protected] @[email protected] posted all about this on GitHub, reddit, their personal blog, and contacted random media outlets like the one linked here, to complain about how “we have nothing to do with YouTube, why is YouTube bullying us”. And since everyone obviously wants to give the little guy the benefit of the doubt, everyone starts wondering how it could be that a project that’s all about providing an alternative UI for YouTube, doesn’t call YouTube.
It’s like if a movie pirating website is trying to argue
“Endgame.mp4” is just a file name. It has nothing to do with Marvel or Disney. What the hell are those greedy companies have to do with us??
I’m all for invidious, piracy, etc. But seriously?
You can’t say something that profound and leave us on a cliffhanger… Ellaborate a bit please?
They’ve (convincingly) followed up above. I’m hoping the contributors to Invidious can clear this up. If no one replies here, I’ll open an issue on Invidious’ GitHub page asking that clarification be added to the readme on how their YoutubeAPI wrapper is not using an official YouTube API.
One of the devs answered above
I’ve replied to that, I’m not satisfied. It’s a bit of a wall of text though.
TL;DR: “clean room reverse engineering” has a specific definition and I don’t believe it applies here. I do believe that the cited TOS applies to an internal API endpoint which is publicly accessible. Both things spell trouble.
I also take issue with the phrase “does not use official YouTube APIs” in the readme, but maybe that’s pedantry between “official” and “documented.”
Is youtube going to go after all the hosts? Lots of people are hosting their own copy of it. It’s OSS.
That’s what I wonder as well. Probably they’ll be satisfied with bringing down the Invidious project website, including their documentation and installation files.
Yeah that’s probably not gonna happen, they have communicated that they won’t give up without a fight.
Why are all websites trying to lock down users own content? First with Twitter, then Reddit, and now Youtube…
Rising interest rates (among other factors) are causing investors to pull out. Since these websites have always relied on investors they never had to be profitable until now.
Lmao good luck, google.
Between piped, invidious, and all their alternatives+instances there’s no way they can win this fight. Hydra will prevail.
