Can youtube take down newpipe if they wish to do so?
Yes, because Newpipe depends on Youtube. It gets videos straight from Youtube, and Youtube can stop that access anytime they want. They probably will because Newpipe users are pretty much getting Youtube Premium for free.
It’s almost like what Reddit did with their API, to stop front end clients to reddit. Youtube can do the same anytime they want, and it makes sense from a business perspective too.
Even things like ViMusic, a Youtube music front end, can be taken away.
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Oh, but newpipe is open source and it gets content from youtube. One can fork and always redistribute it every time whenever they want. Does newpipe use youtube api? If not, how can youtube take down? If it does take down, it leaves us with no alternative!
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No.
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Youtube can just change the way it’s content is accessible to outside clients, making it harder/not possible for newpipe to extract content. Youtube’s the source and they control who gets to access the source and how
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I doubt that it would be easy to take down Newpipe exclusively. It doesn’t use Youtube API (according to another peeps here) so it appears as another browser or whatnot, which certainly doesn’t help to distinguish Newpipe’s quieries from another innocent traffic.
And Google certainly won’t take drastic measures as Reddit or Twitter did, like:
- paywalling API,
- forbidding scraping, embedded videos,
- enforcing user account requirement, official app or site usage, and so on.
They’re not that desperate to launch IPO or to cut all expenses at all costs, and they’re not that bothered by the AI bots scraping all the content, because it’s freaking videos, not text.
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NewPipe uses scraping to obtain the content so there isn’t really a foolproof way for Google to block it. They can change the structure of the of the web pages which can cause NewPipe to break. As it has happened many times before. But as long as NewPipe is actively maintained it will be fixed sooner or later.
The only way to actually block NewPipe would be by putting the content behind a login wall and completely disallow non signed in users to access it. The chance of YouTube going full Elon Musk though is fairly low in my opinion.
Google could also take the legal route and try to take down NewPipe the way they did with Vanced before. However, unlike Vanced which was basically a modified version of the official YouTube app and a clear violation of Google’s copyright, NewPipe is completely open source.
Yes, but it’s more complicated than it might seem initally as there are already forks which use invidious to get videos instead.