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Judge makes Youtube(Google) show Viacom viewing habits of users

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progressiveman1

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That doesn't matters. It is wrong to charge Google for the actions of those that break their Terms of Use. To charge Google is as bad as what the pirates are doing. They are asking the courts to steal some of Google's property as "damages" for the actions of some of their users who are using YouTube for something other than it was intended and breaching the Terms of Use.

Methinks you missed the tone of my post...I'll give you a big freakin' hint. I don't like Viacom.

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This is a naive view of law and the function of government.

That is incorrect since you are working on false interpretations of what I was saying, as I will illustrate.

The protection of individual rights cannot depend on suspects voluntarily admitting that they are thieves, which is why courts rightly have subpoena power.

This is false interpretation no. 1: thinking I suggested it can do so. I never suggested it can do so. I said that the courts should only require Google to hand over the tracking details of the guilty not the innocent.

Guilt is determined in a court of law based on comparing the facts and the law; if the court has no right to compel production or appearance in court to determine guilt or innocence, rights protection reduces to persuading violators that they should give themselves up.

False interpretation no. 2: thinking I suggested otherwise. I never suggested otherwise. I was in fact saying something that implicately relies on that happening and being necessary. See false imterpretation no. 1 for what I was saying.

Methinks you missed the tone of my post...I'll give you a big freakin' hint. I don't like Viacom.

I did realise that. I simply addressed a point in your post rather than the tone. But really it doesn't matter whether you like them or not, my point still stands and you have yet to address it. If you don't want to, that is fine by me, but I don't want to discuss opinions of Viacom. I am here to discuss the case.

Whether you like Viacom or not isn't a fact we need to be arguing. I don't like Starbucks. I don't support people stealing their coffee, though.

Well, said. The debate is about the case, not opinions of Viacom, Google, or YouTube.

Edited by DragonMaci
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I said that the courts should only require Google to hand over the tracking details of the guilty not the innocent.
I just explained to you why that is meaningless and metaphysically impossible. What part of my explanation did you not grasp?
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You misunderstand. She was arguing for usage in reviews and the like, not ads. As she said reviews are utterly ineffective if they don't use a quote, or mention some of the content.

But why must the author's total ownership of his property (i.e. the right to control all reproduction) be compromised by the *need* of someone else to make his reviews more effective? Again, I don't see any moral basis for such a claim.

You misunderstand again. She didn't say there need done such.

Huh?

She said it is not a breach of copyright to include a small extract in a review or anything else similar. For example, it would not be a breach of copyright for the website terrygoodkind.net to quote the Wizard's Rules from The Sword of Truthseries and to mention an example of the rules being breached in the books. They do that and it is not a breach of copyright. Nor would it be a breach of copyright for a review to quote the Wizard's Rule from the SOT book being reviewed.

I made it clear that I was not discussing existing copyright law but the moral basis for any copyright law. My understanding of the ethics of property is that an object (including an intellectual work) rightfully belongs to its creator, who is not required to share it with his fellow humans even if they are in dire "need" of it. If Ayn Rand writes The Fountainhead, it is hers and hers alone to dispose of. Accordingly, when and where it is reproduced must be entirely of her choosing. If someone gets to excerpt 100 words of it without Rand's permission, then we cannot say rights to The Fountainhead are exclusively Ayn Rand's.

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I just explained to you why that is meaningless and metaphysically impossible. What part of my explanation did you not grasp?

The part where it has any connection at all to what I said. As I said before, your post relies of two misinterpretations of what I said.

Besides, it is NOT meaningless to separate the guilty and innocent. If it was then the courts would be pointless because there would be no meaning to them separating the guilty from the innocent.

Also, it is NOT impossible to separate the guilty form the innocent. Again the courts would be pointless if that was so, this time because they would be unable to separate the guilty from the innocent. Also, Viacom is going to have to do that if they want to make the process as expedient as possible, which they should want to and I am sure they will want to.

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But why must the author's total ownership of his property (i.e. the right to control all reproduction) be compromised by the *need* of someone else to make his reviews more effective? Again, I don't see any moral basis for such a claim.

Now you are misinterpreting me. I never made such a claim, never claimed there was such a need. I said it doesn't compromise his rights if it is something like the example I gave.

Huh?

Sorry I mistyped. I meant to type: "You misunderstand again. She didn't say there is need to do such."

I made it clear that I was not discussing existing copyright law but the moral basis for any copyright law.

I was doing exactly the same. Terry Goodkind's right are not being breached in the example I gave even though it is not the official Teryy Goodkind site.

