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YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom
psyopper writes "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as 'speculative' and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives." Update: 07/03 18:05 GMT by T : Brian Aker, now of MySQL but long ago Slashdot's "database thug," writes a journal entry on how companies could intelligently treat such potentially sensitive user data.
hmmm, thats a nasty precedent.
Presumably, legal discovery is usually limited to the domain in which the lawsuit is operating. In a case like this, is it really appropriate for Google to provide such vast quantities of information, 99.9% of which is almost certainly irrelevant to the case? Shouldn't there be an appeals process Google can use that basically says "that judge doesn't know what (s)he's talking about, Viacom don't need this information"?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I live in Finland so Viacom doesn't affect here. Still, Google is giving them all the records of my personal video watching too.
Some might say "So what, nothing personal on youtube..." but for some of us there is. A lot of information about my friends, what kind of videos I watch, etc. are stuff that I don't want any third parties to know, really.
I think I don't quite yet need to wait for my mother to ask
Why did you get a "It seems you have been watching slash videos, would you be interested in these magazines..." mail?
but it won't be far away if this kind of stuff gets more common.
Fine print: I work in internet advertising.
Why would a company keep all of that information, especially when they know there is a high degree of certainty that they will be involved in some legal troubles later. Keeping this information is just asking for trouble. There probably are a few ways they use it, but it could easily be done without needing to keep a history. View counts, for instance, could just be incremented, and immediately the information about who viewed it could be thrown out. What about all of the related videos? Just create those links and throw out the information about the individuals that clicked between videos? It just doesn't make sense that when you will be offering a service that could come back to bit you in the rear, why would you keep information that could potentially show that you are doing something in a gray-area?
Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.
So anonymize the data. Ask your friendly local CS student for instructions. You can get all your statistics from that.
Oh, that isn't actually the reason you want the data? Yeah, thought so. DIAF
The users need to intervene as a class and request a protective order. They probably can't get the subpoena quashed but they probably can get the judge to limit what Viacom can do with the data and who can see it. They should ask him to limit access to the data to outside experts sworn to secrecy.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why would Google even keep this info. We seriously need to learn to stop tracking this kind of stuff. It's like the Patriot act and libraries. When the act passed and libraries found out that checkout records of their users could be used in court most libraries simply stopped keeping a record of them. Companies like Google need to start doing the same.
So, if google has taken down a video from some non-viacom entity, for any reason, viacom gets a copy, in violation of the original owners' copyrights?
Also, I wonder if google had to take down any kiddie porn vids ... seems we could get viacom for possessing child porn.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Another company to purposely avoid
How? I don't buy stuff from Viacom, the TV stations do. As I don't watch much TV anyway my participation in a boycott isn't going to help any.
That organized RIAA boycott sure helped. The four foreign-owned record labels ignore it, and all losses it causes are attributed to piracy.
At first I thought "somebody needs to start blowing shit up" but then I realized that no matter what we do, it will be useless at best and probably counterproductive.
Now, I haven't RTFA (yet) but the summary sounds like they're going after people who watch YouTube videos. How in the hell am I supposed to know the copyright owner doesn't want it seen? Not wanting your video seen is as stupid as not wanting your music heard.
Is Hollywood that scared of Ster Wreck?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Who needs to win cases when you can receive millions of dollars in data simply by going through discovery proceedings?
Why fuckviacom?
There is no reason for Google to log IP addresses.
You'd better tagged it "fuckjudgelouislstanton". Because that bloody asshole violates every viewers privacy worldwide. Of course viacom wants this data, companies are not "nice", and if they think they can get away with it, they will do it. But this judge is a fucking catastrophe for allowing them to rape the viewers privacy.
And of course, it's entirely illegal to demand google to turn over the records of non-US viewers to viacom, due to much harder privacy-laws everywhere else.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Every single user of the Internet should be OUTRAGED about this judge's neglect of basic privacy statutes. I dispatched an email to YouTube about this order, urging them to fight it with all their power.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Exactly. I live in South Korea, but I put up videos of my kid so my family back home can see her grow. Lots of my friends have put up home videos, these might or might not contain information that could be used against them in some sort of official position (be it a job interview or perhaps an interview for a visa to work legally in a different country).
