The app is on a .app TLD, and that's ran by google. So theoretically google just pull the domain registration. I wouldn't put it past them. Hooray for vanity domains!
- The creator received a letter from YouTube's legal team regarding the GRJ app, which they claim violates YouTube's terms of service.
- The creator, representing Futo, responded by stating that the GRJ app does not use the YouTube API services and is therefore not subject to those terms of service.
- The creator expresses frustration with how YouTube and other platforms often arbitrarily delete creator accounts and content, threatening people's livelihoods.
- The creator sees the GRJ app as a solution to help creators connect with their audience even if their accounts are deleted from platforms.
- The creator is critical of how the more users are willing to pay for content and software, the worse the experience and more abuse they face.
- The creator shares a personal example of being unable to play downloaded YouTube content offline, despite paying for YouTube Premium.
- The creator is done accepting the concept that the more one gives, the worse the treatment they receive in return.
- The creator states they have the resources and intention to legally fight YouTube over the GRJ app, unlike "four kids in a college dorm room."
- The creator emphasizes that Futo is a serious company, not just a hobby project, and is willing to spend significant money on legal representation.
- The creator is committed to continuing to offer the GRJ app to serve their customers, despite YouTube's demands to cease and desist.
Having custom f-droid repositories isn't that unusual or necessarily malicious. For example the microG project has its own f-droid repo. iirc there's some overhead with getting something into f-droid since they have their own build process, versus just uploading an APK, which might be why they chose that.
Just look at how out of date NewPipe is in F-Droid, it's maintainer just isn't motivated to get new versions of the app building on F-Droid's servers, leaving end users with a half year out of date client that is unreliable to use.
Scroll down the page please and note the prior F-Droid release was Version 0.25.2 (994) - Added on Aug 10, 2023
All of the v26 releases are missing. F-Droid's maintainers just did not build or publish these, leaving F-Droid users with a broken app since early December 2023 until 2 weeks ago, basically 5 months of shipping an app that did not consistently work.
(IANAL) Seems like the right response would be something like:
> We have no record of ever entering into any agreement or business relationship with Google. If our records are mistaken, please send us a copy of the contract you believe we signed.
Google are not the police and they shouldn't be able to enforce their arbitrary terms on other companies just because they exist on the same internet.
> YouTube claims he violated their API terms of service and he [Louis] explains that GrayJay doesn't use the API so they never agreed or accepted those terms.
The point (of the person you replied to, too, presumably) is not that they don't have an agreement with Google, but that they're not violating these specific terms (as claimed by Google) because that's not what they signed up for. They run a channel, not an API client. (My understanding of their words, not saying I can judge the legal merit of this.)
Not that it seems like a (at least short term) beneficial move to get this type of cross with the platform that can probably terminate your account at their sole discretion, but I'm happy he's trying to get Youtube content more liberated. For instance, you can mark your videos as having a creative commons license, but that means nothing because it's not like it spawns a download button for the users to exercise their granted license. Anyone besides the uploader still has to violate YT's ToS (which I'm sure forbids these third-party video downloaders) in order to get at that creative commons video data
Just to clarify: This letter was about GrayJay, a 3rd party YouTube front-end that -as I understand it- gets its YT content by parsing the YouTube website. This way they can access YouTube content without using their official (or any, really) API. Parsing the site is more complicated and a lot of work to maintain but good for privacy and no restrictions from API terms of use.
Google pretends not to know or understand this by asking the GrayJay devs to honor the terms of an API they actively avoid using.
GrayJay is being developed by a team at FUTO (dot org) that Louis Rossmann is affiliated with. His personal 'Louis Rossmann' YouTube channel is seperate from FUTO and GrayJay, and isn't part of this issue, nor is his personal channel mentioned in the letter.
I hope I remember correctly, I listened to his video while falling asleep ^^
If you don't need an account or an api key to access it, then there's no contract signed, and so they can't restrict your usage contractually. An API with no requirement for an API key is functionally identical here. On the other hand, scraping a website that only exposes content to logged in users is the same as using an api behind a key. The relevant part is whether you need to sign a contract to access the content.
I think that ship sailed when websites started having to ask users consent for cookies. Now it's no longer "accessing a website" it's "interacting with a service." If they have to ask for consent to set a cookie, you have to abide by their ToS to connect to their servers.
