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Is my project legal? and should I forget about it if its not?
so long story's short, I was building my project I called it "yougle",
just like google you search for a word/sentence and then you get where that string you entered appears in youtube videos,
I already coded the business logic of yougle, and I already can get where strings appear in videos of some popular youtube channels(pewdiepie, etc..),
but the thing is I'm not sure whether this subtitles database I got by scraping youtube is actually legit or not.
I read the TOS(https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) of youtube it said that:
"You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, "robots," "spiders," or "offline readers," that accesses the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser. "
violation #1?
so basically this phrase is that you can't scrape faster than a human can browse internet, and ofcourse it'll take me years to collect data this way
violation #2? in the robots.txt(for those of who you don't know what robots.txt file is, its a file that tells bots which endpoints they should not crawl) file of youtube, it have an endpoint that I'm using to get subtitles out of videos:
"Disallow: /timedtext_video"
should I forget about my project?
what can I do to keep on going with the project while keeping it legit?
- Tomte 9y ago#1: obviously violates TOS #2: rude, but probably okay More important: "yougle" might be a trademark violation. I'd be surprised if it wasn't. About forgetting about it: that's your decision. My personal take: I find the project utterly uninteresting, and there is no obvious business opportunity that might make the legal uncertainties worthwhile.
- evex 9y agoI appreciate your feedback, I opened a question on google productforums if you want to follow up :) https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/ftBX_JQwdXU;context-place=forum/youtube https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/ftBX_...
- evex 9y agoTurns out there is already an API for captions, so problem solved :) https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions