
Is my project legal? and should I forget about it if its not? - evex
so long story&#x27;s short, I was building my project I called it &quot;yougle&quot;,<p>just like google you search for a word&#x2F;sentence and then you get where that string you entered appears in youtube videos,<p>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..),<p>but the thing is I&#x27;m not sure whether this subtitles database I got by scraping youtube is actually legit or not.
I read the TOS(https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;terms) of youtube it said that:<p>&quot;You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, &quot;robots,&quot; &quot;spiders,&quot; or &quot;offline readers,&quot; 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. &quot;<p>violation #1?
so basically this phrase is that you can&#x27;t scrape faster than a human can browse internet, and ofcourse it&#x27;ll take me years to collect data this way<p>violation #2? in the robots.txt(for those of who you don&#x27;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&#x27;m using to get subtitles out of videos:<p>&quot;Disallow: &#x2F;timedtext_video&quot;<p>should I forget about my project?
what can I do to keep on going with the project while keeping it legit?
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Tomte
#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.

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evex
I appreciate your feedback, I opened a question on google productforums if you
want to follow up :)
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/ftBX_...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/youtube/ftBX_JQwdXU;context-
place=forum/youtube)

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evex
Turns 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)