I highly doubt that is legally the case. In situations when I have been in conversations with lawyers about this sort of thing they have been universally of the opinion that to be bound to some terms of service the user has to take an affirmative action to accept those terms. The action can’t just be expressing your cookie preference, and in fact in some jurisdictions (Europe, California? I think) the cookie regulations that gave rise to those annoying consent dialogs specifically say you can’t give a user a different quality of service if they refuse the cookies, so that would seem to undermine your argument somewhat.
DDoS is arbitrary with any definition. What’s the difference between a weak server that can’t handle an influx of load vs an “attack”? The result is the same. It all depends on intent and coordination, which is better defined by lawyers than engineers.
To some extent, you have to expect that anything with an open port 80 on the public internet is accessed by strangers. First because it’s the technical reality, but it’s also part of the principles of the web in some deeper philosophical sense.
Companies are separate legal entities from the people who work there.
YT can't make demands of a company just because one of the company's employees happens to have a YT channel. It's true if some random gaming youtuber has a job at IBM, and it's also true if you're a public figure like Louis Rossman.
IBM can say they have no business relationship with YT, even if one of IBM's employees runs a youtube channel. And Grayjay can say they have no business relationship with YT, even if Louis Rossman has a channel.
This is in addition to lucb1e's comment about the API terms specifically. Even if YT's lawyers are confusing the individual Louis Rossman with the company he's associated with, they still seem confused about which set of terms he agreed to.
IANAL, but disagree. In the context of business relationships, tortious interference is "intentionally acting to prevent someone from successfully establishing or maintaining business relationships with others".
GRJ is not preventing anyone from maintaining a business relationship with Google.
That Google might -choose- to end a business relationship is on them, but they weren't prevented from having a relationship with their YouTube 'customer', or vice versa.
It's more complex. If my app causes someone else to violate ToS, it's very much on realm of the types of things which lead to expensive litigations as I've seen in related domains.
There is an agreement in the "Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots" sense. I.e., by connecting to YouTube Google's lawyers feel you implicitly agreed to do so under Google's terms only... and Google can hire better lawyers than you can.
That would be a uniquely stupid interpretation of the law to try to set as a precedent but a company that blindly connects to everything on the Internet constantly. If making an http connection to a server and receiving content constituted acceptance of a license, Google would be the biggest and dumbest ATM ever
The originator of the quote, Warner exec Jamie Kellner, said that there was some allowance for going to the bathroom... but that routinely skipping ads, as the brand-new TiVo DVR could do, constituted theft of programming.
Honestly, he wasn't wrong: if content is provided on an ad-supported basis, there's a give and take. The content was provided with the understanding that the advertisers who paid the network in lieu of the viewer would have the viewer's attention during ad breaks. If the viewer should screen out the advertisements, they are getting the benefits of programming while depriving the network of the benefits it hoped to realize by providing the content. This is morally equivalent to stealing. Everybody seems to understand this except for tech nerds, who for literally half a century have been creatively interpreting IP law and its philosophical underpinning in their favor.
I expect some browser fingerprinting and remote attestation tech to be deployed by Google in order to catch content thieves, and some scathing DMCA lawsuits to result in the wake of the inevitable attempts to circumvent said tech.
If it's not possible to ethically deliver content on an ad-supported basis, then maybe we shouldn't allow it to exist, instead of excusing immoral thinks because "that's the only way to do it".
>If the viewer should screen out the advertisements, they are getting the benefits of programming while depriving the network of the benefits it hoped to realize by providing the content.
I find this idea disgusting. There are many kinds of contracts we don't allow - for example you can't sell yourself into slavery, even if you want to. Similarly I think that the "contract" you describe should not be allowed to exist, even assuming it's legally binding right now (and I doubt it).
>Everybody seems to understand this except for tech nerds
In my experience it's the other way around - everybody disagrees, except a tiny minority of people who benefit from the ad-supported monopoles.
It is too often that I get linked a 30 minute video that reading an abstract like this for most of them would really help me prioritise whether to watch it or not.
Now I guess I just need it in an extension to appear below the video automatically or something :)
TL;DR: Rossmann's team is developing Grayjay, a 3rd party YouTube (and other sites) client. Like Vanced. This makes YouTube unhappy, because they don't want 3rd party players which often do things like disable ads and telemetry.
The name of the organization is FUTO. It's not just Rossman, it's also the rich guy that came up with the concept and hired Rossman and other people who are building multiple FUTOish software programs.
