[SeanAnderson]

Hey. I'm not the person you're responding to, but your response sparked my interest given the context.

It sounds like you're saying, "Yes. Our technology enables someone to listen to YouTube without forcing them to continually view the video."

If so, I would like to caution you to tread lightly in this area. I'd built a 300K MAU YouTube-streaming Chrome extension which was ultimately terminated due to advertisers complaining to YouTube that viewers might consume content without visually seeing an advertisement. I went through a year of attempting to mitigate their concerns, but, ultimately, their expectation was that all a/v content become paused the moment video is not visible.

The only exception to this rule, that I am aware of, is Twitch.TV streamers listening to YouTube while streaming and viewers of the stream consuming that YouTube content without seeing the visuals. This is a backroom agreement between Amazon and the RIAA and is not an agreement I would encourage others to hope to achieve.

Obviously, you're not bound by YouTube's TOS, but run afoul and you'll find hyperbeam added to the big 4's url blacklist. This will prevent all YouTube content from playing through your domain.

[Kiro]

How would they block this exactly?

[SeanAnderson]

Technically? YouTube users are free to describe a deny list of domains. If the referer request header mentions the domain then content does not play.

If you employ technical mitigations, such as issuing requests from a server and misleading with the referer, YouTube will reach out with a C&D. If you don't honor it, then prepare to defend your usage in court similar to ytdl. They will make the case that 1984 Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. doesn't apply to here as there's clear commercial intent supporting the desire to re-stream media content

[Kiro]

I was mostly curious about this statement:

> Obviously, you're not bound by YouTube's TOS, but run afoul and you'll find hyperbeam added to the big 4's url blacklist. This will prevent all YouTube content from playing through your domain.

This seems like a non-issue since by the very nature of the service no referer is sent. The browser is spun up in a VM and streamed to the client through WebRTC.

So in order to technically block this they would need to know all the possible IPs of the servers.

[SeanAnderson]

Yeah. Running as a Chrome extension I had the ability to rewrite my referer to any URL I chose and had the technically sound defense of "My referer shouldn't be <domain> because I am an extension not a website"

When I commented on the technical viability of enforcement, they simply had a lawyer tell me to stop instead. If I had had enough spare resources to challenge it, then maybe things would've ended differently.

Just wanting to make sure we don't get caught up on focusing on what is technically possible. That's not how the world works. Laws, and interpretations of those laws, define what is allowed to be done with code.