This link to be recycled by Chuck under the heading "Privacy is dead"
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/judge-orders-yo.html
Judge orders Google/YouTube to hand over enormous gobs of usage data, including IP addresses and userids, to Viacom, for the stated purpose "to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement." Of course since Viacom was also denied its requests for Google's search source code, access to all videos marked private, and other such patently ridiculous things, I guess the judge thought this was a reasonable compromise.
Ironically, I'm doing an analysis of the main website I work on this morning, looking at what products are most popular over time, so I generally understand what Viacom says they're trying to do. Yes, you need some sort of visitor identifier to do any sort of useful analysis. But there's no reason that has to be IP addresses and userids. Ok, maybe that's what Youtube uses internally to track things, but it'd be relatively trivial to do hash it all before handing it over so there's no way to trace anything back to a specific user...
..For that matter though, Youtube displays total views for each video right on its bloody site! Just identify all the infringing videos in a given historical time period, and someone at Google could produce a report with the info Viacom says they want, probably in less than an hour.
The identifying part is apparently the sticking point, as Viacom's position appears to boil down to: Youtube should know what videos infringe on copyright, the moment that someone uploads them, without Viacom bothering to actually tell Youtube anything about what they've copyrighted, because Google's source code is clearly based on telepathic wizards. So give us full access to everything Youtube has, which we double pinky swear not to use to track down other people to sue, or reverse engineer Google's search algorithm, or go fishing for completely other things to litigate Youtube out of business with.
Yeah so basically Viacom is a big fat jerk and that judge is an idiot. That is all.
Judge orders Google/YouTube to hand over enormous gobs of usage data, including IP addresses and userids, to Viacom, for the stated purpose "to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement." Of course since Viacom was also denied its requests for Google's search source code, access to all videos marked private, and other such patently ridiculous things, I guess the judge thought this was a reasonable compromise.
Ironically, I'm doing an analysis of the main website I work on this morning, looking at what products are most popular over time, so I generally understand what Viacom says they're trying to do. Yes, you need some sort of visitor identifier to do any sort of useful analysis. But there's no reason that has to be IP addresses and userids. Ok, maybe that's what Youtube uses internally to track things, but it'd be relatively trivial to do hash it all before handing it over so there's no way to trace anything back to a specific user...
..For that matter though, Youtube displays total views for each video right on its bloody site! Just identify all the infringing videos in a given historical time period, and someone at Google could produce a report with the info Viacom says they want, probably in less than an hour.
The identifying part is apparently the sticking point, as Viacom's position appears to boil down to: Youtube should know what videos infringe on copyright, the moment that someone uploads them, without Viacom bothering to actually tell Youtube anything about what they've copyrighted, because Google's source code is clearly based on telepathic wizards. So give us full access to everything Youtube has, which we double pinky swear not to use to track down other people to sue, or reverse engineer Google's search algorithm, or go fishing for completely other things to litigate Youtube out of business with.
Yeah so basically Viacom is a big fat jerk and that judge is an idiot. That is all.