Oh, cool. I didn't know Rossmann was related to Futo. I know Futo from [1]: 'The Voice Input app for Android that respects your privacy.' and I did not know Futo was more than 'Voice Input'.
As for Grayjay. Yeah, this is exactly what we need: an application which allows us to watch video (offline) without being tied to a platform.
We have a name for that: it is called a web browser. In a web browser, we use standards such as HTML and CSS. The user decides how a website looks, not the website (those are merely suggestions, the user is the one who in the end decides if they want to follow these).
Something like Grayjay is following the spirit of the WWW.
For the user, yes, the experience is largely the same, Vanced also has nearly the same UI, but YouTube/Vanced is very likely using a proprietary API, which makes it much easier to argue that TOS was violated, and that's what we are discussing in this thread.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to reading everything on HN; there's far too much.
You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
I'm saying I don't think this comment you've flagged yourself "ought to have been moderated." Louis Rothman is a public figure. There doesn't seem to be any rule against attacking public figures
... or is there? If so, when and how does it kick in?
Also, just call them "rules." Calling them "guidelines" implies they can be broken occasionally if there's a good reason. It's misleading.
The GP comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40242447) was flagged by users—lots of them, and rightly. It's a clear example of what we don't want on this site: personal attack, name-calling and snark, with zero interesting information. It doesn't matter whether the target is a public figure, because the issue is the poor quality of the comment itself.
You're right that they're "guidelines" not "rules" because there's a certain amount of slack. But in the current case, the comment went way beyond the slack.
Except for his own businesses and work, he refuses to understand or acknowledge that everything is composed of sequences of tradeoffs and they are that way for a reason. His schtick is painting things black and white instead and telling "they are out to get you, play you for fools, that is why things are the way they are, the world is being unfair to you! but you are clever and you won't fall into that trap!" - that elicits an emotional response from some and converts to views and clicks. Maybe that is not his schtick, but how he genuinely sees the world, that I don't know. It was the same when he had a couple thousand subscribers, and the same today, he is very consistent.
He's been frustrated with dating and women for a long time and there have been hints of that bullshit for a while. It's why I find it difficult to watch him anymore.
He's got over 2 mill followers. And can't get a date? Interesting, he should just switch his subject a bit towards things that women like. He'll have women breaking down his door just to talk to him.
> He'll have women breaking down his door just to talk to him.
Perhaps. Or maybe not. Though I'd agree that appearing romantically frustrated or thirsty will certainly turn most away; no matter how they come to meet you.
Swipe apps have ratcheted up expectations to unrealistic levels. The only hope for sub-180s is to meet people in real life via acquaintances with mutual attraction. The game has changed and the old rules don't apply any more.
I'm guessing 180 is 180cm, as 183cm is 6ft which fit's in to the whole "don't swipe if under 6ft" meme. Which, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is a popularised (no idea if it's actualy popular) line on dating app profiles where you swipe to indicate interest in talking. Which somewhat demystifies the rest.
That is not a popular thing to say about the internets own man sticking it to the man, but I agree. I havent seen the incelesque videos, but some of his content in the last years is very high on the drama, always bickering with everyone, whining about this and that. It is not the same as him fixing some board with a random piece lifted from some other board. This is a common pattern with people trying to do good but can't seem to come to grips with that they can't fix everything and thus become losers addicted to defeat. It is sad, I hope he gets better though.
I’ve said these about other platforms as well, but we need to heavily regulate large social media and content platforms like YouTube. They should not be able to arbitrarily demonetize, censor, shadow ban, or ban any content or users, which is where they are going unless Louis Rossman bends the knee. They also should not be allowed to operate in anti competitive ways like we see here. These big tech companies and social media platforms are too big and play too important a role in our modern society to just do whatever they want, and we should be treating them more like a utility. Alternatively, let’s split up all these big companies like Google and heavily tax all businesses that earn more than $10B in annual profit. Or both.
I think removing section 230 protections from these companies would be sufficient enough. You can’t have it both ways on being an editor of content (the algorithms) then claim you aren’t a publisher.
I have to ask: why do people think removing §230 will make (in their views) overly censorious social media platforms less censorious? The entire point of §230 is to make them immune to the liabilities of failing to moderate; in a world where, say, failing to take down a defamatory video makes the entire platform liable for defamation, the only logical course of action is to essentially take down everything somebody might find offensive. And if you're already incensed by how ready platforms are to do that today, that alternative reality would surely be far worse.
