YouTube legal team contacted us · Issue #3872 · iv-org/invidious
github.com
They don't understand that we never agreed to any of their TOS/policies, they don't understand that we don't use their API. What now? Things will continue normally until they can't anymore. Assume ...

Youtube’s lawyers are going after Invidious, the alternative open source front end to YouTube. Enshittification never stops huh?

  • riskable
    2•2 years ago

    In 2012 a Federal court held that Zappos Terms of Service (TOS) were unenforceable:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Zappos.com,_Inc.,_Customer_Data_Security_Breach_Litigation

    …for two reasons:

    • The agreement stated that it could be changed at any time without informing end users.
    • End users never actually had to click on anything to “agree” to the TOS. In other words, since users didn’t have to “agree” to the TOS to use the website it didn’t count as a legal contract.

    The situation of Invidious seems like it falls under the second bullet: Invidious (developers) never agreed to YouTube’s TOS therefore YouTube can’t claim it has a legal contract between them and Invidious.

    A physical, real-world equivalent would be putting up a painting in a public space/commons (i.e. youtube.com) with a little plaque on the side with lots of tiny text saying something like, “by viewing this painting you agree to adhere to the following terms…” No reasonable person would expect people to have to abide by such rules. Especially since you have to view the painting first before you can even get close enough to view the painting’s TOS.

    youtube.com is in the same situation: How do you even find the TOS for YouTube’s API? You have to go looking for it at youtube.com (and it’s not trivial to find either). You don’t have to “agree” to anything before accessing youtube.com… It just loads. It’s the same with the API: You don’t have to sign an agreement before you can start using it. It’s right there, always accepting requests.

    It seems obvious (to me) how YouTube can solve this problem. The law has loads of precedent and a very simple legal mechanism that would be (technically) trivial for YouTube to implement: Require users sign up/make an account and “agree” to their TOS before they’re allowed to view anything or access the API. Now they can go after individual users using tools like Invidious to their heart’s content. They still wouldn’t be able to go after the developers though since it would be difficult to prove that they agreed to the TOS.