- Sunday, 12 July 2009
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You can't run a $30 billion company on games - Bob Colwell, former Intel architect
Hand over Youtube logs orders judge
THE WORLD'S MOST VISITED website is being forced to hand over the details of every clip watched by every use... ever.
Google, which snapped up Youtube for $1.65 billion last year, is calling foul on the order from a New York judge saying that the cost of producing the detailed logs would be prohibitive.
The judge rejected the appeal stating that. although the logs would be large, and that producing them would be difficult, they would easily fit onto a couple of standard hard drives.
The ruling has been forced by media giant Viacom, which is trying to prove that Youtube encourages piracy by offering copyrighted material without payment.
Civil rights groups are also getting their knickers in a twist over the order. "The court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."
Google suggested that handing over the data would pose a security threat and asked that it be allowed to provide the data scrubbed clean of personal information. "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order." µ
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Damn straight Google! The moment google starts handing over my personal infomation to courts and production companies is the moment I stop using Youtube!

This will end up turning into a Napter/Universal thing all over again, in which production companies like viacom will be left out in the cold and too far behind to catch up!

Broadcast your stuff online before we do!
That judge is mad if he thinks 12TB will fit on a couple of standard hard drives! I would imagine Google will have to create some sort of RAID array of about 20 or so 1TB drives to store all that data and its parity information. Actually, they should supply it as RAID0 and hope Viacom damage one of the drives... ;)

I'm actually surprised it's only 12TB, I'd have thought it would be much bigger given how many people use YouTube every day. 

That said, why does Google have to capture IP address and username with every video viewing? I could understand needing something to uniquely record a viewing to prevent someone watching a video multiple times to boost his viewing numbers, but this situation is excellent proof that Google's obsession with logging people's searches is wide open to personal identification and breaching their privacy.

Things could be even worse if they were forced to open up their web search history. This ruling sets a bad precedent for people getting their hands on that data in the future I think.

oki doki, errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrm, google hand over said 'damning documents' then what ?? 

is viacom gonna say, "there i told you so" then chuck a hissy fit thats of such biblical proportions that the pirates houses/ships self destruct, or what ??
20 000 "worst INFRINGERS" who watched silly quality MTV video-clips' from 80' will receive $5k settlement letters from MPAAORANYOTHER freaks... 
Welcome in Internet for corps profits world!!
easy-fix, google make a search-tool that checks if the material is copyrighted. Then they are taking reasonable care, then they are unlikely to be sued.

Easy.