[weegee]

Google has no one to blame except for themselves.

If they had not violated viewers privacy by LOGGING their viewing habits, there would be nothing to surrender.

But Big Media wants a permanent record so they can cull viewing habits. Exactly what Viacommie want to garner from it.

If they want to know HOW MANY times a clip was viewed, that information was already displayed onscreen.

[Old Sarge]

First, they came for the YouTubers,
and I did not speak out,
for I was not a YouTuber....

[Prole]

"who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google"

Google/Youtube/Viacom will target user IP addresses for their lawsuits against Americans.

It all reminds me of the RIAA's lawsuits against college students because they downloaded music to their MP3 players.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070301-8953.html

http://www.insidevandy.com/drupal/node/3753

[Dasaji]

So, if I’ve got this right, Viacom’s *advertisers* have put pressure on Viacom to sue Google because video clips from Viacom programs are on youtube.com.

And the court has ordered Google to hand over viewing history, presumably, so the advertisers can “track” down who watched the Viacom program’s clips, and therefore, get some sort of “discount” from Viacom. (and since poop rolls downhill, Viacom’s gone after Google.)

This article was very poorly written and hard to figure out.

[Trityn]

They shouldn’t have logged it in the first place. But if they have to respond then they should make it worthless by giving Viacom every single, printed, hard copy page of it.

[fr_freak]

It doesn’t make any sense that Viacom would go after the viewing habits, specifically. It seems more likely that they would want to target the people who posted video material, perhaps to sue them.

[webstersII]

“Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.”

Can someone explain this to me? I thought all they needed was the IP address and the time of the data request and they could go back to their service provider and get all the info they want.

Maybe some of it isn’t useful because the ISPs dump their logs after some period of time so the data is not available forever.

Seems like Yahoo could just use the username and drop the storage of the IP address as it doesn’t really serve any purpose.