YouTube User Data To Be Turned Over To Viacom in Discovery Order: Privacy Concerns Take Center Stage
A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far. The order raised concerns among YouTube users and privacy advocates that the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed. But Google and Viacom said they were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors.
MyDD :: Youtube Hands Viacom Your Entire Video History
As part of its $1 Billion lawsuit against Google, the parent company of YouTube, a judge has ordered the video sharing site to hand over its entire database containing the history of all user actions, including what videos each visitor has watched and uploaded. This database includes users' IP addresses and their usernames, if applicable. This decision represents a hideous breach of privacy and brings to light several very important, and scary, issues...Technorati Tags: privacy, Viacom, YouTube, Communications Decency Act
Like any web site or ISP, YouTube is considered an "interactive computer service", under section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act, the so-called "safe harbor" provision, which immunizes such service providers from the illegal actions of their users, subject to a few caveats...
The only reason that Viacom has put forth so far on why YouTube should be exempt from this law is that the infringement in question takes place on a "massive scale". However, there's no exemption in the law for scale, and besides, several of the cases where safe harbor has been successfully invoked involved crime on a very large scale indeed. So it seems likely based on the available precedent that Viacom will not prevail. But maybe, by getting this list, they already have.
What is an internet attorney anyway? Is it a lawyer who practices on-line (ie on the internet). Or is there a field of law called "internet law?" how does one define an internet attorney?
Posted by: Internet attorney | July 22, 2008 at 05:13 PM