My understanding of the ethics of property is that an object (including an intellectual work) rightfully belongs to its creator, who is not required to share it with his fellow humans even if they are in dire "need" of it.

There are two points that need be raised in reply to this. 1. Me and Jenni are not talking about need. Need has nothing to do with our points. 2. They are sharing it when they publish it/record it/etc. That is a part of the point. You don't record an album or publish a book for only you to read/listen to; you do it so others can read/listen to it.

If Ayn Rand writes The Fountainhead, it is hers and hers alone to dispose of.

That site, reveiwers, and the like are not "disposing of" the works; they are providing a form of free advertisement for the artist. They might even be saying it is good and why. In the case of that Terry Goodkind site they are trying to help spread his philosophical messages. Terry Goodkind says that is his main reason for writing - to spread philosophical messages through fiction. Whether it be advertising, helping spread the author's messages, etc, as long it is only a small extract it is not a breach of copyright - and I mean that in the moral sense not the legal sense. And this in no way detracts from the artist's rights.

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But why should an owner's control over his property be limited to protection from financial loss? For example, I may not be able to show any financial loss from hunters crossing my land to kill deer. In fact, they may end up dining at my café and purchasing souvenirs in my shop. But I would still retain the moral right to exclude them from my woods if I chose to. Similarly, singer-songwriter Tom Waits has the moral right (and currently also the legal right) to refuse the use of his material in commercials, even though permitting advertisers to include his work would earn him more royalties and introduce millions of potential buyers to his songs.

Because intellectual property is fundamentally different from, say, land property. It is an established fact, for instance, that it constitutes a violation of rights for copyrights and patents to last forever, but you can sure as hell own title to land or other physical property *forever*.

I'm not claiming that reviewers "need" this or that, it was simply an example of one of the ways in which intellectual property differs from physical property. Financial harm is, in my understanding, the basic way of determining whether someone's intellectual property right has been infringed. It's easier with physical property because if someone wanders onto your property, you can SEE them standing there in your backyard.

It makes practical sense to me to have a cultural norm resembling a Fair Use law, but it probably shouldn't have to be a law. Much better for the easy-going producers to make it known that they don't mind you, say, parodying their movies or making music video clips or whatever. Then social pressure will do the job of getting the jackasses to do something similar, because every blogger and his mother will ridicule them for their idiot stand.

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Whether you like Viacom or not isn't a fact we need to be arguing. I don't like Starbucks. I don't support people stealing their coffee, though.

We weren't arguing the relevance of me not liking Viacom. The only reason I mention it is because when they get in a scrape I have a sort of feeling of "chickens coming home to roost". We could get into this in detail but I won't. The point that I was making is that Kane is misinterpreting (he still is a few posts down) the meaning of my words. He did not look at context and tone and acted as if I were saying something factually when I was actually using dry sarcasm.

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We weren't arguing the relevance of me not liking Viacom. The only reason I mention it is because when they get in a scrape I have a sort of feeling of "chickens coming home to roost". We could get into this in detail but I won't. The point that I was making is that Kane is misinterpreting (he still is a few posts down) the meaning of my words. He did not look at context and tone and acted as if I were saying something factually when I was actually using dry sarcasm.

Dry sarcasm often doesn't come across in text.

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Kane, please do me a favor and don't attempt to misinterpret me any more in the future. I can make a big enough mess when I'm the only one trying to explain what I meant.

Please don't make stupid comments like that. It isn't like I was trying to misinterpret you. If I did so it was obviously an accident. Now, I assume you didn't really mean I done it on purpose, in which case your wording was asanine. I will not take back anything I said though since defending you was an aside and the main point was to point out the errors in his posts. My main points, ie, the ones about his errors, stand.

Edited by DragonMaci
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Only the data of the guilty ones, not the innocent ones.

Viacom's argument is that Google could have looked at all this data and concluded that more/most viewers are using YouTube! to view copyrighted material, as opposed to the user-produced content Google asserts is YouTube!'s primary use. In order to do that, they need records of all views, not just infringing views. Viacom isn't using the discovered data to prosecute specific acts of copyright infringement.

Which law were you thinking of as the exemplar of "clear"?

I was thinking that the "could have done more to stop infringement" standard was vague. I mean, Google could always have done more to stop infringement - they could have shut down YouTube! altogether. I think it would be hard, under the law, for Google to know ahead of time what constitutes "enough."

