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by SeanAnderson 1389 days ago
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
1 comments
Kiro 1389 days ago
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.

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SeanAnderson 1389 days ago
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.

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