> Vanced is discontinued for "legal reasons" as vanced was infringing the logo and branding of the original YouTube app as the logo resembles the original logo in a similar way and was used without taking prior permission from Google for using the branding.
Huh?!? That was the only reason behind the C&D letter and they killed the product when a simple logo redesign could have solved the issue? Or the C&D letter would have voided any attempt to do that? Something doesn't add up.
I'm the developer of Cydia, an alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iOS devices, a software ecosystem which was filled with both modifications to existing clients and complete re-implementations of clients, and this is definitely the #1 mistake that new developers would make (much to my annoyance, as it just seems so OBVIOUS of a thing to not do, but people really are idiots): you need to be extremely careful with trademarks and logos--only ever talking about a client "for" some other service as opposed to using that service's name as a modifier on your app (so, "YouTube Vanced" is definitely never OK and a dumb decision when you could say "Vanced for YouTube" or even be extremely safe and just stick with "Vanced", leaving any mention of "YouTube" to your descriptions), etc.--lest you get wrecked. And yet, somehow, you see it happen time and time again as people just can't help themselves when it comes to using other peoples' trademarks for their clients.
And yes: it is an incredibly simple thing to avoid, and yet it is also a deceptively difficult thing to fix and cleanly walk away from later when the other party actively wants you to not exist as you are often now stuck in a really shitty position with respect to the hole you have already dug yourself into and the legal fees you are potentially going to lose just trying to defend yourself going forward. Hell: someone I don't like from the "extended" Cydia ecosystem (if nothing else: they are the kind of person who thinks they are above trademarks) once even just hinted on Twitter at building a product with the name "Snapchat" in it (which I obviously would never have sold as I was really careful about this sort of stuff) and their lawyers started coming after me with a cease and desist for something I wasn't even going to do, costing me thousands of dollars to deal with (as their lawyer knew to directly contact my lawyer, making it harder for me to avoid any costs).
A little off-topic, but it's really cool to see that you're still floating around here. One of my first "hacker" moments was Jailbreaking a used first-gen iPod I bought off Craigslist in 5th grade. I remember seeing your name on a number of things, and people always mentioned you on forums/IRC when I had questions. Never got around to saying hello, but I suppose it's better late than never to say 'thank you' for expanding my young mind and really shoving me head-first into the world of futzing with locked-down electronics!
> their lawyers started coming after me with a cease and desist for something I wasn't even going to do, costing me thousands of dollars to deal with (as their lawyer knew to directly contact my lawyer, making it harder for me to avoid any costs).
Why would Snapchat's lawyers go directly to your lawyers on this one? And how would that cost you legal fees. Wouldn't your lawyers need your sign-off to bill on any projects that they are to undertake?
That lawyer should have notified you first, then you could have passed them on to your lawyer. These arrangements are not a blanket thing, they are typically on a per-case basis. And your lawyer likely should have contacted you to get your agreement that they were going to represent you in this matter. Which likely they did only you didn't realize that that was what was happening. If my lawyer started to invoice me for a matter that I did not refer to them I would tell them to go pound sand, lawyers or not. So beware of accidentally agreeing that they could represent you if they notified you.
> And yet, somehow, you see it happen time and time again as people just can't help themselves when it comes to using other peoples' trademarks for their clients.
This is exactly what happened with "Reddit is fun" which had to rebrand as "RiF" but quickly changed again to "RiF is fun for Reddit" which is a rather clunky name but seems to meet the criteria of having enough standoff to the original
i would suggest you to discuss your arrangement with your lawyer (i am one and i do not do any work on behalf of the client without their approval. not even agreeing to discuss matter with a third party, let the client confirm if they want me to talk)
that said, i was exposed to cydia back in 2008 with the original iphone and used that phone till around 2013 i guess. best time of my life. thank you for your work. the "Walled garden" that apple created was made more open because of your work. thank you again
Copyright and trademark law isn't taught in most schools. Why would you expect most people to know how to avoid the traps laid out by the corporations?