This kind of bullshit affects people living in basically any country with even semi-decent internet access (you know there's some kid in a yurt in Mongolia who's willing to wait all night to wtch that one video on youtube).
So yeah, you ordinary person in America: go start a witch hunt, a riot, a protest, a civil war. Go do something to claim back your country from the people who have no soul.
Of course, one wonders how many Viacom employees or their family members have watched Viacom "owned" material on youtube...
Why is Google keeping such detailed logs? If Google had anonymised their IP address logs to begin with, they could have avoided this.
They should have taken the white house's lead and preemptively destroyed any computer records they didn't want coming out in court.
Yeah. It's a good thing that Viacomm isn't a multinational organization that, through lobbying and PACs, donates tons of money to politicians...not to mention donations to politicians from its upper management on a private basis, otherwise I'd be worried too!
:(
Oh crap
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Not much Google can do now if ordered by a court to turn it over, but I'm a bit (lot) creeped out by why they think they need to keep this type of detailed personalized history in the first place. Having the history means that a court/government/disgruntled employee/future employer/hacker may get access to it.
If Google really need to target advertising to what we're watching, searching for, etc, etc (big brother - yuck), then couldn't they at least do so in a more anonymous form - rather than storing "user Joe just watched Viacom's boobie-jiggle on YouTube on July 3rd", just do user[joe].interests[interest-class[boobie-jiggle]]++.
I guess Google don't consider being big brother incarnate to be "evil", but I think most of their user base do!
I laughed and agree with the "Funny" moderatiom, but for the sake of being a little serious, court orders trump privacy laws or terms of service, unfortunately.
My youtube stuff is copyrighted. Maybe I should sue Viacom for breaking it.
In other news... Slashdot ordered to hand over the IP addresses and usernames and list of comments posted by every individual to read the "YouTube Must Give All User Histories To Viacom" thread on slashdot, including the identities of all "anonymous coward" viewers and posters, and their ip addresses.
CmdrTaco protested that the action would violate reader privacy, but the court dismissed it as mere speculation.
It seems Xyz Co. insisted that most of Slashdots' profits came from participants sparking illegal protests.
Still not too hot?
You shouldn't underestimate the damage a large corporation can do with private data. Most of them are bestest friends forever with the government, and of those who aren't, few of them will stand up to the government. I'd say that if Viacom has this info it's as good as in US gov. hands.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Quite frankly, if you consider that information private, you shouldn't be using YouTube, or most other Google services. Google is known for logging everything and keeping the logs for a long time, and they're not doing it to have logs when they're sued for them. And it's not just Google. YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook and all the other services are essentially data generation facilities which use the primary function as bait. You could post your own flash videos on your own web site. Everything you need for that is freely available. But you don't, because you don't actually care about your privacy and a distributed web structure, so quit whining.
Why do companies keep collecting every bit of data they can like this? Why does Google need to know the user name of the person watching the videos? Even the IP address is questionable. If they want to track people artificially inflating their views, wouldn't it be simple to keep one day's worth of views by IP address? What value do they get from keeping all the viewing history?
Meanwhile, Viacom gets user names, IP addresses, and the list of every video watched. If they are smart, they will realize this is way better then any survey or Nelson rating they ever get. And they got it nearly for free. You can be certain that other companies will be very interested in this data too. Can they just give Viacom a call and get it? Did the court put any restraints on Viacom sharing this data?
I hope you haven't watched anything on YouTube you don't want to be contacted about. Now excuse me while I go log out of my account. I don't think I've watched anything I don't want shared, but at the same time I would rather not risk having someone else come through and make decisions about me based on my random viewing habits.
Yeah, but shouting at them doesn't work that well. I mean, who is going to stand around the whole time while I shout, "This guy's corporation is violating your personal privacy, subverting the courts into a money making operation instead of a justice system, twisting laws to suit his own needs, bribing members of congress with contributions to their campaigns or charities, harming innovation with restrictive IP laws, violating anti-trust laws via industry groups, and he's also badly dressed."
