Big brother is watching... your freedom is fading... Welcome to the New World Order !!!

prouted

Tom Anderson pulled off the PERFECT hiest. Created Youtube; The site blew up in a short time; Sold it for 1.6 Billion; Left Google with the bill.

Joseph

One thing that I cant find an answer to about this. When they say "all users data" do they mean the whole world or just the US?
Im sure we have rules in Europe about user data being used this way. I dunno if YT gets around this with EULAs but I dunno if its right for this little Englishmans habit of watching the entire Spongebob Squarepants series on YT being used in a US court. Cause in England we dont do surveillance.....oh wait....yep, sorry were far worse. Dam it im moving to Mars

dk42

Youtube username? What's that?

FrankenPC

Obligatory "fuck the RIAA" comment

MrBlahBlah

I see a customer backlash crapstorm of epic proportions in Viacom's future.

mwbeeler

@Hectorvex:
I should probably take down my one man re-make of "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!"...

Ha Ha!

GiltProto

great so now they are going to find out that I like lolcats, video game clips, and the ocasional japanese idol video

lilaliendog

I want the names & IPs of all the people viewing my performance of Hare Hare Yukai. Heck, I want the names & IP addresses of all users for every post made on the site, just to see if somebody copied or re-upped my video, and for "marketing" reasons.

Yeah...this is legal how?

geowrian

"It is illegal to kill, but it watching somene do it in the middle of the street a crime?"

That is a bad analogy because in the US, actually it is a crime.

No one will get busted for watching, and probably no one is getting busted for uploading either.

I imagine they probably want the data to prove the amount of unique traffic watching these things. They are probably curious to compare it against their own internal metrics. It may not even be directly case related. More an issue that while the door is open, why not peak inside? That data is very heavily guarded. I mean shit, they were trying to get Google's search algorithms!

noamjamski

what user name? i don't have a youtube user name. and my IP address changes every few days. big deal.

tucker

@sorensilk: But I'm using a pseudonym!

92BuickLeSabre

Absolutely nothing on the internet is private. Act accordingly. That's the way I look at it anyway.

sorensilk

@Stacky Botrus: exactly. its like arresting the person looking at graffiti, not the artist.

emergeoriginal

that is going to be a HUGE list......

Mr Josh Zombie

@Hectorvex: Oh, not until I see it, please.

ps61318

Someone right now is cursing their good luck in scoring that Viacom internship this summer.

78,281,028 pages of records down, 401,294,102 to go.

Hiphopopotamus

You mean the RIAA/MPAA will see all of the YTPMV I have been watching..... I have one thing to say to this travesty....

"Tommorrow I'll invent those blueprints"

praevalesco

Why would it matter who WATCHES it? I would imagine they would want to know who POSTED the video, since they are the one violating copyright laws.

It is illegal to kill, but it watching somene do it in the middle of the street a crime?

STOP THE MADNESS!

Stacky Botrus

*starts rummaging through my desk for my passport*

92BuickLeSabre

Well, so much for youtube...

s017jrs

That ruling can still be appealed

One Judges decision is just that - one subjective decision. It is no more accurate than one doctor's decision or one Teacher's decision.

Also what good is all of that info going to do - if Viacom missuses it, they could get a massive lawsuit

Public Relations

I should probably take down my one man re-make of Mama Mia...

Hectorvex

Which will subsequently be used to fire off "infrigement and settlement" letters to the people posting it. What an easy way to double your lawsuits value.

1. Get Youtube info
2. Get IP address' name and real address from Internet Provider
3. Send letter demanding heaps of money to posting users
4. PROFIT!!!!!

DaveExile

"Everything is recorded in a book." - Pirke Avos (Ethics of the Fathers) - written close to 2000 years ago.

This is not what they really had in mind, but it somehow is fitting.

ps61318

What a fucking joke...I'd like to see Viacom try to sue someone for watching material uploaded to YouTube.

amodlin

great... now on top of the RIAA I have YouTube breathing down my neck...

violentsingalong

1. Why is YouTube storing IP's?

2. It's NOT illegal to go to a site and watch a video.

JEmlay

* Suing YouTube for copyright infringement $20 Million
* Getting a retarded Judge to order the release of registered YouTube posters information another $10 million in bribes
* Increasing the number of youtube videos depicting users telling Viacom to "suck their ass" tenfold..

PRICELESS!!

DanLar75

@amodlin: Don't worry...I'm sure they will try.

Mless

@Aaron Martin-Colby:
You beat me to it :)

philly_phenom

Are they gonna attempt to prosecute watchers like RIAA did with napster downloaders?

philly_phenom

I think everyone pretty much saw this coming.

I'd wager that Youtube will be the Napster of video. Regulated into the dirt and replaced with a bevy of alternatives that have the magic Youtube now lacks.

Aaron Martin-Colby

In Soviet Russia, Viacom Tubes You.

Kaiser-Machead's Chips Ahoy!

Every video. As in non-viacom lawsuit related stuff too.
tinFoilHat>

1) Why?

2) Are they looking for demographics info for a larger attempt to enter the market?

D> What data ( outside the scope of the case ) are the gleaning from such a massive inspection of information?

/tinFoilHat>

They should not be able to ask for data that is (grossly) out of the scope of their allegations of infringement.

I shouldn't be able to ask for all the transactons of a store during the course of investigating multiple thefts of the same DVD;or to be analogous to this case, DVD's sold in said store.....right?

slapBOXmaster

I love how Google just willingly coughs up our data to Viacom. It's a violation of privacy. I could see how they might be able to get the IPs and Names of people that have hosted copyrighted Viacom videos, but even that's a stretch if they have no probable cause.

michaelportent

Get a life people, they want this data so they can say that Google owes them $0.01 X 99,999,999,999 (users who watched a video)...this is standard practice in determining "harm".

eramberg

@DaveExile: Watching videos uploaded by copyright infringers is not illegal.

The only people who could possibly get in trouble with MAFIAA over this are people who upload the videos.

That being said, any lawsuits MAFIAA may start based on this will be thrown out of court for unlawful search very, very soon after the lawsuit is filed.

Bullshit move by Viacom AND the judge who ruled on it though.

Pixelantes Anonymous

"secret search sauce"

I actually know the secret; it's the sauce Chinese takeout places use for chicken in brown sauce.

And den?

tobedetermined

Don't care. Not afraid. The illusion of privacy on the internet has been amusing to me for years.

What is a man?

@Stacky Botrus: actually i believe the good samaritan law forbids you from doing that... so id say technically you'd b doing something illegal by just watching a murder... you'd have to call the police, or help out... lol

HaLfRiCa

I don't care what they know I watch.

It's what I download I don't want to get in trouble for.

strider_mt2k

Yeah, now all Viacom will need to go is shoulder tap some ISP's to get the more vital information that coincides with the IP addresses.

Demographics galore, and they got paid for it.

merebito

Ahh google. Continuing down that beautiful road of not being evil. So not evil.

antidayjob

its not such a big blow as it would have been a year ago. fortunately youtube eats up most of the flak so the little guys like Veoh and DailyMotion (and theyre ever growing number of smaller cousins) can slip through the net.

That and I've moved on to bitTorrent protocol. Mwahahaaha.

Overheal

@Stacky Botrus: Viacom will argue that each person who watched a copyrighted video would have happily paid $0.99 for it and therefore Google owes them $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (roughly) in lost revenue.

This is, of course, absolute nonsense.

wjousts

I've not liked the viacom corporation ever since they took Duckman off the air.

CaptCaveman

@eramberg:

Maybe, but they don't need usernames and IP addresses for that, they just need redacted access logs.

I read that what Viacom wants from this is to show that copyrighted material is more popular than "non-copyrighted" material on YouTube (which is to say corporate content vs. individual user content, since really each video maker/representative thereof owns the copyright to his or her own non-derivative work). In so showing, they would argue that YouTube profits primarily from copyright infringement and not the voluntary submission of its users' own creations.

Personally, I think every YouTube user should make a "Viacom Sucks" video of some kind and rocket them all to the top of the popularity list.

chucklebuck

Yeah i am also one of the few peoples that thinks that there is NO privacy on the internet at all, if someone wants to know who are you and what are you doing, there are methods to get to it.

Mike918

@HaLfRiCa:

do a youtube search for the finale of Seinfeld, the whole plot revolves around the good samaritan law.

No entrapment intended, just the irony.

beatrat

@michaelportent: really? you think this was a willful decision? do you know what a court order is?

how many people even log into youtube to watch a video? i _think_ i have an account but i'm not really sure. wonder how this will unfold...

junk

Who ever believes we still have privacy is living in happy-happy world..

DJJS

WOW, how many legal cases has Google won now?? Their legal team is INSANE...

ws6kid

@amodlin:

they can't.. copyright laws only make copying and distribution illegal. actually getting a copy and watching it is not.

ryusen

Who's all for a class action against Viacom for invasion of privacy?

WolfDemon

And this is why its really really stupid to keep records of who comes to your site or not. All that matters is the count (number of visits, countries that visit from, number of times user ID XXX visits, number of vides seens, etc) so just take the count and dump the rest of the data as useless. Its the usual crap of managers not really understanding the data of the reports they demand so they demand everything gets captured "just in case I need it later"

If google was the braintrust it claims to be it would make sure it never got those spreadsheet type managers so that the useless data isn't captured, so later some sue happy company can't demand it.

If the data is needed for some reason, create a Time to Live policy for that data. Say two weeks and its auto deleted. There are plenty of solutions available that gives them the metrics that managers live on (yet usually don't need) and yet doesn't violate people's privacy if and when courts demand that a company do so.

kingdom2000

i feel like im getting borked, something will come out like the video privacy act and protect our privacy... comcast doesnt have to provide ips of people illegally downloading anything

purple_pillows

Attn. Viacom:

Fuck you.

Absent Blue

@kingdom2000: but if the court wants the data then they have to give the order and not demanding all the data they have collected
@least in a perfect situation

TBM-Fan

so it's ok if I watch stuff, as long as I don't upload stuff?

Tsumi91

I'm sure the guy who video taped his girlfriend using wii fit didn't think it could do any harm either, until she started getting turned down for jobs due to it, or the county official that had to resign for having bikini shots of herself on her my space page, imagine if people found out obama or mccain had viewed every rump shake or big boob, or cross dress video on you tube, and yet it was really the kid war driving, stealing their wifi to get his perv on at night, oh and why go through the courts for file sharer's when you've got a huge data base of users with name and address connected to a IP to strong arm, guilty or not they know grandmothers and 12y olds can't fight them, oh she was 101 but 1011 was the real pirate, oops, oh well she already settled, i guess we should go after 1011 now

matt360

@WolfDemon: I'm in!

Crowbot

@prouted: haha, welcome to the new world order, it's 1776...but don't worry, you didn't miss it entirely, it's getting far worse!

Manve

OK, so Viacom now knows what my obscure fetish is. There goes my privacy (read: dignity).

mister8ill

I hope they don't use this to sell it to advertisers. Marketing pays a lot for info like this.
They use your IP address to know where you live, and so on. I know this because I do it with my website using google analytics.

silvio_tercero