> 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!
I had the exact same experience, although I was older (9th/10th grade). I'd go so far as to say I might not be a programmer if it wasn't for my experience of tweaking the hell out of my jailbroken iPod touch.
> 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?
Snapchat's lawyers actually knew my IP lawyers from a prior issue (which wasn't actually related to Snapchat). (And it isn't even that strange, btw: there is actually a quirk of legal ethics that if, as a lawyer, you know someone else is represented by a lawyer, you aren't supposed to directly contact that person without going through their lawyer.)
What kind of retainer arrangement do you have with your IP lawyers where someone can reach out to them directly and incur billable time? I've got a couple different kinds of lawyers, and there isn't one of them you could call up and get me billed for. You might have a reasonable complaint for your lawyers about this!
They're lawyers, so this kind of setup is probably in their agreement already, and thus nothing the person could do. I'd chalk it up as a paid-for lesson and keep an eye out for it in subsequent agreements.
Some call me crazy, but I always read what I'm signing before I sign, even if it's something coming from my SO to "just quickly sign", or if it's random paperwork that a teller or person just gives me while saying "sign here and here and we're all done" as if it's the most normal of things and not some super-scary contract where I could be selling my kidneys to a company.
I do the same. Most people really don't expect it, that's how uncommon that is. When I signed a work contract at an university it was filled with legal text and obligations, mostly in regards to expected work ethics. Nothing actually insane I was opposed to, but it was about 20 pages of mostly dense legal text and excerpts from state law I wasn't sent in advance and it took me nearly 2 hours to work through. You would expect everyone to actually carefully read that! It's your work contract and literally law you have to follow! The HR lady didn't expect me to read it and apparently wasn't aware how long it takes to actually read everything, so she ended up waiting 30 minutes before she left the room and told me to tell her when I'm done xD. Later I asked her if it's uncommon and she told me I'm actually the first one to sit there and carefully read everything before signing.
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?
1) One reason I feel it is so "obvious" is that trademark law (which I am going to isolate, as this has nothing to do with copyright law: the two are often lumped together but they are extremely different and serve a very different purpose) is more reasonably structured than people give it credit for and most of it really is designed to prevent impersonation, which by and large helps consumers and end users; and like, frankly, in most of these cases, if you ask people why they insisted on using the other person's product's name in their product it actually isn't benign: they actively want their users to confused the two products a bit.
2) Even if you don't agree with the concepts behind trademark law and you really believe that it is somehow a "trap" laid out by corporations, if you are going out of your way to go to war with a multi-billion dollar company your mental model shouldn't be "in for a penny, in for a pound" but more "choose your battles wisely": even ignoring the "you should have a lawyer" aspects of this, you should analyze each decision you make from the perspective of "can I foresee this making them extra-angry" and then decide "is this a core part of my crusade, or is this the kind of thing that is just going to make me more likely to end up failing?".
I have almost zero understanding of the details of trademark law (and I don't recall it coming up in school), but not using someone elses trademark on my own product seems pretty obvious to me.
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.
Sure, but the past is hard to change. So, when a company is threatening to take legal action based on violations you have already committed unless you take a specified set of steps, merely stopping future violations without complying with the rest of their demands is risky.
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!
YouTube Premium is an actual product, but as far as I'm aware it doesn't generate much revenue for creators which I why I assumed they meant channel membership.
Offtopic but I bought YouTube Premium a few months ago and it's 100% worth the money. YouTube ads are aggressive and it turns out I used YouTube all the time. I didn't really notice until I started paying for it how much time I spent having to wait for ads to end or skipping them.
Now I get angry every time I end up in YouTube via incognito when using social media and an ad plays.
Premium is definitely worth it if you want to support creators while enjoying ad-free playback. However, it doesn't solve the privacy problem at all - if anything it gives Google even more info as now they've got some verified payment details (you can't usually provide fake details otherwise the payment will fail).
But not on the TV or mobile.
Firefox ok, but it's also browser only.
Youtube Music is quite useful as a radio player. Start with one song you like and it continues with similar songs. Key is it's just music and you have a list of albums of that band/singer/etc.
Overall it's good enough but not really great.
Vanced was great for that.
Also installed both apps on my mom's phone so she would not be irritated by ads. Being 87 she clicks on ads more often than I'd like. She even bought useless things from Facebook ads. She knows that I'll be angry so she lies about it. I have to protect her from the internet. She's a different generation. For instance I tell her about something being true and she won't believe me until she reads on the internet about it, because she grew up with "what you read is true".
She's also exposed to lots of radical propaganda on Facebook. It's so bad that she quite often shares right wing videos and I have to step in and have discussions with her about what she's doing.
But she isn't right wing at all. She hates all forms of nationalism or racism.
Long story short. Adblocking isn't available for all platforms. But it's required for multiple reasons. Google knows and doesn't allow adblockers to be installed on mobile Chrome, because if they did their ad revenue would take a big hit.
