8th July 2008, 1:50 AM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:I should point out a few things. Those videos are inaccurate in their description of this. (Also of note, I don't have a Youtube account and don't really ever attempt to get one. I don't really ever want to be a person who "uploads to youtube".)
Read this ENTIRE post before commenting. You may think you have an idea of my opinion one paragraph in, but you'd be wrong. Don't respond until you've read the whole thing if you please.
Viacom isn't asking for names or addresses. They are asking for specific information about what was watched and if specific users (only known by user name) have watched this or that video. Namely, they want to know if a large number of users primarily watch pirated videos. The reason they want to use this is so they can say that Youtube is fully capable of banning those who ONLY watch pirated movies to reduce the desire for people to use Youtube for that purpose. I think it's important that before you complain, you MUST make sure you are complaining accurately. Arguing against a strawman gets you nowhere. This is not a case of them demanding all the data of all users. They simply want the data of which videos each username or IP address has watched, and no more data than this. They won't be able to sue individuals based on that.
Now then, I have this to say. First of all, does Youtube even store such information? Maybe they simply don't keep track of who watches what. I'd be surprised if they care. If they do, for say advertising purposes, then they'd have something to provide. If they don't, then the only information Viacom would be able to get is what videos each user posted, which I think they already have from Youtube. Their request would then be denied on the basis of their not gathering it.
Secondly, I must wonder how much of an effort both gathering and analysing this would be. If they do have it, it would have to be several terabytes of data. That could take some time to gather (I think Youtube uses a cloud computing system for storing data, which would be the main source of time). The processing comes in the form of filtering out all the data that Viacom would not be able to get from this order, namely, addresses and so on (those are outside the scope of this request). That would simply be done via a program as it's all tagged specifically on their system, but running that program on several terabytes of data would take some time. This also goes for Viacom themselves, and it's even worse for them. They'd have to actually go through a list of all the stuff they consider stolen and set up filters to search through all this data for all the users that have viewed it.
The third issue has to do with certain problems with the order even in it's limited form. Many users put their real names right in there as their user name. Some might even have a name like "CarlCalifornia" or something else specific enough to track them down. It's easier to find someone in the real world from a little information than some give the internet credit for. I suggest a further limitation that's fully within the scope of what Viacom wants with this data. Replace all user names with contingent numbers. User A would be called 1, and user B would be called 2, and so on down the list. They would still be able to say "all these users primarily use youtube for viewing pirated stuff" even if they lack specific user names. Those are unneeded. Along those lines, how could they even say that a viewer watched the whole thing? Many videos are embedded on other web pages and many more are labelled in misleading ways. A person may not know it's pirated until they actually load it, and further, a person may just have that video come up in someone else's page and be there for some totally different reason. The only reason I point this out is that it means that a supposed "hit" would actually be someone who paused the video just as it started, and thus Viacom's liscense is protected in that case. Unless Youtube further tracks how far into a video a user has watched, they'd have no clear idea.
This bit of prying also doesn't really seem to do much to establish Youtube being "at fault" for what it's users post. It's a free system, and what they seem to be suggesting is that far more stringent check policies be put in place. What sort of system would they use that isn't very easily circumvented? Descriptions can easily be lies, and if they were forced to check each and every video posted, it would take forever for anything to get posted in the swarm until eventually people just stopped going, killing the service and all others like it in time. For the sake of Viacom they intend to kill all other markets? Yes, copyright must be protected but not by sacrificing someone else's rights to do it. There are limits. Copyright is a concept I stand behind, but only to a limited extent. To take copyright to it's ultimate extreme, nothing new could ever be created again. Without it, it's bad, but taken to an extreme is even worse. As such, copyright law must be tempered closer to the "free" end, even if it means someone can't make money off concepts like, say, odors or styles of gameplay, and even if it means the existance of a thing like Youtube must be allowed even if many of it's users violate copyright laws.
As to the privacy concerns, well I don't think anything over the line has been asked by this request so long is it is as limited as suggested.
You cant know the content of a video untill you've first scene it, Some people have the naive thinking that the fact its on youtube means its legal.
The person most at fault is the uploader not the downloader. If I walked into the streets shouting "free beer" and everybody that grabbed my booze would they be liable,If it ended up that I stole it?
Some of the concerns that people have is that this gives precedent for groups like Scientology to use this to suppress their critics, Unlike Viacom Scientology has a far darker track record of organizing mafia style attacks on opponents of the movement.