But of course you are right that the "should have known" standard is, in this case, also vague. (In other legal contexts, constructive knowledge is less vague: e.g., in contracts, parties are presumed to know the terms of the written agreement they signed, whether or not they actually knew.) In this case, Viacom is trying to prove Google had constructive knowledge of infringement based on the records sought in the discovery request at issue - that more users use the site for infringing purposes than non-infringing ones, and Google should have discovered this by looking at the data, and done something about it. But as Google argued, this is terabytes and terabytes of data (not even including the videos themselves), which Viacom's attorneys are going to spend a giant pile of money analyzing and processing. "Should have known" becomes "should have spent a giant pile of money to find out." Even in the porn context, Google relies on user compliance with the TOS and user reporting to weed out the rest. They don't have scores of people at YouTube! HQ watching every single video that gets posted. That's the burden Google will argue as a defense.

~Q

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Viacom's argument is that Google could have looked at all this data and concluded that more/most viewers are using YouTube! to view copyrighted material, as opposed to the user-produced content Google asserts is YouTube!'s primary use.

My arguments is that the court should require Google to do what Viacom argues they could of done and then hand over just the records of the guilty rather requiring Google hand over all records.

Actually, the court shouldn't require Google to hand over anything in this case since Google are not to blame for the actions of their users.

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Actually, the court shouldn't require Google to hand over anything in this case since Google are not to blame for the actions of their users.

Should Google ever be liable for the actions of its users? E.g., if Google encourages and facilitates those actions?

~Q

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Viacom's trying to prove Google did just that - encouraged and facilitated the illegal acts of its users. Google's really being sued for its own acts, not for the acts of its users. To that end, Viacom wants to argue that Google knew its YouTube! service was being used more for illegal activity than for legal. They need all the usage records in order to argue that part of their case. They can't argue "more often than not" without the "not" data. American discovery rules allow litigants access to anything relevant to proving a legitimate claim. If encouraging and facilitating illegal activity is a legitimate claim, shouldn't Viacom have access to evidence that might support that claim?

~Q

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"Should have known" becomes "should have spent a giant pile of money to find out." Even in the porn context, Google relies on user compliance with the TOS and user reporting to weed out the rest. They don't have scores of people at YouTube! HQ watching every single video that gets posted.
What strikes me is the difference between reporting porn and reporting infringement. It is basically impossible for a concerned citizen to report infringement, and trivial to report porn. If indeed it would require big piles of money to hire viewers to check for possible infringement, that's a reasonable limit on what they should have done. Their current standard regarding infringement is massively weighted against respect for copyright. Their actions strike me as constructive abetting. [i'm irritated to find that they posted a book of mine without permission so I want them to die slowly and painfully, though not enough to join a class action suit].
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Please don't make stupid comments like that. It isn't like I was trying to misinterpret you. If I did so it was obviously an accident. Now, I assume you didn't really mean I done it on purpose, in which case your wording was asanine. I will not take back anything I said though since defending you was an aside and the main point was to point out the errors in his posts. My main points, ie, the ones about his errors, stand.

I don't care whether it was an accident that you made erroneous statements. And I certainly mean that you attempted to explain what I said or meant on purpose . . . unless you're trying to indicate that you're sleep-typing--which may be true given the quality of this post.

Since it's not Google's job to determine innocence or guilt, it's the court's job, and the court can't DO that unless it has the subpeona'd information, as far as I'm concerned the court has every right to ask for ALL usage information. Most companies don't claim that they'll never disclose your information to anyone, just that they won't sell it. Privacy on the internet is a myth.

I don't know enough about the specifics of current law to have a good opinion on whether Fair Use is really a necessary part of copyright law. I'm leaning toward no because that sort of thing, like most similar things, is self-policing under capitalism.

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I'm irritated to find that they posted a book of mine without permission so I want them to die slowly and painfully, though not enough to join a class action suit.

I'd like to hear more about that. Did you ask them to take it down? Also, why not join the class action? Is there a class action already in progress? If so, you might already be part of it - some class actions are mandatory.

~Q

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Viacom's trying to prove Google did just that - encouraged and facilitated the illegal acts of its users.

The sites contains no such encouragement - quite the reverse - so that much of their claim is rubbish. The other part is most likely equally as much rubbish.

Google's really being sued for its own acts, not for the acts of its users.

Earlier posts in this thread, including the original, implied otherwise.

To that end, Viacom wants to argue that Google knew its YouTube! service was being used more for illegal activity than for legal.

I doubt they knew any such thing partially because I doubt there is more illegal use than legal. I strongly suspect most YouTube videos are homemade.

