Last week, we posted a video of an interview with Cydia’s creator, Jay Freeman (saurik). The clip was about 6 minutes long, and consisted of saurik showing off many of his favorite tweaks and iOS extensions in response to the question, “Why should you jailbreak your iPhone?”
The video garnered a lot of attention. It was sort of surreal to see the guy who’s devoted much of his life over the last several years to developing and maintaining Cydia explain why he loves jailbreaking so much. It seems like the video’s popularity ultimately led to its demise…
Apparently YouTube removed the video, citing that the video had been removed due to its violation of their TOS (Terms of Service). Robert Scoble, the producer of the saurik interview, tweeted that he hasn’t received an email or any other communication from YouTube as to the why the video was pulled.
One of Scoble’s theories is that a phone number, exposed in the video, caused the streaming video giant to remove his clip. It certainly can’t be due to its content. A search of YouTube for Why should you jailbreak your iPhone returns over 5,000 results.
Although there’s dozens of reasonable explanations of why the saurik interview got dropped, you have to wonder in the back of your mind if Apple had a hand in it.
The Cupertino company has been in a battle with jailbreakers for the last few years, but have become more aggressive in recent months. Asking YouTube to remove the popular saurik videos wouldn’t be the first time Apple’s requested a company to remove ties with the jailbreak community. Remember the Scion theme?
Regardless of who made the call, it certainly wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, iSpazio re-uploaded the video this morning to its YouTube channel. It appears it was edited to remove the phone number in question, so we’ll see if this video holds up.
What do you think? Is this a privacy thing with YouTube or did Apple send the suits?