I still get ads even with YouTube Premium. I just listened to a podcast on Spotify called The Agent and its full with ads. I pay Premium to avoid ads since they are wasting my time (and stuff gets through Pi-Hole).
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.
Any APK hoster which distributes bytecode (or any other software) without prior permission acts illegaly.
Redistribution of copyright protected material requires authorization of the right holder. Code (or programs compiled from code), usually fall under this rule.
(In the US) hoster privilege usually allows them to not be liable unless they know about a specific infraction. In some jurisdictions some platforms (such as youtube) are required to monitor uploads proactively for known copyright violations.
The comment tread is arguing that it's hard to prove modified binary rather than the easier way; reuse of the trademark. Either way, both the modification and redistribution are illegal.
Vanced itself is based on decompiled bytecode of original Youtube app.
Another team can build on top of Vanced app just like Vanced devs built on top of Youtube app. So we wouldn't necessarily say whether it is using a hypothetical "source code" leaked by Vanced team or not by bytecode inspection (nor would it matter much).
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.
Not the online or browser-based signing, no, but LuckyPatcher lets you patch APKs locally (I think their specific implementation requires root, but that wouldn't be necessary if APKs were downloaded in-app). I was actually really surprised when I first found Vanced that it wasn't using something like LP and instead distributing pre-modded APKs.
Good call, I didn't think of that. I believe that the non-root approach for LuckyPatcher is to create a separate, (limited) modified APK file rather than modifying an existing, installed app
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.
A joke that somehow a lot of people seem to fall for? And you take their actual money rather than, at the latest after payment, revealing it was just a joke and refunding the money?
> Isn't vanced just a patched version of the official app?
I believe that it is. Although they don't have the source code, just the binary which they have modified in order to add features, see smali[0]. Other projects like the Google camera mod are using similar approaches to modify or port official apps
2. I don't keep my sources closed, I did publish them on xda-developers[1], but they've changed things around a lot since then and the links in my post broke. I need to reupload them somewhere. I avoid lawsuits by not being related to the US in any way whatsoever. And either way I don't think patching someone else's code is illegal, especially since no DRM is circumvented in the process. Making "get an official apk first" the first step, instead of distributing decompiled smali files, probably also helps.
> If you wanted to open source how you patched Instagram, how would you avoid lawsuit?
Operate as if you were operating an underground drug marketplace or worse. If those technologies are able to thwart international law enforcement investigations, they're definitely strong enough to protect you from Facebook, not to mention that nobody will burn a zero-day to make Big Advertising happy when that zero-day can be better used to take down multimillion-dollar drug marketplaces (or worse).
If clearnet infrastructure is needed, put it in a country that gives the middle finger to the US. Being located there is also a huge bonus.
Alternatively, support copyright reforms and campaigns for privacy laws and their enforcement (which is currently lacking when it comes to the GDPR), so that such projects become unnecessary. In the meantime, don't use such services as much as possible.
I was wondering if one of the authors was a youtube employee and took code perhaps, but yours is the simpler explanation. Sounds logical to request this from Google's POV.
I'm really sad I missed the boat on Vanced by one day. I'd heard about it for a long time and randomly decided to finally start using it only to find all the download links had been removed the day before. Youtube ads have become horrendously annoying.
Does anyone know if the apks can be found on any archive site?
That's a valid argument, but Vanced also had sponsorblock which auto-skipped all those tedious intros, "please install this adware mobile game and smash that subscribe button" and boring outros.
I will be very eagerly monitoring the situation with hope a successor will arise.
On the YouTube iOS app, where I consume most of my YouTube content, you can tap on the right side of the video for 10 second skips - 6 taps, 60seconds of skip. Or something like that anyway, I just tap until I see/hear what I want.
This is how I skip any content that bores me, which is a category that does include mobile game sponsorships but goes beyond what sponsorblock offers.
The problem with skipping is you have to be active with fingers. And, its perfunctory to keeping tapping forward and backward. Many creators put multiple ads, with bombastic approach like you should install this vpn to protect yourself, really? It isn't just ads, but sponsor blocked saves time by skipping unnecessary portion
I personally stopped my subscription after their decision to remove the dislike counter. Ultimately does not change anything for them, but I just couldn't justify it.
YouTube Premium includes a music streaming subscription, something I already have with someone else, so something I’m not looking to pay for twice just to not see adverts on YouTube.
Because I don’t watch YouTube much, I would be willing to pay maybe $2-3 per month to get of rid of adverts. I heard they are in some countries exploring such an option, hopefully they roll it out to my country eventually.
In the meantime I avoid the YouTube tvOS and iOS apps due to the obscene amount of adverts. The iOS app is particularly obnoxious as it prompts for a free premium trial every time I open it.
Privacy is the main problem - though I'm not sure how Vanced fared on that front (did their modifications also neuter any spyware and malicious features from the app?).
I do not have a Google account and do not want one - Google has no place in my life other than being a malicious website I sometimes have to visit when other search engines fail.
I want to support creators and do the right thing, but this means I'd have to let an undesirable creep into my private life and provide them with valid personal details so that they can process the payment. That's not something I want to do, so alternative clients (Invidious in my case) and ad-blockers are the way to go.