Really, the problem with protesting any of this is threefold:
1 - the problem is poorly understood by the general public
2 - protestors are starting to be ignored as whackos
3 - even if you can get the point across and have people understand why this is a problem, they will be apathetic
So, WhyTF do they need usernames and IP's? The popularity of a clip has NOTHING to do with WHO viewed it, simply how MANY people viewed it. Asking for usernames simply means they are either out to sue individuals or they want the information for profiling purposes which has nada to do with the lawsuit and so should not be allowed in discovery.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Thank you for pointing this out. Google does face additional liability if most videos are copyrighted material, and Viacom would likely be vindicated. That said, there's no reason to request usernames, IP addresses, etc., unless they were to go after the individual viewers. If they requested the IP/username for those who uploaded the protected works, however, that would make some sense.
freeflux-powered open-source blog
Any webserver (apache) we have setup logs IP addresses automatically. It's standard stuff, not google being evil.
What is viacom going to do with the user data? Start suing youtube viewers?
Way to copy RIAA and SCO.
RIAA and SCO should sue viacom for totally rocking their style.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
The servers are in the US, so we europeans can't do shit about it unfortunately. (Enforcing EU directives outside the EU is the same nonsense that happens when the US tries to apply their laws abroad).
We would have legal standing to prevent this, if the servers were located at least partly in the EU.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What would be the purpose of this? If you watch a video on YouTube, even if its not there legally, you are doing nothing illegal. Or at least nothing provably illegal. The person uploading these copyrighted materials is doing something definitely illegal, but couldn't they do figure out who that is already by just crawling the site for their content and making a note of the username, and then pestering Google for the IP address?
Something doesn't make sense here. My guess is they more or less know who is pirating their content, but what they are really interested in is who is pirating their partners'/competitors' content, and they are going to try to sell that info on to their competitors. Just a guess.
This is just as much reason to avoid Google, or any company that keeps any kind of logs of your behavior.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yeah, but Google is the one company that doesn't have much excuse to do things the "standard" way. A company like that scrutinizes everything that's logged, because even something that only writes a couple bytes for every user generates gigabytes of data every year. If they log IP addresses, it's because they want to log IP addresses, not because they didn't bother to change a default config.
That's a pretty big gamble though. For starters, what if they get the logs and find out that infringing content is in fact not more popular than non-infringing? They would have spent all that money for nothing, and I think there's a pretty damn good chance that an analysis of the logs might come out that way, given that YouTube's primary use is not as a source of pirated material.
Also, what does 'more popular' mean based on username and IP address? How do we know that all those hits for the YouTube version of 'Who's The Boss' aren't originating from Tony Danza's Nefarious Botnet, in some sort of harebrained scheme hatched by the management of Viacom to inflate the popularity of infringing content over non-infringing?
Ladies and gentlemen, start your bittorrent clients!
I can see why the information could be relevant.
They want to be able to see not only whether infringing videos make up a significant proportion of views, but also whether viewing such videos is restricted to a small sub-set of YouTube viewers, or is more general behaviour.
If everybody is at it, then they can claim that YouTube can't function without copyright infringement. If it's mostly a small set of people doing all the uploads and viewing it'd be harder to make such a claim.
I consider this to be outrageous and a major breach of everyones privacy. Now viacom will basically be able to mine the database and basically do whatever it wants that suits its fancy. Its another reason to boycott Viacomm. But as well, we should be asking Google to stop recording logs of what videos people use, or destroy them after a week. The view logging is not needed for other features, like comments, view count, ratings, favourite lists, and so on.
This is just as much reason to avoid Google, or any company that keeps any kind of logs of your behavior.
And yet you are posting on Slashdot...
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Your mistake isn't not to trust Viacom, your mistake is to trust Google. You're exhibiting the "nobody ever got fired for buying (IBM|Microsoft)" attitude. Google's interests may be aligned with your interests at the moment, but there's no guarantee that it will stay this way. Remove the "do no evil" facade and you'll see that it's just another global corporation looking for ways to capitalize on its assets.
