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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.
Another company to purposely avoid.
I fail to see why they would need to know who watched the videos.. uploader? Maybe, but viewers?
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
Isn't there some law that, unless you are a convicted monopolist, you can't be expected to help the competition ? I'm sure Viacom will do nothing with this data to help its own advertising business, no sirree.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Why would they keep it reliably? The google model was based on "stuff breaks, it doesn't hurt our results much and we start over every month"
There was wisdom to that (when it happened)
You've probably missed this story, I'm guessing. Large enough data sets apparently break anonymizing techniques.
Except that due to government manipulation of the economy, congressman have been bought and paid for by companies like Viacom, and will readily pass legislation favoring such companies. Its one huge protection racket favoring the wealthiest and largest organizations.
The judge is a moron.
All they need is a count of views of each video. Something that is already available directly from the site!
The issue is not so much that they want the viewing logs to prove their argument. Anyone sufficiently motivated could study that since YouTube posts the number of views for each video on the site. The bigger issue is acquiring the names and IP addresses for everyone along with the view numbers. I fail to see how having that information is relevant to their case.
-- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -- Albert Einstein
Anyone have some boilerplate forms and step by step instructions to file the necessary legal objections to this? I would sure do it and I'll bet enough other people would to keep the court busy just reading the stuff for quite a while.
So.. what happens when we Viacom can't find a judge on this planet who's IP address isn't on the list that has viewed copyrighted material?
Any defense attorney can get the case thrown out of court based on possible bias of any judge that's on that list.
Defective Logic
That's actually a pretty good idea. If you just stored out every keyword/tag from every video and then looked at the frequency of those keywords among videos you've watched, that could generally point you towards similar videos.
IAAL.
When someone asks for discovery outside any reasonable boundry, attorneys refer to it as a "fishing expedition". Here, they just want to see the user patterns, so that they can do a stat analysis and figure out new ways to handicap a service they don't control.
The overarching reason for all of this litigation is only secondarily about copyright. The primary reason is so that they can learn and when they ask the "series of tubes" know-little (but bought and paid for) congress for son of DMCA they know how to hamstring.
While the Viacoms and Sonys of the world don't like the internet and can't kill it, they can try to hobble it at every turn. This, HDCP, etc are all part of one grand scheme to control the pipeline. "child porn" is the excuse to filter at the ISP......
Think of 1978....they controlled your tv, and that's the way they liked it. That is the ideal.
Both for Google and whomever gets their hands on this information... this data is potentially valuable from a marketing standpoint. Even if what is being watched can't be broken down into demographics, it's a huge data base of what Internet uses want to watch. I suspect the value of this data from a marketing research point of view is worth more than any loss of revenue caused by people watching copyrighted materials.
Lurchicus - For Sig, see other side.
They're arguing that YouTube gets more viewership from copyrighted materials than non-copyrighted stuff, and they want the viewer logs to prove that
FTFA:
The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.
Viacom also requested YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema.
What the fuck does Viacom think? And why is the judge agreeing with them?
And do you honestly think this is ALL they will use this information for? The marketing data value alone of those drives has to be worth well in the millions of dollars (if not billions). 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)--which could put the data's value *well* into the billions.
.
In other words, an ignorant judge just handed them a cache of data worth way more than anything they could have gotten from an actual win (and has compromised the personal data of millions of completely innocent people to Viacom's market research department in the process)
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Google's Blog claims that they started taking steps to anonymize their logs a year ago, keeping "only" 18 months worth of identifiable data, to be implemented "within a year's time".
It seems likely that this wouldn't have been soon enough for any of this material to have been anonymized before Viacom's suit, since it was filed the same month they made this announcement.
... could put "infringing" content over the top.
Mod parent up. This isn't potentially valuable. This is worth more than all the possible money they could have lost in ad revenue from the 'infringing' Viacom episodes. In my view, the real prize is this data. It tells them what movies to make and its easily searchable. I think the suit is just a cover to get this valuable data!
I called the chambers and left a message with the woman who answered the phone. She seemed genuinely annoyed today so perhaps she is taking several messages about the issue. Although I could be wrong.
I have pretty regularly cleared my viewing history on YouTube. (Go to QuickList->Viewing History->Clear Viewing History on the YouTube interface).
Did YouTube keep a copy of it anyway? Are they turning that over to Viacom?
If so, I'd like to file a bug against the Clear Viewing History feature as it obviously did not clear the viewing history.
Stuart Eichert
As a YouTube user from Norway, I now feel violated by a court decision made in the United States. I'd be pleasantly surprised if non-US IPs are excluded from this handover. Those bloodsucking leeches should be forced to sue the whole world (and have their case thrown out of the courts) before they could even touch this information.
But if we abolish copyright, then we can't keep suiing Viacom for copyright infringement!
In 2007 Viacom, claiming copyright infringment, requested the removal of a Youtube video that contained a part of their show, Web Junk 2.0, which featured a video from Youtube that Viacom allegedly used without permission. Christopher Knight, the creator of the video, wrote in a blog post: "So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip. Folks, this is, as we say down here in the South, 'bass-ackwards.'"[5] Knight subsequently filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter-notification claim with YouTube. Two weeks later Viacom yielded to Knight and the disputed clip was restored.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Ageist bigotry does not help your cause.
And remember, you'll either get old or die young! Which would you rather do?!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
So anyone know how secure this personal data will be after giving it to Viacom (presumably without Google's privacy policy being legally binding on them as they receive it?)
Yahoo! is nice in that it provides the user with some control over where their personal data is stored. I first opened my Yahoo! account in Australia, and when I moved back to Europe, I was asked whether I wanted my data migrated to European servers to improve speed (or reduce their costs, a cynic would say). They also made it clear what the privacy implications would be.