They think if you remove 230 they won't act as an editor, but only as a publisher, which means ZERO rules for content published except what is illegal by law.
Anyone who has moderated a forum in their lives know how exceedingly stupid this idea is.
It bifurcates platforms in two: those with no moderation, and those that have detailed human review for every video. A site like youtube is largely unworkable under the latter model, but is more workable under the former model. Either youtube would adopt such a model, or they would pivot to being essentially netflix with all licensed content. In the latter case another site would spring up or an existing site would become popular for people without an existing following to post videos, which would necessarily use a moderationless model.
It won't. If Youtube had no moderation, it would have no ad revenue. This would effectively kill every single website where users can publish content without having to go through a publishing contract first.
Youtube, Medium, Newsgrounds, every single comments section on news articles, all web forums, Discord, reviews on Amazon, Steam. I'm not even sure websites like buy me a coffee and patreon would be able to survive, because if they can't moderate their posts, that doesn't mean mastercard can't ban them, as mastercard isn't subject to publishing laws.
Mastercard et al are able to act as censors of the internet because websites have discretionary moderation policies. If, when mastercard demanded policy changes, websites could only respond with "sorry, it's out of our hands", then mastercard would give it up pretty quick. If they didn't, then bitcoin would become temporarily quite popular until they did. People want to be able to pay for things online, and credit cards are able to boss websites around only insofar as they don't push the envelope too far.
That's not going to be how things are likely to work. The financial industry censors disreputable sites because, effectively, disreputable sites are too expensive to support (e.g., high chargeback rates). The big social media sites today aren't going to "gee, golly, we have to completely abandon moderation to deal with liability now"; no, they're going to ramp up their moderation hard, because reputational risk is still a thing (also, they still have liabilities in countries that aren't the US that they are going to be very concerned about!).
And when you have sites like Youtube that retain a strict moderation policy, there is going to be absolutely 0 incentive for them to cave to whatever new niche sites crop up that try to play the "we can't enact moderation" card, exactly as happens today.
If youtube (and every similar website) was forced to abandon content moderation (or cease being "you"tube), that wouldn't substantially increase their chargeback rate.
> ramp up their moderation hard
Not good enough. Every claim about a person in every video posted to youtube would need to be fact checked prior to being visible on youtube. You are underestimating the degree to which this kills youtube qua youtube. This is subtantially more true for facebook, or for comment sections.
>still have liabilities in countries that aren't the US
Already most sites that are required to censor content for a certain locale only block it for IPs from that locale. I doubt this would change.
> Every claim about a person in every video posted to youtube would need to be fact checked prior to being visible on youtube.
No it doesn't. Defamation requires some form of mens rea of the statement being made (negligence or actual malice depending on who it's about), so liability for defamation in a no-§230 world largely means "will take it down after someone complains" as there's a pretty solid defense that not verifying the statements before uploading doesn't constitute even negligence, much less actual malice.
The liability rules in a no-§230 world aren't entirely clear since we're basing everything on just two court cases that existed pre-§230, but the social media companies are going to be extremely willing to throw down millions of dollars in legal fees to persuade judges to evolve liability rules that make their moderation policies feasible.
And this comes back to the main point again: no moderation just doesn't scale, not even in channels of merely a hundred people, let alone hundreds of millions. It is naïve to think that companies are going to suddenly decide that "no moderation" is less risk than "tailor both our moderation policies and the law to find some middle ground that is actually feasible."
I don't think you truly understand what "no moderation" actually means. No moderation means you have to accept porn (and I don't mean "oh look a titty" not-really-porn; I mean hardcore revenge porn); it means you have to accept the dreggiest of spam imaginable. In general, it means accepting the sort of videos that are so offensive to people that you're going to get sued anyways by people who are upset over content on your site, even though technically you're not liable for it (this already happens today in spades, even with §230 immunity).
And an unmoderated site isn't going to be all that fun for users. If there's no curation, you're going to mostly find dreck, which will turn users onto platforms that actually have content worth consuming. If there's curation, well congratulations, content creators still have to pander to the curation rules which is effectively the same moderation environment anyways.
Obviously not, I should have been more specific but I’m obviously referring to the large corporate internet gatekeepers (Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Amazon, etc).
That's fine, it'll allow more competition from those that are actually not publishing their content versus those that are doing both publishing and editorializing.
