First they went after Vanced, now Invidious. With the ongoing recession, companies are realising that less and less people would be be willing to pay for subscriptions and to increase their revenue they are going to tie all the loose ends they have allowed over the years.
The devs of invidious need to be more careful and circumspect in their language and response. I believe they have a good chance of fighting this, and continuing the project regardless, but Don't. Tickle. The dragon tail!
What's looking worse is the actual joke of a response from one of the developers.
"Lawyers hate this one weird trick."
In my experience, thinking you've found a loophole legally because it is using boilerplate language usually ends really badly. If you're not a lawyer, don't assume you're as smart as a lawyer when it comes to law, and definitely don't think your flowery prose means fuck all in court. Just because it wasn't addressed directly to this guy doesn't make this magically go away.
Relavent related links:
This just makes me think of Kleiman v. Wright, where Craig Wright (among many, many other shenanigans) claimed that a printout of an email wasn't an email, it was a piece of paper. That didn't end up going the way he wanted.
Indeed, if I were the developers I would be threading much more carefully. While it may be true that the letter is not precise enough, access to YouTube implies a relative acceptance of the terms of service of providing the service, and it is not so clear cut as Invidious claims.
the request won't hold up in court. they scrape Youtube's public site, so any complaint that claims they're violated the API's TOS is moot
This. They'll still try and take it off github though which is still a big deal
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