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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.
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
I think GP is wanting to know why Viacom needs to know who watched, when posting the copyrighted content is more unambiguously actionable. FTA:
When the Supreme Court ruled on Grokster, they considered that Grokster knew that the service would be used overwhelmingly for illegal files, and that legal files wouldn't account for enough traffic to make the whole thing worthwhile/profitable. Illegal activity may not have been integral to the technical model of what they were doing, but it was integral to the business model. It looks like they're going to try to make the case that Google knew that copyrighted material was going to be essential to driving enough traffic to the site to make it a credible medium. That would make their participation in the infringement pretty willful.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
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.
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.
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.