YouTube legal team asked Invidious developers to take down the service within 7 days

[Catweazle]

YouTube's legal team has demanded that Invidious, the free and open source privacy-focused YouTube frontend, cease offering their client within seven days. The legal team emailed Invidious stating that they had recently become aware of the service and that it appeared to be in violation of the YouTube API Services Terms of Service and Developer Policies.
In response, the project manager of the Invidious project replied on GitHub that they never agreed to any of YouTube's Terms of Services or Policies, and that Invidious doesn't use YouTube's API to fetch and display the videos. He added that “Things will continue normally until they can't anymore.”, implying that they're not going to comply with YouTube legal team's request.

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[Pathduck]

@Catweazle said in YouTube legal team asked Invidious developers to take down the service within 7 days:

they had recently become aware of the service

How long have they been going - 4 years?

I wouldn't give YT much hope here. Yes, all content on YT is basically the property of Google, and Invidious is infringing on this content by streaming it to their own site without those nice ads that bring in the $$$.

Invidious appears to be hosted by njal.la on servers in Iceland so appars pretty safe from US law.
https://njal.la/about/

"We're a team of committed internet activists, and we're also involved in other privacy projects such as the IPredator VPN service. Some of us have also been involved in projects like The Pirate Bay and Piratbyrån to mention a few things."
https://njal.la/faq/

It's open-source and should be easy to fork and create mirror sites in very little time.

YouTube will probably try to change their code to block it (and tools like yt-dlp etc), the tools will find ways around this, and so on etc etc ad Infinitum.

I'm pretty sure YT wants to implement some kind of DRM on their vids in the future, but this would cause problems for all kinds of embed sites, and might simply not be technically feasible given the massive amount of data being put in and out of the system every second.

[Catweazle]

@Pathduck, apart Invidious (with half a dozen forks it has) isn't the only front-end, there are also f.Exmpl. Piped and CloudTube, also with several instances, the desktop-client FreeTube and some others. All FOSS and forkables.

It is clear that Google has problems avoiding the trend towards decentralization in the network, being in the situation of trying to plug 12 holes in the dam with 10 fingers