I should have clarified and specified that I was only referring to these trillion dollar multi-national corporations that can obviously afford to regulate their platforms themselves.
Regulations can be targeted you know, they don't have to be full-stop.
But the government likes this, as it lets them push censorship under the guise of eliminating "hate speech", "misinformation", "fake news". They've also tricked people into thinking they need it to filter out the former things. They don't, and are actively harmed by the censorship.
YouTube, Facebook, Instragram, etc are already doing this.
Also what's nice about the government is that they are compromised of citizens where we can vote in new people to lobby the changes we want. How can I do this at Google or Meta? That's something only the privileged can afford.
I don’t think that works in practise. Social media companies need to be able to use algorithms for discovery. The firehose approach doesn’t work at large scale. Algorithmic discovery will always have some type of bias and you’re just setting up a scenario where companies won’t be able to make any changes without getting sued. Utilities are essential to life. YouTube is not. If you don’t like the way YouTube operates, create your own. Kick did that. Parler did that. Elon did that by buying Twitter. If you don’t want to create one, join one of those.
If social media was ever regulated, it would have to (and should be, IMO) done from the angle of the financial regulation. If social media is compared to a marketplace, then the marketplace can be regulated to ensure financial health of the system.
What it shouldn't be regulated for is the content itself. I don't like congresspeople of any party wanting to regulate something because they see less of the news they like on one platform, regardless of if it's factual merit. These are voluntary entertainment sites. If you want to see a platform that carries your news, then instead you free to talk with your wallet, to petition the company and get other users on board, and totally free to start your own platform (or, as seems to be the trend nowadays, free to buy someone else's if you can't make one yourself)
Unfortunately this response (as well as the previous one) is quite childish and doesn't address any of the points Google is making.
I can only assume their legal team in the background advised them that they do not believe Google will take action (probably because of antitrust fears, etc) and thus no actual response is warranted.
If I was them I'd actually provide a constructive response arguing that their app is just like a browser (not too dissimilar to Google's own Chrome) and doesn't seek consent from the platform owner just like Chrome doesn't seek consent from the visited websites.
> doesn't address any of the points Google is making.
Yes it does. YouTube claims he violated their API terms of service and he explains that GrayJay doesn't use the API so they never agreed or accepted those terms. They had no need to.
The normal YouTube TOS says things like "You are not allowed to: access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service ... circumvent, disable, fraudulently engage with, or otherwise interfere with any part of the Service" https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#c3e2907ca8 This pretty much bans alternative clients.
Which is in some way worse. Not only would the TOS allow YouTube to ban Rossman, it would allow them to ban every person who uses GrayJay. Obviously they're not going to do that because of the collateral damage.
Do you need to agree to youtube's TOS to use it? I can open youtube in an incognito window or on a machine I never used without a TOS consent required.
Also, youtube itself is just a website. Websites can be accessed through multiple venues, aka browsers. Browsers don't always guarantee the way it will render or present html will be as the author would expect.
I'm not sure what type of response you're expecting because in their previous response they directly addressed Google's claims and clarified that their app is not using the Youtube API and therefore isn't bound by its terms of service. Google apparently sent their response to /dev/null and just reiterated their previous claims yet again, indicating that they're not engaging in good faith.
How about, by scraping my website they have agreed to my TOS which unilaterally supersedes any other agreements that may be in place. Any disputes between parties must be resolved by binding public votes on Twitter.
childish is a good way to describe how he and many people think when it comes to companies. the smartest people will just refuse to use any logical thinking and display extreme bias.
That reminds me of Groucho Marx's stunt of "responding" to a never-actually-made legal threat from Warner Brothers (publisher of Casablanca) over his movie A Night in Casablanca. As a pre-emptive media strike, it seemed to work.
> You claim you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without their permission. What about Warner Brothers — do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. When Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, we were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers and even before us, there had been other brothers — the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazoff; Dan Brouthers, an outfielder with Detroit; and “Brother, can you spare a dime?” This was originally “Brothers, can you spare a dime” but this was spreading a dime pretty thin so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other brother and whittled it down to “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
The app is on a .app TLD, and that's ran by google. So theoretically google just pull the domain registration. I wouldn't put it past them. Hooray for vanity domains!
https://get.app/
He needs to get better about posting the link to whatever he's talking about so I can read ahead and be more informed.