Blown To Bits

Ever watch YouTube? Your records are going to Viacom

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 by Harry Lewis
According buy generic dexamethasone to the American Lung Association, people who have a parent discount amoxicillin with asthma are up to six times as likely to cheapest artane develop the condition. For example, moving the swollen arm or purchase betnovate online leg can stimulate the muscles and encourage the flow of purchase cipro no rx lymph fluid, reducing swelling and improving overall function. Angiotensin II aldactone medicine receptor blockers prevent angiotensin from reaching some of the sites atrovent online without prescription it binds to in the kidneys, heart, and blood vessels. artane online stores The ACS explains that doctors can give higher doses of purchase artane best price professional chemotherapy if they also transplant stem cells or bone marrow. buy viagra low price The first step to overcoming spiritual depression is to recognize generic petcam (metacam) oral suspension the differences between spiritual depression and clinical depression. Pinpointing the purchase spiriva online source of a sound may be more difficult, when compared discount viagra overnight delivery with those who can hear well in both ears. The drops generic Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved all statins, and they.

The worlds of copyright and privacy collided on Tuesday to cause a massive, privacy-shattering digital explosion. A judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom all its records of who has watched what videos. What clip, under what name, and from what IP address. Viacom is suing Google for accommodating its copyrighted materials on YouTube, and the judge dismissed privacy arguments Google tried to mount as “speculative.” The story is here and the judge’s order is here. (Thanks to Wired’s blog for these.)

Readers of Blown to Bits will recall how easily “anonymized” search records were de-identified, so there is serious reason to doubt that the fact that YouTube users are free to choose non-identifying login names will really protect their privacy.

The logs themselves comprise twelve TERABYTEs of data. There are lots of things that can be done with that data and there are lots of ways it can go astray ….

The judge denied various other requests of the plaintiffs, including a request for the source code of the Google search engine itself, supposedly so the plaintiff could check if Google was doing something special to make infringing material more attractive.

But the judge did require Google to turn over every video it has ever taken down for any reason, so Viacom can sort through them and draw their own conclusions about why. So if you ever put up a video while you were drunk and then changed your mind in the cold light of day, it’s part of the evidence in this court case now.

So much for the illusion that watching YouTube is like watching TV. But I’m sure there’s no reason to be worried about all those activity logs. Surely everyone will understand that you were just horsing around when you were watching that stuff ‚Ķ or maybe you were conducting research, yes, that’s what you were doing ‚Ķ.

One Response to “Ever watch YouTube? Your records are going to Viacom”

  1. Blown to Bits » Blog Archive » An international wrinkle on the YouTube order Says:

    […] Ever watch YouTube? Your records are going to Viacom […]