Andy Maxwell, reporting for TorrentFreak:

The developers of Invidious, a privacy-respecting alternative front-end for YouTube, have received a cease-and-desist notice from YouTube’s legal department. The free and open source software, which provides a YouTube experience minus advertising and user tracking, has been instructed to shut down within seven days. As things stand, cooperation isn’t on the agenda. […]

The main problems apparent in Google’s cease and desist are straightforward; Invidious does not use YouTube’s API, and as a result, the project’s developers never agreed to any associated terms of service. As anyone who foolishly left their own instance open to the public will confirm, Invidious is effectively a proxy service, one with a penchant for bandwidth.

I’ve started using Invidious more over the past few months. Although I continue to pay for YouTube Premium for the ad-free experience on Apple TV, I would rather use Invidious on every device where I’m able to. I think of Invidious as a way to slowly ween myself off of YouTube content — much like I did with IFTTT and BirdSiteLive for Twitter.

I’m glad to see the developers behind the project are standing their ground. And luckily, because Invidious is open source, there isn’t really much Google can do to stop its development or prevent its distribution.

➝ Source: torrentfreak.com