Seems legit. I think they think it's a warning shot, they are now on Google's list. This letter is a "nice" way of saying - guys well you are now on our list and shut down or well force you to shut down.
Smart play, rather end on a high note, without months and months of C&Do letters and axety and stress. Learn and move on.
Vanced is a modified version of the official Youtube app. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure it's a copyright violation to distribute modified versions of someone else's software without their permission.
What's probably not illegal to distribute is the source code for the tools they used to generate those modified Youtube apps, so I'm a bit surprised by how adamantly they're refusing to do so in this post.
The author probably knows that Google could sue the ever living hell out of them for copyright and trademark violations, or maybe even go so far as to try to extract "lost revenue" from skipped ads by arguing that the trademark violation might have tricked people into thinking the app was official and therefore unknowingly deprived Google of ads.
I'm guessing the C&D was followed by a "we won't sue you if you do the following" proposal, which includes not releasing the source code for their tweaks.
They did tried to change the logo a few days before all this, at least on Discord.
However as others point here the "You are using our logo without our permission" is just a valid reason to shut down an app, and happens more often that it should.
There's what I consider the 'hierarchy of legal arguments' when it comes to patched software distribution:
1. Trademark infringement. Easy to prove even in a court, often can get an injunction approved with no further effort.
2. Copyright infringement. Requires some effort to convince a judge that, yes, this is your content, code, or art, and that they did indeed copy and redistribute it, which would cost a few hours of legal professionals' time to draft up in layman's terms, and lead to a few dozens of pages in a court filing. Easier for visual stuff (such as images) than, say, decompiled code, especially as with decompiled code you may even 'accidentally' be violating the patched app's authors' copyright.
3. Anti-circumvention. This is a bit more of a stretch, but if someone doesn't want (or can't afford) a defense, it's easy to spin something in this way. For YT, since there's some obfuscation applied (see the YTDL takedown attempt), one could also easily argue this. Similarly, one could also argue the same if, for example, a video game modification 'works with pirated copies'.
4. 'The far stretch', such as 'runtime patches make a derivative work in memory', some antitrust violations ('their free patches are devaluing our paid subscriptions/microtransactions'), and other 'less' gray-area stuff.
5. Outright challenging the legality of specific types of reverse engineering. This one is tough as it may go the wrong way as well, and this could attract the attention of big financial sponsors (e.g. the EFF) to steer this into 'dangerous precedent'.
Now, this case is of course just referring to a C&D, but a lot of companies only send/distribute C&D letters once they also have a court filing for e.g. an injunction ready to go in parallel, for example if the C&D is explicitly refused.
Even if that's not the case, refusing it may just as well lead to a court case in a few months, based on another 'technicality' somewhere in this hierarchy.
(statement of authority: I've dealt with numerous of these cases in the video game industry, some of them being the accused myself, sometimes involving others telling me their experiences and/or asking for advice other than 'get a lawyer')
It seems unlikely to me as well. There has to be something more to it than that. Maybe they were threatened to be taken to court anyway if they said anything else about the cease and desist letter.
More likely just legal threats to say "this is the opening shot, but these are the cruise missiles we have aimed at your bank account and life in general". Lawyers don't care, they will destroy you and your loved ones (edit: obviously not physically but legally and financially) and sleep like a baby at night.
Broadly, I think it would be a mistake to read this with the idea that you're going to get the truth out of it. This smells very much like CYA spin. Not mad at all of course, do what you gotta.
> The main source of income for youtube isn't ads. YouTube revolves around the merchandise and YouTube Premium subscriptions.
Lol. You can open Alphabet's 10-Q or 10-K and find out in a matter of seconds how untrue this is. Reminds me of the famous "Senator, we run ads <suppressed smile>" by Zuckerberg.
They're referring to creators, not the platform. For creators it's absolutely true that merch brings in more revenue than ads, and I assume by premium subscriptions they mean channel membership.
I also assume English isn't the author's native language because there are some small grammatical and structural quirks like this platform vs creators thing. It's very readable though!
Exactly. Zuckerberg wasn't even smiling when he said that, just incredulous that the US Senator who has summoned him to DC and is questioning him in front of millions of Americans doesn't know the first thing about what he is saying.
Indeed. IIRC, there were quite a few issues with his testimony obfuscating things. But he was pretty blunt about the business model. I thought the point of the clip was how out of touch the Senator asking was.
> Vanced is discontinued for "legal reasons" as vanced was infringing the logo and branding of the original YouTube app as the logo resembles the original logo in a similar way and was used without taking prior permission from Google for using the branding
So if this is the actual reason, shutting down completely seems a bit of an overreaction. Why not just get a new logo and rebrand the app ?
My impression is that they aren’t legally allowed to reuse any of the source code that was ever used in vanced.
But if they create a new thing as a new team and claim that it shares nothing with vanced; and, critically, they never release the source code from the original vanced (which presumably hasn’t been subpoenaed); then they can reuse the source code, because nobody will know the difference.
This, presumably, would be what they mean by “complications” if they release Vance’s code: it’ll retroactively prove that their new """unrelated""" project is actually related after all.
Yeah, they were illegally distributing Google's copyrighted source code this entire time. It's just easier to prove the trademark thing, so Google lead off with that.
My take is that Google wanted Vanced dead. On top of trademark problems, if the app was a modified official client then copyright is also at issue. And there's always the CFAA hammer looming.
It wouldn't cost much, compared to litigation, for Google to send them a letter outlining these issues. It's possible they made Vanced an offer they couldn't refuse (i.e., shut down now and avoid litigation)
Not an attorney, but I suspect two mistakes the YouTube Vanced team did with the project is having "YouTube" in the name (Could be considered as a false association and trademark violation by Google or YouTube), and redistributing complete APKs that were modified YouTube APKs that would be under copyright.
I have not looked into the inner works of this, but on device patching of APK DEX classes from a set of patches is possible. Would not require root as long as it generates a patched APK and installs that using the standard PackageInstaller. That is probably a less risky proposition then distributing modified APKs themselves.
> "YouTube" in the name (Could be considered as a false association and trademark violation by Google or YouTube)
This is an important point. The "insert popular company name" for "insert industry" works great when you have just launched but this statement should be ditched as immediately as you get some traction.
I liked how, the Reddit client App "RIF" started. It was first "Reddit is fun", now it has become "RIF is fun".
No matter how benevolent you think the company you are referring to is, at the end everyone wants money, and the survival rate using this strategy is close to zero.
Without naming any names, I have seen certain startups claiming they are the Stackoverflow or Quora of "X" industry. The path Stackoverflow's ownership is taking, I bet they will start suing these companies for false representation sooner then we can imagine.
The name on the Google Store is now "rif is fun for Reddit"; I'm not sure that's a great example. It still has Reddit in the name. If you do it right, it doesn't matter if the other party is upset about it. They can be upset all they want; you're allowed to do it to show interoperability.
Makes me wonder how thin the lines are for the youtube-dl and yt-dlp projects at this point.
(The former fell victim to a DMCA takedown from RIAA asserting it was a 'circumvention' tool to download publicly accessible content that was copyrighted by the RIAA, but AFAIK Google did not comment on the incident.)
Yeah binary patching would basically solve this issue and wouldn't be any more of a hassle for the user than vanced already was. For a similar example, see the way most alternative Minecraft servers download and patch official binaries on first start (they started doing this due to getting a bunch of DMCA takedowns a few years ago).
With a bit of effort, Vanced could even have the download page perform the patching and signing in JS/wasm, then include the privkey in the app so it could download, patch and sign new copies of itself on the fly.
Or, for better security, have a web service that signs any APK that matches a set of hashes. Clients patch the APK locally, then send it in to get signed - everyone now has byte-identical APKs, but Vanced severs never technically distributed Google's binaries.
One could argue it does, one could also argue it does not. If a company wants a quick takedown of something it feels 'isn't right', having to rely on something like that with limited precedent (and a high risk of setting the wrong precedent for them) is a lot more difficult, so you're more likely to not get C&D'd/sued over such - but if you then do something that is easier to sue over, like trademark infringement or more outright copyright infringement, you're likely getting hit for one of those whenever a company 'disliking you' notices instead of them trying the 'hard' arguments.
