Apple blocks YouTube channel of historical WWDC videos. This is not the first time this has happened: Apple fielded its legal department to threaten an enthusiast’s YouTube channel with copyright and rights infringement that contained a historical archive of hundreds of videos from past editions of WWDC, the world conference of Apple developers.
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The requests for removal of the materials by Apple for copyright infringement were over three, the maximum number allowed before proceeding with the removal of the channel and also the permanent blocking of the YouTube account of Brendan Shanks, owner of the archive that collected historical WWDC videos.
The owner of the late YouTube channel has announced what happened with some posts on Twitter in which he hurls some digs in the direction of Cupertino, claiming that Apple seems to want to block videos of WWDC editions of about 20 years ago that deal with now obsolete topics, including the first version of Mac OS X, Darwin, Aqua, WebObjects and so on.
The same thing happened in 2016 when the YouTube channel EveryAppleVideo was closed with an intervention by Apple’s lawyers. Since then the owner of the channel Sam Henri Gold has given himself the mission of keeping all the videos, an archive of 80 GB of data that over the years has been distributed as a Torrent file, then with a shared folder in Google Drive, to finally arrive at a unofficial Apple archive since 2020. But this too has been closed due to Apple’s intervention.
Returning to the historical WWDC video archive, enthusiast Brendan Shanks assures that he is still in possession of all the videos, as well as descriptions for each of the videos he created with a lot of work. Shanks states that he will try to publish these materials on the Internet Archive, but warns that it will be a long operation and will take time.
It was and still is foreseeable that Apple will intervene wherever possible to protect its materials and rights, but it is a pity that so far the Cupertino multinational has not done much to make these materials freely available to enthusiasts and scholars.