Any webserver (apache) we have setup logs IP addresses automatically. It's standard stuff, not google being evil.
It's the default for apache. It's also plain illegal in at least some contries (e.g. Germany) to keep these logs; depending on how you interpret the laws, it may even be illegal to let these logs hit the harddisk.
The sad truth is that most open source applications make it quite hard to log in a non privacy-invading way (e.g. for apache, you can keep IPs out of the access log, but not out of the error log; you need mod_removeip for clean logs).
Similar problem with syslog; debian has an anonymizing patch for syslog-ng, but upstream refuses to incorporate it (allegedly because it clashes with some vapourware future extension).
And yes, it's open source, you can patch it. But if you don't use standard packages from your distribution, you miss security updates and have to track them by yourself, which can be a huge pain.
It's all in how you spin in it. If 80% of the people have watched one viacom broadcast, Then they will say 80% of the youtube poeple only come to watch copyrighted matieral. On the other hand if 20% of people watched mostly copyrighted material, they will say that users are only going to youtube to watch copyrighted material. Either way the data go they will spin it their way. Didn't we just have a post about this last week? (data interpretation I mean)
Abolish copyright. End the insanity.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Google can (and probably is) datamining to find what users actually choose to watch, which I'm sure Viacom wants to get their hands on.
I'm always wondering if companies and government officials are doing this when they actually request this type of info during these types of cases. There is so much money to be made on this data. What happens to this information after the case is done? Does Viacom just destroy it, or do they send it to marketing?
Can I bum a sig?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While I disagree with the judge's decision for various reasons, I feel no sympathy for your friends, and the plight induced here is not among the reasons I object to the decision.
Youtube is a publicly available website and, as such, videos on it are public displays. If they didn't want to broadcast their shenanigans, they shouldn't have made a public display of those shenanigans.
Government obtaining damaging information by thwarting the privacy of citizens is one thing, but this would be government obtaining damaging information by simply accessing content that it - and everyone else - was given implicit permission to view.
Your friends would do well to spend a little more time thinking through the repercussions of their actions. Even if this had never crept up, there are still countless other ways such reckless displays can fall into 'the wrong hands'.
Weird slashbug #455
Seriously? You want that much harm for people who don't have anything to do with the judge's ruling?
I sometimes wonder how fanatic you have to be to say something as stupid as this!
My penguin ate my sig
Oh yes, I could set up a website fairly easily. Of course, hosting services don't keep logs either. Oh, I guess I could run a server out of my house. My ISP, they definitely don't keep logs. Hmmm, maybe I should just run some CAT5 across the Pacific to my family back home in Canada, that way I can know for sure my data stays secure and private.
I know that Google and the rest of the bunch keep logs, but I don't think it's unreasonable to have some expectation of privacy against 3rd parties.
A fair bit of people seem to worry that the data will be used for other purposes that the case where it is requested. It is my understanding that the material is confinded to that case only as it can't be sold or used by Viacom for its own buisness. Or does that work differently in USA law?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
"I cannot wait until these greedy corporate motherfuckers take it in the ass when the revolution comes"
The revolution has already happened, in the 1960s. We lost/gave up/sold out/bought in.
C.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
Who the Fuck are Viacom?
and why should people give them anything?
This is what you get for running a sever in the United States.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
This was done by order of a judge in the united states district court, southern district of New York.
Bush had nothing to do with it.
The statement that Viacom getting every individual user's history, regardless of any individual's actions (whether they even viewed a Viacom-originated clip) will invade each user's privacy is not "speculative". It is a 100% guarantee that those millions of people's privacy will be invaded, though assured protection by Google's privacy policy.
The 4th Amendment says our privacy right will be protected by due process. A judge who rules that 100% certainty is "speculative" is not the process we're due. Google should fight this tyrannical ruling. And that judge should be forced to retire.
--
make install -not war
The judge making this senile ruling is Louis Stanton, who was born in 1927, 81 years ago. He was appointed by Ronald Reagan, 23 years ago.
