Complying with the YouTube Terms of Service

In short, Zetria does not distribute content from YouTube since all YouTube links, except for embeded videos, which are granted permission by YouTube, are user-shared and redirect users back to YouTube's own viewing page.

Below is an excerpt under the “Your Use of the Service” section from the YouTube Terms of Service, which Zetria’s service might be considered to be violating.

The following restrictions apply to your use of the Service. You are not allowed to:


1. access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the respective rights holders;
2. …
3. access the Service using any automated means (such as robots, botnets or scrapers) except (a) in the case of public search engines, in accordance with YouTube’s robots.txt file; or (b) with YouTube’s prior written permission;
4. …

This section of the terms lists out forbidden ways of accessing YouTube’s Service. In the first point, it says that users may not “distribute” content from YouTube. In the third point, it says that users may not access YouTube’s service through “any automated means.” Zetria’s service for sharing links may be considered to be violating these rules. However, Zetria does not “distribute” any content from YouTube, nor does it access YouTube’s content through “any automated means.”

1. Sharing Educational Links (Including YouTube Links) on Zetria

Zetria allows users to share educational links that lead to websites or webpages that can serve educational purposes. Sharing is done by either users or staffs of Zetria instead of computer programs. When a link to YouTube is shared on Zetria (either through the web app or the API), Zetria’s server automatically extracts the “video ID” part of the URL and stores it into its database with strings that describe the video. Through this process, Zetria builds up a database that contains shared educational links (including YouTube video IDs that can be constructed to become links to YouTube videos).

2. Dedicated Search Engine for Educational Links

Zetria has a dedicated search engine for users to search for educational links that are shared on Zetria. On the search page, Zetria has a dedicated tab that filters the search result to only YouTube videos, where Zetria displays YouTube videos whose descriptions are considered relevant to the search query. Through this process, we do not “distribute” YouTube’s content. Instead, it is a process that enables users to search for links already present in Zetria’s database. After users click the link, Zetria brings users directly to the video’s YouTube page. Therefore, the Zetria search engine do not “distribute” YouTube’s content.

3. Relevant Educational Links under Every “view.php” Page

Zetria has a section on every “view.php” page that displays links to educational webpages that are relevant to that “view.php” page. These links include YouTube links. However, this is not a way of “distributing” YouTube’s content. This feature uses Zetria’s own search algorithm and, just like Zetria’s search page, does not “distribute” YouTube’s content.

4. The Search API for Searching Educational Links

Except for the dedicated search page, Zetria also provides a Search API that allows developers to access links stored in Zetria’s database through the algorithm that the search page uses. Users get response that contains links relevant to the search query after requesting it. Some of the links are links to YouTube videos and represent YouTube’s video links by simply using the videos’ IDs. This is essentially the same to returning the entire video URL, the difference only being now that the video URL is shortened, the data size minified. Thus, this process can be seen as Zetria responding users with links they request. Therefore, the Zetria Search API does not “distribute” YouTube’s content.

Conclusion

Zetria gets YouTube video IDs from the users who share them and does not use robots to crawl YouTube’s content at any scale. The data Zetria obtains are stored as full-length URLs or shortened ones (ie. YouTube video IDs) in Zetria’s database. These links are then filtered by a search algorithm and provided to the users when they search for it, when they visit “view.php” pages, and when they send requests to our APIs. Therefore, allowing users to share educational links and to search for them does not violate YouTube’s Terms of Service. For actual violations or other potential violations of YouTube’s terms, contact service@zetria.org and keep in mind that we are willing to comply with YouTube’s Terms of Service.