The popular Vanced YouTube app is being discontinued, after a legal threat from Google. The creators of Vanced have revealed the project will be shut down in the coming days, with download links set to be removed. While the app will continue to work for anyone who currently has it installed on Android, without any future updates it’s likely to stop working at some point soon. The Vanced owners say they’ve had to discontinue the project “due to legal reasons.”
Google sent the Vanced owners a cease and desist letter recently, which has forced the developers to stop distributing and developing the app. “We were asked to remove all references to ‘YouTube’, change the logo, and remove all links related to YouTube products,” says an admin from the Vanced team in a Discord message to The Verge.
The most surprising thing for me is not that Google shut Vanced down, but that it took them this long. YouTube with ads is a terrible user experience, so I pay for YouTube Premium to get rid of them, but obviously, not everyone has the means to do so, be it financially or because of some inane Google restriction. Vanced offered a great alternative for these people.
With Google trying ever harder to monetise the hell out of YouTube views, it was only a matter of time before it would go after Vanced. In the past few months, I noticed a considerable uptick in mentions of and references to the application, and Google probably noticed too.
Pretty sad about this. I pay for YTP but also use Vanced A LOT. Only really because it restores the client to a properly configurable one.
Once Vanced stops working I’ll cancel YTP and move to adblocking and watching in the browser.
That’s the next question in software-related litigation (now that the whole question of API copyrightability has been settled, mostly in favour of the little guy since API re-implementation can fall under fair use):
The next question is: If there is an online service with a publicly-reachable API, and has a huge Terms-Of-Service agreement with all kinds of restrictions, can I make an app that accesses that publicly-reachable API in a way that violates the ToS?
(since the application itself doesn’t violate the ToS and the ToS itself might not be legally enforceable)
What an organisation like the FSF should do (if they ever wake up from their slumber and internal bickering) is create a clone of the Vanced app and make it publicly available, so Google has to sent a proper lawsuit instead of getting what they want via backroom agreements.
kurkosdr,
(my emphasis).
Personally I think the API copyright case was absolutely devastating for little guys; APIs have been deemed copyrightable. Fair use exceptions don’t come automatically or cheap. Every project can be sued for violating API copyrights and the onus is on them to discontinue their violation or build a fair use legal defense. It’s all about technicalities. Judges have very different opinions on the matter of API copyrights, even directly contradicting one another as the google case itself shows. The outcome will come down to the quality of your legal team, which you can control although it might cost millions, and the judge you get, which you can’t control.
I wish APIs would have been ruled definitively uncopyrightable, but we can’t change it.
I agree with you you. It’s not the program that has to agree to the ToS, it’s the user themselves. The program itself doesn’t breaking any laws and under contract law terms are not supposed to be unilaterally applied to entities who haven’t agreed to them. The same was true of P2P sharing apps back in the day. The P2P software wasn’t illegal and had clear legitimate use cases. But media companies still went to court and successfully shut down several P2P authors anyways making the authors legally responsible for their user’s actions. I very much disagree with this and I think it raises the risk of techno-phobic judges ruling against pen testing tools like Kali Linux just because they can expose vulnerabilities in corporate networks.
I doubt that would happen, but a court case over advertiser’s right to show us ads would be interesting. I for one don’t know how that would play out. My vote is against the advertisers for sure. Advertising has gotten so damn invasive.
“Cooler Screens” is pushing a pilot program right now to put spyware tracking and digital ads on the face of pharmacy refrigerator doors so you can’t see what’s inside without looking at them. I hope this crashes and burns. Being pummeled by even more ads is the last thing anybody wants.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/walgreens-smart-fridge-spys-on-you/
API copyrightability was always debatable. Any non-trivial literal works are potentially copyrightable and there is no exception in copyright law for APIs. The courts decided that APIs are copyrightable, so that was the end of the discussion. From that point on, fair use was the best kind of outcome we could hope for and we got that. I think it’s a mostly-good outcome, since it’s unlikely that companies will now go through the effort of suing given the strong fair-use precedent for the Java APIs.
Please keep in mind that what matters is what the law says, not what is fair. Courts have to work within the limits of the law provided to them by the lawmakers.
The thing is that P2P sharing apps are not targeting any particular copyrighted work, and as you say, they do have clear and legitimate use cases, and, joy of joys, the courts have recognised that, which is all that matter (it’s why apps like qBitTorrent can be distributed openly from US servers).
The case for an app that targets a particular API of a particular service and provides features that violate the ToS of that service is another thing. It all boils down to whether the ToS is legally binding to the user, and if it is legally binding to the user, whether it’s legal to provide a service that targets the particular API in a way that helps the user violate the legally-binding ToS.
I know, I know… the IANAL people of the internet already have opinions on the subject (like they had on the issue of API copyrightability), but unless we get a court case, we can’t know. And that’s why it’s the next big battleground in software-related litigation.
Vanced has chosen to waive the white flag. I think the FSF should strive for a real trial so the battle isn’t forfeit without a court showdown.