Most Americans have to retire when they're 65. This guy is still sitting there, ruling on American activities that were invented only when he was already past retirement age.
Let him rule on whips & buggies. He's obviously unfit to rule on Internet privacy, and has even forgotten the 4th Amendment.
--
make install -not war
Google does face additional liability if most videos are copyrighted material, and Viacom would likely be vindicated.
99.999% of everything on youtube is copyrighted.
I upload home videos of my daughter so that family overseas can keep up - they're copyrighted *by me*.
Congratulations, you've bought into the ??AA propaganda that copyrighted == illegal.
This is exactly why I don't put ANY pictures of myself or friends up on the web unless I have no other choice, and then I only leave them there long enough to get the job done. The PUBLIC internet is a terrible place to put anything personal. These social networking sites are just libraries of personal info about you that anyone can see. Even if the company running the site claims you'll have privacy, it only takes a buyout, bankruptcy, or legal action to change that policy. Stay FAR AWAY.
I really wish this attitude would filter into the Slashdot groupthink. At the moment, Google is Microsoft's enemy. Slashdot is falling for the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" idea. To put it very geekily, it's applying boolean logic to a tri-state system.
I hate printers.
And that doesn't count the lawsuit value (they now have IP information on every person who has ever watched a copyrighted video on Youtube, after all)
Unless explicitly placed in the public domain, every video on Youtube is copyrighted. By placing the video on Youtube, you are asserting copyright over the video and granting Youtube a license to publish the video. I can't see any judge anywhere in the US ruling that viewing a video on Youtube violates copyright.
of course, it's entirely illegal to demand google to turn over the records of non-US viewers
It is glaringly obvious that you have neither legal training nor even an armchair-lawyer's understanding of the law.
If Viacom wants my personal information, bitch gotta pay.
There's a problem, though -- it's not your information. It's YouTube's log of your activities in a public space (the Internet). It doesn't belong to you.
Analogy time: if I sit outside a store and record the date and time that each customer walks into and out of the store, that's my information. It may be about you, if you're one if the customers, but it's still my information.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
We once raced to a state border to avoid being served with lawsuit papers so we could destroy all our working papers and then allowed ourselves to be served once that was done.
That still sounds illegal, as you could then be said to have known or had reason to know that it might be evidence. Admitting to a possible felony to the whole Internet is not wise.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The difference is that Viacom didn't sit outside youtube and record who went in and out. Youtube (as most sites) has a privacy policy that says they wont share the info, viacom walked into the store and demanded the books...
So on one end of the spectrum we have a mother who posed as a teen on myspace ending in a case that will make violating a TOS a federal offense analogous to hacking a network... and on this end of the spectrum Privacy Policies are completely worthless if a company simply guesses that there is wrong doings.
Is there any way to legally make myself a company instead of a person? I think I'd have way more rights that way.
Collector's Edition
It would be a stretch to say that social networking sites fall into a similar category as the Jerry Springer show (not too many hillbillies on Facebook yet), but the desire to tell all, share all, and most importantly, be seen, is undeniably widespread in our modern culture
You seem to misunderstand the appeal of Facebook in particular. The majority of people using Facebook do so because it facilitates communication with their friends, and provides a framework for getting to know friends of their friends. It has nothing to do with exhibitionism.
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Its funny to see some people actually think that google is slashdot approved.
Get real, google is here because they have product(s) which are useful and sellable. Its not here because a bunch of geeks on slashdot like it. Neither will it go away if they start despising it.
As I understand it, one of the main points in the GPL is that if you create a derivative work based on GPL'ed code, you are obligated to release the source to your modifications when distributing source/binaries to other folks. This is a different kind of "free" than "I can take this code and do whatever the fuck I want with it".
The mechanism that the GPL uses to enforce this is the copyright owned by the original creator of the work. If copyright were abolished, it would be legally OK if I took the source code to Firefox, created and released a derivative web browser, and refused to release any of the modified source to anyone.
Of course, since this is /., I'm sure you knew this :)
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm