Viacom vs Google

[/0]

Have any of you heard about this? Basically, Viacom has is trying to sue google for the heaps of copyrighted material on the youtube. In order to get evidence, they have ordered Youtube to produce information on what kind of videos every individual has watched, as well as give Viacom the IP addresses of every user. I mean every single video, every single individual... this is terabytes of information. I think this sounds absurd... I didn't agree to give my information to Viacom.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Google-pleads-with-Viacom-for-YouTube-privacy/0,130061791,339290381,00.htm

The news article seems quite tame but if you look at videos on youtube you will see how outraged people are. The generally gist of the youtube community is that Viacom shouldn't target individuals, despite the news article stating Viacom is "forbidden from targeting individual users". I don't know which source is more reliable.

[AppleXY]

Yeah, I heard about this about 2 weeks ago. It's pretty fucked up, Viacom should go to hell. I mean srsly, as you said, it's terabytes of information! Not only that, it's absolute breach of privacy~!

[ninwa]

Who is Viacom, what do they do / make / what services do they provide etc? (so I can go boycott them too ^^)

[cara.mel]

Who is Viacom, what do they do / make / what services do they provide etc? (so I can go boycott them too ^^)

Biiiiiiiiiiig entertainment company.
From wiki:

This is a summary of the main Viacom divisions. For detailed assets see List of assets owned by Viacom.
    * Film Production and Distribution: Viacom International, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Republic Pictures, MTV Films, Nickelodeon Movies, Go Fish Pictures
    * Television Networks: Comedy Central, Logo, BET, Spike, TV Land, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Noggin, The N, Nick Jr., TEENick, MTV, VH1, MTV2, CMT, MHD
    * Television Production and Television Distribution: DreamWorks Television
    * Video Gaming: Xfire, Harmonix, GameTrailers, Neopets

[AppleXY]

Viacom is a large media conglomerate with $13bn in revenues. As caramel said, it owns many other corps.

It'll be quite hard to boycott.

[excal]

Old news is old =D

[bturville]

they're trying to prove that copyrighted content is more popular on youtube than non copywrited i think.

i'm surprised youtube keeps records of every users every play.

[excal]

They have to, as part of their compliance regimen within the US DMCA Safe Harbour provisions.

The privacy implications in the EU and, to a lesser extent, Australia should be an interesting thing to observe (countries within the EU are moving towards extremely consumer-sided privacy legislation, such as the Data Protection Act in the UK). It does, however, end up as a matter of jurisdiction (is Youtube AU incorporated here? etc)