YouTube Hands Over User Info To Fox

An anonymous reader writes "Tech Crunch has an article about YouTube identifying and handing over a user's information after a request from Fox. 'Three weeks after receiving a subpoena from the U.S. District Court in Northern California, YouTube has reportedly identified a user accused by 20th Century Fox Television of uploading episodes of the show 24 a week prior to their running on television. That user, named ECOTtotal, is also alleged to have uploaded 12 episodes of The Simpsons, some quite old. Apparently Google and YouTube were willing and able to identify the owner of the username ECOTtotal, according to a report on InternetNews.com.'"

Comments

Falsely Believing You are Anonymous...

[CompMD]

...on the Internet can lead to very bad or unexpected things for you or those around you. Just this week someone "anonymously" posting on a local newspaper online forum caused a mistrial in a multiple first degree murder and aggravated arson case where I live.

Re:Willing to identify?

[drinkypoo]

How about simple theft? The shows in question weren't broadcast or otherwise distributed to the general public in some fashion by Fox. If these shows were posted to YouTube after they aired, then copyright infringement would be pretty much all that Fox would have as legal ammunition. However, someone illegally removed (stole) these shows from one of the production facilities.

Okay just STOP THERE. You do NOT know what you are talking about.

Media is often distributed to certain individuals before it is aired on TV or released in theaters, as the case may be. Fox has not publicly made the assertion that he stole the discs. He MAY have done this, but there is NO reason to believe that it is the case. And to claim that someone stole the discs from a Fox production facility is just ignorant until Fox tells us that is true. Otherwise, it's safer to assume that someone had them for a legitimate reason, and either allowed them to make a copy, or they are "them" and uploaded it themselves. Telecine releases of movies are often made in the theater where the movie will be shown and most screeners you can download are made from screening copies intentionally distributed for review.

Finally, someone who was in the production facility wouldn't necessarily need to actually take any discs anywhere. They might conceivably have copied them while onsite, one disc at a time (per visit?) with a computer on the site, or one they brought with them. This is almost more likely than stealing it, because stealing the masters or screening duplicates would be detected far more rapidly than copying them.

What if I were to grab a copy of my company's quarterly results before they were published/publically released and spread them all over the internet? Obviously, there would be hell to pay.

Yes, for dissemination of private information that does not belong to you. Guess what? It's still not called theft unless you physically remove them from the enterprise. You CAN steal a copy of data. You cannot steal the data without stealing all of the copies.

However, if I did the same thing after the company published its results, there really wouldn't be any harm that would come from it.

You could repost the figures, but copying and pasting the data in its entirety, including the presentation (formatting etc) would be a violation of copyright. The first part is because no one owns facts. The second part is because it's not your copyrighted information. Putting information on the web (or in a quarterly report) doesn't revoke its copyright.

All you are doing is speculating wildly. I realize this is a favorite slashbot pastime, but give it up already. You don't know shit about what happened, and neither do the rest of us.