Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs

Barence, following up on yesterday's news that Viacom is looking for videos uploaded by Google staff, links to an article at PC Pro, excerpting: "Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers. Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site. Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers."

Comments

Re:Okay then, what's the point?

[JoshJ]

The point is that Viacom can find out that "the same person that viewed video X that infringes our copyright also viewed fifteen other videos that infringe our copyright; and he only looked at two that do not". (Or at least, that's what Viacom is hoping to find- that users view piles of Viacom-copyrighted videos and very little in the way of original content.)

Re:subject

[Actually, I do RTFA]

IANAL but isn't there some recent laws/legal precedence that would actually expose them to MORE trouble if they didn't keep those records?

No, there was a recent ruling that a torrent site had to start keeping records in response to a subpoena.

IANAL, but I believe the issues was as follows. Basically, a subpoena cannot be used to force you to start keeping records you otherwise would not (otherwise, imagine the subpoenas over MS's coffee drank allocated to line of code), it can only force you to retain records you create anyway. The torrent site claimed that they never kept records. The plantiff claimed that they kept records in RAM for the purpose of actually running the torrent, and that recording those logs counted as a reasonable imposition for a subpoena.

Payment in advance

[SmallFurryCreature]

TV stations BUY tv programs and pay for them in hard cash BEFORE they are aired. This makes it fairly easy to do your balance book if you produce content. Hell, most content is even PAID before it is ever produced. What happens is that you pitch an idea, get money to produce a pilot. Show the pilot and get money to produce a season. It is the way the industry works.

With internet ad income the producers would need to finance everything in advance and then just hope the money trickles in over time. There are also issues with advertising. Does an advertiser prefer to air his ads on certain timeslots on tv OR god knows when on a user screen? People on slashdot seem a bit to fond of new tech to be able to see the many difficulties internet ads bring.

TV is also a onetime affair. Want to watch it again, buy the DVD. If it is always available on the internet, why buy the DVD? If you think ad revenues way up against dvd sales, you are just silly.