As another poster mentioned, YouTube Premium in India costs roughly $2 USD/month. And Premium Family (shareable with 5 accounts) is about $2.50 USD/month.
So subscribing via an Indian VPN can get you Premium for roughly $20 a year. Or get a Family plan for less than $30/year, and re-selling the extra slots on Reddit for about $20 a pop will net you ~$50 USD in profit.
Do you subscribe to anything on the internet? Perhaps Spotify, your internet connection, Netflix? Have you considered their premium offering, or do you think YT should be free and without ads?
There's about 10 sponsors that go over and over in the channels I watch. I've seen them all and am a customer of one (from long ago - so nothing to do with their YT sponsorship) already. Nobody benefits from wasting my time showing me products/brands I already know about and already made a decision to buy or not to buy.
Getting rid of tiktock-est YouTube shorts or whatever they call it. Hated having that on my YouTube homepage and the official app doesn't let you remove it. YouTube Vanced does. I also pay for YouTube premium.
Personally, I avoid paying for things that could instead be provided by some appropriate software, as doing so encourages further proprietaryism. This includes services that corral communication into centralized silos. When proprietary middlemen attempt to force their desired paradigms onto us, the answer isn't to just give in and pay their Danegeld. Rather the solution is to build better software and communication infrastructure that won't get shut down by legal nastygrams.
Most other services I subscribe to don't have the incentive and/or resources to be creepy and stalk me everywhere. They're happy to take my money, give me the product/service and leave it at that.
YouTube's parent company both has the incentive and the resources. Giving them your real personal info (as required for payment processing) and some money on a silver platter is not an idea I'm comfortable with.
There are archives of them including checksums to ensure the files are not tampered with. I'd rather not post it here as I don't think it's allowed here, but the Vanced subreddit will have quite links.
My understanding is that Vanced was a patching of the official Youtube App, so already on somewhat shaky ground.
If Vanced took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Youtube App, or the source code could point to them, I could see Google reacting poorly to start out with - though afaik (not a lawyer, also not your lawyer) it's legal to distribute source for a patch for a proprietary program and instructions to apply it.
I'm not a lawyer either, but: I'd worry that something Vanced was doing was technically in violation of DMCA, or at least could be argued to be in violation by someone with several billion dollars.
IANAL, but I do not think patching a app violates any copyright at all, as long as you distribute the patches and download the app clientside. A very good example of this would be Bukkit (which itself is licensed under GPL) , which patches Minecraft Server JARs to provide a stable modding API to work it.
Infact the story itself has quite a interesting turn, so it turned out sometime later Mojang decided to "buy" Bukkit. (aka pay it's lead developers to give up their copyright), and what they (incorrectly) supposed from this was, that they would be allowed to distribute direct bukkit binaries (afterall they own minecraft), that was until one of the Bukkit contributers decided to DMCA the website.
I'm unsure what the current situation around this is, and how they sorted everything out in the end.
They basically decompiled youtube's apk, modify and and repackaging it as Vanced, so off course they can't release their "source code" because it's not theirs (except the modified parts).
It sounds like they're making it really clear that they've "killed" the project, probably so they can just start another one that doesn't have the same issues. I wouldn't be surprised if they just form a new LLC, and transfer the old code as IP between the two, tweaking the offending assets and calling it a day.
I don't understand why it has to be an LLC. They're doing that pisses off a major company & industry, relating to copyright & computers, in a country where copyright and computer-related laws are just as insane as the idea of doing this in the open.
If they want to continue this (which I'd argue is a bad idea given they've presumably been discovered), the way to do so is to operate entirely in the underground (using Tor or other anonymization systems) and host any required infrastructure in a country that doesn't care - Russia comes to mind, even more so given the recent events.
The mere fact that they received a C&D and it had leverage over them already suggests a massive failure. Why was there a place to send a C&D to begin with? The proper legal department contact for such a project is /dev/null, so something failed big time if that C&D found its way somewhere else.
Google probably said something like: "For now we ask you to not use our Logo and trademarks anymore and if you comply by shutting the project down, we are happy to leave it at that.
If however you decide to continue we will come after you for the numerous other issues this project has such as the fact that it is an unauthorized modification of our official youtube app, primarily used to deprive us and our partners of income.
It's your choice"
Google lined up their troops and fired a warning shot. Vanced recognized their unwinnable position and surrendered.
That's the reason this write up doesn't make any sense because they did do that, the old logo was just the YouTube logo with a gradient and a line, the new logo is much closer to NewPipe's and they dropped the YouTube from "YouTube Vanced"
Yes, you can continue to use Vanced for now, if you already have a working APK or can procure one. But with no updates coming, it's only a matter of time before YouTube make breaking changes and it stops working. I would guess 6 months to a year, based on how often I've needed to update in the past.
Agreed. I think a smarter approach would've been to release the patches and other changes separately, and had the official YT app be patched locally. This, however, could probably not work on non-root devices.
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.