Remember that, back in the first days of emulators, lots of authors of emulator software waived the white flag when presented with legal threats, until some company got their court case and won (which is how we eventually got RetroArch).
provide a service that targets = provide an app that targets
(though services are also part of the question)
kurkosdr,
The problem with fair use exceptions is that they determined on a case by case basis. Even someone other than google who wants to use java APIs would still be facing risk today. The Java APIs did not become uncopyrightable. Oracle could still sue over them and it will come down to case by case technicalities: “A fair use exception is not justified here because -whatever-“. I think the google trial produced a net loss for the industry, but it is what it is and I understand that complaining about it won’t help anything. Shrug.
Sometimes I think that’s a bit optimistic, haha. It’s not supposed to work this way but sometimes judges place their personal opinions above the law. Even the US supreme court is overturning long standing precedent over political ambitions 🙁
Well, they can now because the RIAA stopped it’s cease and desist orders, but there was a time when they were actively being shut down by the courts. Luckily that era is behind us, but it shows that having legitimate uses doesn’t necessarily mean courts will rule in your favor.
I agree I’d prefer to see it go to court. Still I can’t pretend that I’d be able to do it either. I wouldn’t have the means to go to trial against a major corporation. The consequences of going to trial without a proper defense could be worse for everyone in setting bad precedent than not going to trial at all.
I don’t remember that actually. Maybe they have a model to follow.
Disagree. Before the Google vs Oracle case, implementing someone else’s API was taboo. Yes, I know that open-source projects like Wine do it, but for big corporations, it was generally taboo particularly because nobody wanted to be the first court case. Now that someone put the good fight, there is a strong fair-use precedent. Not as good as declaring APIs uncopyrightable, but at least some major corporation did it, got sued, and won. So it’s a mostly-win in my book.
Sorry to be harsh, but are you willing to officially sign that accusation (and be responsible for the consequences) or it’s yet another IANAL post? I get with disagreeing with their rulings, but accusing them of placing personal opinions and serving political ambitions is another thing and carries consequences unless you can prove it somehow. I think that internet posts accusing the US supreme court of bias are the kind of posts the internet can do without the most.
Hmm… Software like uTorrent existed even back in the MPAA suefest days, but LimeWire was shut-down, so I won’t comment because I don’t know the details.
Which is why some organization like the FSF should do it. If they ever wake up from their slumber and internal bickering, that is.
Well, I don’t agree with your assessment here. Cloning interfaces used to be extremely common and wasn’t even frowned upon. Almost the entire PC industry was built on copying programming interfaces and programming languages. BIOS, DOS, BASIC, PASCAL, and so on. They were independently implemented by many parties and it was considered fair as long as the implementation wasn’t copied. Anyways it’s a bygone era. Now days we need to be a lot more careful.
It’s no secret that the GOP’s is using it’s majority to overturn decades of precedent. This is why abortion rights are being repealed. Some people may be for or against it, but either way I think it’s important that we recognize that the court’s political makeup has an effect.
Yeah, we’ll just have to wait.
The big difference is that things like BASIC and PASCAL were open (obligatory “Microsoft did not invent BASIC” shoutout here). The only notable exception was the Microsoft APIs and that was because Microsoft was knee-deep in anti-trust lawsuits revolving around Windows to even dare touch projects such as Wine or DOSbox, which is what allowed those projects such as Wine or DOSbox to exist free of lawsuits. BIOS was a copyright issue. Java APIs was the first case of its kind really.
Going off topic here, but no the supreme court did not repeal abortion rights. Texas thinks they have found a workaround that avoids the Supreme Court altogether. (whether they did remains to be seen) I don’t accept that “the court’s political makeup has an effect” and I also doubt it matters in this case anyway since API copyrightability is not a hot-button issue.
You’d think that given their stance on “non-free javascript”, the FSF would have rushed to make a free-software YouTube client and defend it in court, but nope. More proof that the FSF does not do activism about the present but about their past.
kurkosdr,
The challenges never stopped, the difference is that previously the supreme court always upheld abortion rights over state’s attempts to overturn them whereas today’s supreme court is ceding those abortion rights to the states. Some people are for, and others are against, but it’s clear that changing political make up of the court is affecting people’s legal rights and it could extend into lots of areas.
I don’t know what their criteria is for getting involved. I would think that they need to pick and choose their battles though. Fighting multinational corporations is expensive and can drag on for years.
Alfman, kurkosdr,
I really don’t know the reason, but the speculation at Ars was about crypto:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/google-shuts-down-youtube-vanced-a-popular-ad-blocking-android-app/
sukru,
I don’t know, I actually don’t use youtube on android so all of this is news to me. Everyone is saying that the vanced client is actually a cracked version of google’s code. If that’s the case then it’s kind of surprising google didn’t come after them before.
NewPipe is great alternative. It supports picture-in-picture too, and t’s open source. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/
It’s a terrible experience for you, but not a terrible experience for me. I absolutely hate having dozens of subscriptions chipping away at my wallet (and I don’t, I only have Google Drive and a VPN), so, between subscription and ads, I choose ads.
I block YouTube ads on the desktop (uBlock origin) but see them on my Nexus Player because I don’t want to bother with third-party apps by whoever.
Funny thing, if you pay for Google’s stupidly expensive fee to get rid of the ads, you’re still left with an inferior client.
Yeah, which is why I’ll cancel YTP when Vanced stops working. Not that I matter, but maybe if enough people do it? Unlikely.