CSC 210 Week 3

YouTube ordered to reveal its viewers
7/3/08

This article talks about a federal judge granting permission for Viacomm Inc and other copyright holders to see youtube video logs on users. Viacomm and the other copyright holders want to know if youtube users are viewing more of their copyrighted material or viewing more of the amateur videos. Viacomm and the other copyright holders say that they would not release the data and that only the "users real name and e-mail address" would be identified. Google, who owns youtube says that it has over 12 terabytes of data it would have to publish to them and it would match roughtly 12 million books, also that it would be a time consuming and invasion of privacy to users. The information that youtube has on the users is how many times they played a video, their IP address and the screen name. Viacom is also seeking 1 billion dollars from youtube because of it's losses from people sharing their copyrighted material on the net. The after math of this case was that youtube had to submit a sample piece of web addresses in it's search indexes, not the actual search terms requested.

I think that this is an invasion of privacy and that Viacomm should not have the rights to see what other youtuber's are looking at. Viacomm should take a different approach at this by just telling youtube to bann all of their videos that are posted or to have investigators look for their videos and submit a request form to youtube to remove a video due to violations.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/biztech/07/03/youtubelawsuit.ap/index.html