> Some users believe that Google had sent cease & desist letter because the Vanced Team had posted NFT to earn money out of the vanced project. The Vanced NFT was never sold in the end. Besides, it was done as a joke and nothing more.
All stuff they posted prior to shutting down pointed to this NFT not being a joke to be honest. Seems like their claim that it was a joke is more about damage control than it being true.
I didn't use vanced before since the open source newpipe fulfilled all my needs, so this is the first I heard of vanced doing some cryptobro token stuff.
So without knowing more than just what is written in the OP: when I read in the same paragraph that "we didn't get to the point of selling" and "besides, it's just a prank bro"... yeah, clearly. Could be true, I suppose it doesn't really matter now, but I'm not convinced. I also read it as trying to save some reputation.
Readit News
Huh?!? That was the only reason behind the C&D letter and they killed the product when a simple logo redesign could have solved the issue? Or the C&D letter would have voided any attempt to do that? Something doesn't add up.
And yes: it is an incredibly simple thing to avoid, and yet it is also a deceptively difficult thing to fix and cleanly walk away from later when the other party actively wants you to not exist as you are often now stuck in a really shitty position with respect to the hole you have already dug yourself into and the legal fees you are potentially going to lose just trying to defend yourself going forward. Hell: someone I don't like from the "extended" Cydia ecosystem (if nothing else: they are the kind of person who thinks they are above trademarks) once even just hinted on Twitter at building a product with the name "Snapchat" in it (which I obviously would never have sold as I was really careful about this sort of stuff) and their lawyers started coming after me with a cease and desist for something I wasn't even going to do, costing me thousands of dollars to deal with (as their lawyer knew to directly contact my lawyer, making it harder for me to avoid any costs).
Why would Snapchat's lawyers go directly to your lawyers on this one? And how would that cost you legal fees. Wouldn't your lawyers need your sign-off to bill on any projects that they are to undertake?
This is exactly what happened with "Reddit is fun" which had to rebrand as "RiF" but quickly changed again to "RiF is fun for Reddit" which is a rather clunky name but seems to meet the criteria of having enough standoff to the original
that said, i was exposed to cydia back in 2008 with the original iphone and used that phone till around 2013 i guess. best time of my life. thank you for your work. the "Walled garden" that apple created was made more open because of your work. thank you again
Smart play, rather end on a high note, without months and months of C&Do letters and axety and stress. Learn and move on.
"We were also asked to remove all links for the distribution of any vanced apps that led to the decision of discontinuation."
Whatever the second half of that sentence may mean in plain English, the whole article is hard to parse.
What's probably not illegal to distribute is the source code for the tools they used to generate those modified Youtube apps, so I'm a bit surprised by how adamantly they're refusing to do so in this post.
I'm guessing the C&D was followed by a "we won't sue you if you do the following" proposal, which includes not releasing the source code for their tweaks.
However as others point here the "You are using our logo without our permission" is just a valid reason to shut down an app, and happens more often that it should.
1. Trademark infringement. Easy to prove even in a court, often can get an injunction approved with no further effort.
2. Copyright infringement. Requires some effort to convince a judge that, yes, this is your content, code, or art, and that they did indeed copy and redistribute it, which would cost a few hours of legal professionals' time to draft up in layman's terms, and lead to a few dozens of pages in a court filing. Easier for visual stuff (such as images) than, say, decompiled code, especially as with decompiled code you may even 'accidentally' be violating the patched app's authors' copyright.
3. Anti-circumvention. This is a bit more of a stretch, but if someone doesn't want (or can't afford) a defense, it's easy to spin something in this way. For YT, since there's some obfuscation applied (see the YTDL takedown attempt), one could also easily argue this. Similarly, one could also argue the same if, for example, a video game modification 'works with pirated copies'.
