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Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs

Posted by timothy on from the have-in-my-hand-a-list dept.

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."

8 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not as it seems by cliffski · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Re:Not as it seems by nine-times · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Not as it seems by snl2587 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are they *all* wrong about their business?

    Quite possible. That's how an industry dies.

  4. Why does Viacom want all those logs? by phr1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    and why did the judge go along with it? They claim they want to see what percentage of users are looking at unauthorized uploads of copyrighted videos. But they could/should/would do that with a statistical sample, not a full dump of the entire log. Like if you wanted to check out an allegation that 50 million Americans have portraits of Osama bin Laden sewn into their underwear, you would not inspect the underwear of every single American. You'd look at a few thousand selected at random and figure out the percentage. Even when the FBI wanted a look at Google search patterns, they only wanted a few million searches, not the billions that Google has stashed. And Google resisted that.

    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.

  5. Re:subject by Smidge204 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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=

  6. Re:subject by MacDork · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  7. Re:Not as it seems by gyranthir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!!!!.

  8. Re:Risks of being worth a fortune by fumblebruschi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.