Watching me watching YouTube
The Viacom V Google spat took its latest turn yesterday when a US judge ordered Google to hand over all records of every video watched by every YouTube user. The information required includes users’ names and IP addresses.
Viacom, and joint plaintiffs, the Football Association, want to this date to prove that the infringing material is more popular than user-created videos.
Obviously, and rightly so, this has caused a bit of an outcry about privacy but I must admit I really would like to know if main stream content is more viewed than the user generated stuff. This not because I want Viacom and the FA to win, absolutely not in fact, but because it would be nice to have a solid proof point against those who argue that advertising/marketing/PR are all dead as the everyone is now a creator/publisher/communicator.
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My evil side was intrigued by this story: Google is supplying 12TB of log data to Viacom. My immediate response — how cool – you could mine this data set for ever! Have you read Kevin Kelly’s The Google Way of Science?
Only it turns out that the judge has stipulated:
(a) that the data must be reviewed by third parties, and Viacom won’t get to see it
(b) that it can only be mined for this purpose (yeah, right)
Damn spoilsports.
While information famously “wants to be free” (roughly meaning “you can’t keep a lid on a story these days”) I have little hope of 12 TB leaking out onto the torrents the way that the AOL Search data did.
Also, I’d probably need a new hard drive.
mediaczar said this on July 10, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Would be a good excuse to upgrade to a new iPOD though..:)
Am quite happy with the judge’ stipulations as it will still prove my point. Unfortunately that would also prove Viacom’s point which would be bad.
kerrymg said this on July 10, 2008 at 5:46 pm