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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."
Yes, but this proves that Viacom needs to upload things on YouTube with ads on them. Because say you get $.01 per each view. That's a whole lot of money Viacom lost because they were being idiots and not using the internet. If that is what Viacom was doing all this is doing is proving that they are indeed dying.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But I think the bigger prize here is getting their grubby paws on more accurate viewing figures than could ever be achieved by something like Nielson. That, after all, is why advertising $$$ continues to flow online -- a trend which (hopefully sooner rather than later) will wipe Viacom and all the rest of the old-media dinosaurs out.
You keep insisting that you hold the secret to profitability for viacom, by repeatedly insisting that all their content should be made freely available on the web paid for by adverts.
Seriously, if you think this is such an awesome idea, why isn't every movie and TV producer on earth submitting their content to youtube?
Are they *all* wrong about their business?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Well that was their stated intention, at least. Many people have suspected that they wanted to do more with it, since they were asking for the record of every view of every movie, including usernames and addresses. That seems like a lot of info just to demonstrate that a movie had been viewed many times. Doesn't YouTube publicly display the number of views for each movie anyway?
But personally, I'd sooner be suspicious that this is a ploy to get access to Google's data as market research. If you're a media company looking for sources of data to mine, getting Google's YouTube records is hitting the jackpot.
Are they *all* wrong about their business?
Quite possible. That's how an industry dies.
I don't know what Viacom wants with this data, but it's not what they say they want, and it has to be evil. Barfff on them, and boo to Google and the judge for handing it over so easily. Google should appeal this up the wazoo, and most importantly STOP KEEPING SUCH LOGS.
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?
A story of a certain torrent site comes to mind...
=Smidge=
Um. So you upload or 'make favourite' or comment upon a bunch of videos to YouTube and "within days" that data is anonymised and you can't access this information - how does that help the user?
at least they care .....
They care about themselves. Had Viacom gotten the IP logs, they could have proven Google staff was party to the infringement. I doubt user welfare was on their mind...
Actually, they wanted the information to attempt to completely take down youtube.
As they wanted to identify Youtube employees as uploaders of copyrighted content, youtube would lose it's ISP Safeharbor granted to them based on the DMCA ISP Safeharbor rules about illegal or copyrighted content on ISP's servers (they are not responsible for it, and do not have to proactively search for it).
If they would lose that safeharbor clause they would be gone within weeks.
Also they stated they weren't planning on going after individual users, but weren't going to rule it out..... Sound familiar? RIAA!!!!.
I know it pisses me off when I can't see my IP address on YouTube, oh wait, I can't, so there's no reason why I would want them to keep my IP address.
We're talking about logged-in YouTube users here, right? Not anonymous browsing.
So for a YouTube user who has already given their name and email address, it would seem pretty standard to record the IP address of at least the last successful login as part of the authentication mechanism.
Do we know if YouTube stores the IP for any longer than that? I'd think it could help track down account break-ins and abuse.
So you have two scenarios - either they keep your IP address and you can then successfully defend yourself against an accusation of uploading unauthorised content which occurred when your account was hacked, or the activity is linked purely to your username and you're on the hook.
What it still boils down to for google is google, as a privacy invasive marketing firm, has not desire to give away data that it considers valuable enough to store for years and only rents out. Tricky for google to argue that it court and claim Viacom is actually trying to steal valuable data that could be used to psychologically analyses an extensive customer base for marketing purposes, as Viacom also manages a less successful video portal and is in affect trying to steal that commercially valuable data via the court in order to try to make it more successful.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As I understand it, Google bought Youtube *specifically because* Viacom was going to sue. Youtube didn't have the resources to fight a lawsuit from Viacom, so they would have had to settle and the most likely outcome would be that Viacom would end up owning Youtube's technology (which they would shelve) and patents (which they would use to stop other companies, Google included, from developing a Youtube equivalent.) So Google bought Youtube in order that Viacom would have to sue Google, which does have the resources to fight the lawsuit (also, presumably, Google thinks it can win it) and Google will wind up owning the technology and free from patent interference.
Have you seen the Visa ads where everyone uses a Visa card and the line flows smoothly while the guy with money gums up the works, exactly the opposite of how the real world works? That's how corporations think.
this is off topic, but having worked as a cashier, I probably know more about POS than you.
Payment methods from fastest to slowest is this:
1: Debit card
2: Cash (exact change)
3: Credit card
4: Cash (inexact change)
5: Check
maybe your real world world differently from mine, but in my experience swipe and sign is a pretty painless process.