Last week, Yale University shut down a website for being too similar to its own course catalog, so the site's creators simply found another way to keep it up.

According to the New York Times, Peter Xu and Harry Yu, twin brothers and seniors at Yale, came up with Yale Blue Book + (YBB+) as an alternative to the school's Yale Blue Book. Since the school shut down the site, the battle to get it up and running once again nearly turned into a First Amendment case.

Xu and Yu said they wanted to create something that would make using the school's course catalog easier and more social. In Dec. 2012, the two brothers came up with YBB+, which claimed to fix the "clunky" YBB, developed by Yale students a couple years ago and sold to the school.

"We wanted it to be faster to use," Xu said. "You can click on a course, you can see its description, you can see what other students have said about it - all in a few clicks."

The two computer science majors succeeded and 1,840 students used YBB+ last semester, one-third the undergraduate population. With YBB+, students could filter classes based on numerical ratings from people who previously took them and share their course choices on Facebook.

Yale was not thrilled with the site and called it a "big problem" in a letter dated Jan. 7 to the twin brothers. Xu and Yu agreed to three recommended changes proposed by administrators as well as "anything else" they wanted. Yale decided instead to shut down the site.

Several organizations, publications and others sided with YBB+'s creators, feeling Yale violated the First Amendment. The Washington Post, Yale Daily News and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education all showed support for Yu and Xu.

Then a fellow senior computer science student joined. Sean Haufler wrote a blog post proposing a way to enhance YBB with YBB+'s functions, only the school would not be able to block it.

Shortly after, Yale College Dean Mary Miller wrote an open letter to the school community saying nobody's free speech was violated, but administrators acted too hastily in the first place.

"The right to free speech, however, does not entitle anyone to appropriate university resources," she wrote. "In the case of YBB+, developers were unaware that they were not only violating the appropriate use policy but also breaching the trust the faculty had put in the college to act as stewards of their teaching evaluations."