4. 'The far stretch', such as 'runtime patches make a derivative work in memory', some antitrust violations ('their free patches are devaluing our paid subscriptions/microtransactions'), and other 'less' gray-area stuff.
5. Outright challenging the legality of specific types of reverse engineering. This one is tough as it may go the wrong way as well, and this could attract the attention of big financial sponsors (e.g. the EFF) to steer this into 'dangerous precedent'.
Now, this case is of course just referring to a C&D, but a lot of companies only send/distribute C&D letters once they also have a court filing for e.g. an injunction ready to go in parallel, for example if the C&D is explicitly refused.
Even if that's not the case, refusing it may just as well lead to a court case in a few months, based on another 'technicality' somewhere in this hierarchy.
(statement of authority: I've dealt with numerous of these cases in the video game industry, some of them being the accused myself, sometimes involving others telling me their experiences and/or asking for advice other than 'get a lawyer')
A gag-order does not seem super likely, but more-so than an NDA.
Lol. You can open Alphabet's 10-Q or 10-K and find out in a matter of seconds how untrue this is. Reminds me of the famous "Senator, we run ads <suppressed smile>" by Zuckerberg.
I also assume English isn't the author's native language because there are some small grammatical and structural quirks like this platform vs creators thing. It's very readable though!
Why? Zuckerberg wasn’t lying when he said Facebook makes their money from ads though.
So if this is the actual reason, shutting down completely seems a bit of an overreaction. Why not just get a new logo and rebrand the app ?
But if they create a new thing as a new team and claim that it shares nothing with vanced; and, critically, they never release the source code from the original vanced (which presumably hasn’t been subpoenaed); then they can reuse the source code, because nobody will know the difference.
This, presumably, would be what they mean by “complications” if they release Vance’s code: it’ll retroactively prove that their new """unrelated""" project is actually related after all.
Bytecode inspection is a thing. It isn't too hard to know if two apks share a large amount of source.
It wouldn't cost much, compared to litigation, for Google to send them a letter outlining these issues. It's possible they made Vanced an offer they couldn't refuse (i.e., shut down now and avoid litigation)
I have not looked into the inner works of this, but on device patching of APK DEX classes from a set of patches is possible. Would not require root as long as it generates a patched APK and installs that using the standard PackageInstaller. That is probably a less risky proposition then distributing modified APKs themselves.
This is an important point. The "insert popular company name" for "insert industry" works great when you have just launched but this statement should be ditched as immediately as you get some traction.
I liked how, the Reddit client App "RIF" started. It was first "Reddit is fun", now it has become "RIF is fun".
No matter how benevolent you think the company you are referring to is, at the end everyone wants money, and the survival rate using this strategy is close to zero.
Without naming any names, I have seen certain startups claiming they are the Stackoverflow or Quora of "X" industry. The path Stackoverflow's ownership is taking, I bet they will start suing these companies for false representation sooner then we can imagine.
(The former fell victim to a DMCA takedown from RIAA asserting it was a 'circumvention' tool to download publicly accessible content that was copyrighted by the RIAA, but AFAIK Google did not comment on the incident.)
With a bit of effort, Vanced could even have the download page perform the patching and signing in JS/wasm, then include the privkey in the app so it could download, patch and sign new copies of itself on the fly.
Or, for better security, have a web service that signs any APK that matches a set of hashes. Clients patch the APK locally, then send it in to get signed - everyone now has byte-identical APKs, but Vanced severs never technically distributed Google's binaries.
Says everything you need to know about NFTs
So without knowing more than just what is written in the OP: when I read in the same paragraph that "we didn't get to the point of selling" and "besides, it's just a prank bro"... yeah, clearly. Could be true, I suppose it doesn't really matter now, but I'm not convinced. I also read it as trying to save some reputation.
"it was done as a joke and nothing more." can pretty much describe NFTs
> If you are talking about creators who are not earning money for using vanced, you should know they won't make millions out of those ads.
... right. Feel free to keep telling yourselves that.
There shouldn't be issues as long as you are sharing them as patches unless they didn't own the rights to the code they added.