In light of that, how can this be an antitrust case?
I think it is legal, the API is public data and accessing it should be protected by the First Amendment as far as I know.
Otherwise scrapping in general would not be allowed and search engines couldn't just crawl sites and list them as they'd need the permission of every site operator they list.
I don't see why APIs would be treated any different, and in Invidious' case they are actually scrapping the HTML page and not using the Android YouTube API. So it's a slightly different case but I do think that using that Android YouTube API should be OK as well, it's all public anyway.
It is the same, they may send you the URL encrypted (more likely obfuscated), but then they also send you the code. In this case, they are giving you all you need to decrypt it. You just run their code that they sent to you.
IANAL, but if I post my username/password here, I should not be able to sue you that you hacked my account.
What is illegal is circumventing any measures at DRM that involve encryption.
> Unless Google wants to prove that running secret_youtube_sauce.js can only be ran by specific user-agents on their own website otherwise it's DMCA infringement, they can try
This is exactly the implication here. It’s not copyright infringement, it’s DRM bypassing which is a separate law. The implication is that google wouldn’t have sent you the content (encrypted or not) if the user agent (or whatever) was different. Therefore, you’re deceiving them and illegally bypassing DRM.
> If they win, you've got a bigger problem anyways, since they would win the right to only allow Chrome to access Google properties.
IIRC YouTube used to not work right on Firefox, intentionally. Also lots of Google properties are behind a Chrome-wall (eg their LLM generative search results)
IANAL, but that’s the gist of what’s happening here.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/It-s-now-illegal-fo...