[Shivetya]

Packaging another person's content should result in an immediate take down of an app. A content owner should not have to opt out of other people using their material, that is akin to telling people you can use someone's stuff until they catch you. I put along the lines of, would you let people use your house just because the door was open? Take your car? It is content/stuff you own. Why do some many discount digital content in value?

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.

[ZoFreX]

OK, so let's ban Firefox from the app store for packaging other people's content. He didn't package, nor did he take their material - that implies that his app somehow contained their content. It did not. It simply let you browse their YouTube channel for content the content holder had made freely available.

(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.)

[klibertp]

You can have your content just fine without anyone taking it from you - just don't publish it. Wanting to both give the content to people and keep it to yourself at the same time is a bit contradictory IMHO. I'm not strictly against people being able to restrict how their content is used, but they definitely should have to explicitly state this. The content itself wants to spread and it will do so if left alone. Unlike your car, remember, which won't magically multiply so that every single person looking on it gets his own version. Anyway, if you want your content to be restricted in some way you should just say so, because what you want is unnatural and exceptional in case of content (and perfectly reasonable, natural and common place in case of your car, where, conveniently, you don't have to do anything if you happen to wan't it to not be stolen).

[wolfgke]

> Packaging another person's content should result in an immediate take down of an app. A content owner should not have to opt out of other people using their material, that is akin to telling people you can use someone's stuff until they catch you.

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.

[tomjen3]

Lets not get into the car analogies here. Please.

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.

[thefreeman]

The difference is Firefox doesn't put one app for every website it accesses in the App Store named after the website and using the websites logo.

[tomjen3]

I specifically said they were two distinct issues. He could have named the app "watch car shown online".

[msandford]

Here's the deal. When you're talking about physical stuff when I have it, you can't have it and vise versa. If you have a car and I steal it, you are denied the use of said car.

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.

[Fuxy]

How about a bit of text near your content warning me that I'm not allowed to use your stuff regardless of my intentions be it a free fan app that will actually spread your content further or whatever.

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.

[icebraining]

The text is in 15 U.S. Code § 1114.

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.