What's wrong with packaging other people's content as long as you're not profiting from it?
If the content owner wants it removed there should be a way to request that while not negatively affecting the developers account.
Plus the whole 3 strikes rule seems a bit too strict for me especially if it's going to be enforced so heavy handedly for what is obviously a minor issue that could have been resolved by a email conversation.
Not to mention other Google accounts like Google Wallet and Google Music getting banned for something like this.
What does one have to do with the other? Do you mean to tell me if i get banned in the Play store all Google account on all services get banned including my Google drive, Google docs, gmail etc
Doesn't that seem a bit absurd to anyone?
How would you like your entire music library deleted because your developer account got banned?
Everything, and the "you're not profiting from it" part is completely irrelevant and can be skipped from the sentence.
Redistributing other people's content without their consent is simply not allowed, and the fact that they have made this content freely available on channel A doesn't give you permission to make it freely available on channel B.
And no matter what position you take on copyright, impersonating their name, as the original poster had done, is clearly unethical and unexcusable.
So it's not really impersonation is it?
Plus they can always just request nicely for it to be removed if their really that bothered by it.
What is with this need of taking drastic measures for something as simple as this. Whatever happened to talking to the developer and sorting it out like gentlemen.
Perhaps they feel that repackaging other peoples content leads to needless confusion about what is official and not, since anyone and their cat can put up an app that wraps a Youtube channel.
Maybe they feel that apps like that are low quality, so to set a bar they'll restrict it to only the actual rights holders who have a more vested stake in making a good app.
It's really a business decision.
In some ways the www is still the wild wild west, anything goes until they come looking for you. Looking for gold on another person's land and such.
(also, your comparison to houses and cars is nigh-on nonsensical: copyrighted material is not a possession, and one person using it does not preclude another person using it, whereas if someone took my car I would be down by one car.)
Why do you place the content into the internet if you don't want other people to use it? You also don't complain about search engines indexing your content or other people linking to your content.
I don't see how wrapping that content is/was different from what Firefox does - except that firefox allows you to go to more than one webpage.
This is, in my mind, a separate issue from impersonating a company.
When it comes to copies of things, though, that all breaks down. When you make a movie and I make an illegal copy (I don't pirate things but let's suppose for a second) you aren't prevented from owning the movie any longer. You've lost a sale for sure, but I didn't just take the copyright away from you and now it's mine and I can sell it and you can't. But that's not even what this guy did.
What we're talking about here is the creation of an "unauthorized" front-end that uses public APIs to display things which are already public.
When you said "take" you're really abusing language in a preposterous way.
First of all nobody was denied use of anything so it's not STOLEN.
Second this content is already freely available on the web.
Third it's freely available via the generic youtube apps google publishes.
Fourth his app didn't download copies to his servers which it then served up (which would be copyright infringement) denying the originating youtube channels views or likes or whatever.
By your "packaging" logic anyone who embeds a bunch of a particular youtube channel's videos onto a webpage should have their servers nuked from orbit. That doesn't pass the laugh test.
https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+embed+channel
If using an unauthorized front-end is really so naughty then why are people allowed to embed things?
Should youtube channel owners be able to dictate which browsers people are allowed to use to view their channels on youtube? Should they be allowed to say "IPv4 only" and disallow the use of IPv6? Should they have the right to dictate which networks are allowed to transport their video? Maybe their content should only be visible to Mac owners and sufficiently cool linux guys but under no circumstances should a windows user be able to view their video.
That would be helpful and remove all the confusion.
Edit: We don't all live in the US so don't assume your laws apply to everyone lawyer-san. Even if something equivalent did exist in every other country it still doesn't make it sane. We all know copyright is broken in many ways. The default should be open like it originally used to be.
Edit: We don't all live in the US so don't assume your laws apply to everyone.
I'm well aware that we don't all live in the US; I don't, either. But if you publish an app in an US marketplace, it's subject to US law.
Say I made a show and sell DVDs of the show for $20 to cover all the costs of the show. When you buy the DVD you agree to not reproduce them so that I can continue to sell more copies to cover the cost of the show. You then start reproducing them and selling them at your cost(no profiting right?) which is about $0.05. Obviously some will get it from you instead of me because it is so much cheaper and I will make less profit, or not meet costs. If you don't see what is wrong in breaking your word (and a legally binding contract) and causing harm to someone just because you didn't profit from it, I don't know what argument would.
If they had given you access to the content under a license which allowed you to share it then yeah sure who cares repackage away. If they shared it with you with the specific previsions that you can do this but not that, then you turn around and do that. Then why would you think it is OK to do that?
"I wrote a simple YouTube client app using the latest YouTube APIs" - The content was not pirated, he created an app with one purpose; to allow you to play videos from one particular YouTube channel.
Remember, their app is nothing more than a small blob of java[script] that provides a limited but improved window onto youtube.
All the content is already available on youtube. He's just providing a different way of finding it. Nothing wrong with it.
