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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

You made me scroll through the youtube TOS to see if that was considered a violation.

As far as I can tell it's technically not... in fact, I can't even find a blanket "YouTube reserves the right to remove any content, for any reason, whatsoever" statement. They don't actually need to state that in the TOS, because they do have that right, but, still.

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Section 4(J): "YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time."

Section 6(F): "YouTube reserves the right to remove Content without prior notice."

https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms

That's indeed quite telling about the TOS nowadays: two people from HN double/triple checked the TOS to find a simple statement and couldn't find it. Yet, it's there.

We need a grep that finds semantic meaning instead of exact string matches. Like an latent factor model of sorts.

I saw those, but the first is couched within the copyright violation rule, so I assumed it was associated. I.e. we can remove it for copyright violation at anytime.

For the second, I assumed that "if your content was removed for a reason we justified here, we don't have to warn you beforehand."

I'm no lawyer though and I'm sure in court those clauses would be summarily smacked across my face one way or the other.

You made me scroll through the TOS again and triple check. Indeed, there is no clause for wholesale termination, but they do require you to follow the community guidelines. Those guidelines do say that you can't promote violence -- and while committing an act of violence isn't necessarily promotion, it could be interpreted as such.

Still interesting to see that there's no blanket termination policy, though. I stand thoroughly corrected.

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