If encouraging and facilitating illegal activity is a legitimate claim, shouldn't Viacom have access to evidence that might support that claim?

I am not sure. I have to ask the question, what about the innocent users don't want Viacom knowing about their actions?

But my main complaint is that I think a huge injustice has been to Google.

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unless you're trying to indicate that you're sleep-typing--which may be true given the quality of this post.

What is the point of saying that? To annoy me? To get me emotional? Since I assume those your not your point I can see no point in saying that comment.

Since it's not Google's job to determine innocence or guilt, it's the court's job, and the court can't DO that unless it has the subpeona'd information, as far as I'm concerned the court has every right to ask for ALL usage information.

The comments that is a reply to were my own opinion not an attempt to interpret yours.

Most companies don't claim that they'll never disclose your information to anyone, just that they won't sell it.

I don't care what they claim. That has nothing to do with my point.

I don't know enough about the specifics of current law to have a good opinion on whether Fair Use is really a necessary part of copyright law. I'm leaning toward no because that sort of thing, like most similar things, is self-policing under capitalism.

You may be right there. I don't know. You probably know more about Fair Use law than I do.

some class actions are mandatory.

More evidence of the corrupt nature of the laws as it stands today. :dough:

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Now you are misinterpreting me. I never made such a claim, never claimed there was such a need. I said it doesn't compromise his rights if it is something like the example I gave.

You wrote, “As she said reviews are utterly ineffective if they don't use a quote, or mention some of the content.” And my point is simply that the effectiveness of a review is utterly irrelevant to an author’s right to control the product of his efforts. If we suppose that A ) the process of creation gives the creator the right to use and dispose of his work as he and he alone sees fit, and B ) that an author’s “work” means any reproductions of his words, then it follows that any reproduction, no matter how brief, of an author’s words without his consent is a violation of his property rights.

Sorry I mistyped. I meant to type: "You misunderstand again. She didn't say there is need to do such."

She wrote, “Movies and reviews pack punch when they point to specific evidence from the movie or book or whatever . . .which involves quotations and so forth..” And my point is that the amount of punch a review packs is completely irrelevant to the right of an individual to complete control over his creation, which means in the case of authors the right to prohibit any reproduction of a work in part or in whole without permission.

I was doing exactly the same. Terry Goodkind's right are not being breached in the example I gave even though it is not the official Teryy Goodkind site.

I do not know the specifics of Goodkind's case. What I can say is that the act of creation confers on the creator only one of the following: 1) complete ownership/control of the product, 2) partial ownership/control, or 3) no ownership/control at all. The argument for complete control is that it was the creator’s brain and body alone that was responsible for the product and that therefore he is not morally obliged to share the creation or profits from the creation with anyone else. In the case of a novel, complete ownership/control would not mean most of the book’s sentences, or 95% of the sentences, but all of the sentences. Therefore, if, say, Ayn Rand, flatly refused to grant permission to quote from The Fountainhead, no reviewer could use a single sentence from that book without violating Rand’s rights.

There are two points that need be raised in reply to this. 1. Me and Jenni are not talking about need. Need has nothing to do with our points.

If so, then the fact that reviews without quotes “are utterly ineffective” is irrelevant to the author’s right to complete control over his works, including the right to deny permission to quote a single sentence.

2. They are sharing it when they publish it/record it/etc. That is a part of the point. You don't record an album or publish a book for only you to read/listen to; you do it so others can read/listen to it.

For a price. And if you agree that an author is entitled to complete control over the product of his intellectual labors, then it follows that he may rightfully deny permission to another writer to use even one of his sentences in a magazine article. If you do not agree with the concept of complete control, then it becomes a completely arbitrary game of what amount is fair use and what amount is infringement. There is nothing objectively right about allowing 100 words in a review but forbidding 101.

That site, reveiwers, and the like are not "disposing of" the works; they are providing a form of free advertisement for the artist. They might even be saying it is good and why. In the case of that Terry Goodkind site they are trying to help spread his philosophical messages. Terry Goodkind says that is his main reason for writing - to spread philosophical messages through fiction. Whether it be advertising, helping spread the author's messages, etc, as long it is only a small extract it is not a breach of copyright - and I mean that in the moral sense not the legal sense. And this in no way detracts from the artist's rights.

Unless you subscribe to the idea that you can take someone’s property without his permission as long as you do something that benefits the owner, then the Argument from Advertising doesn’t wash.

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The argument for complete control is that it was the creator’s brain and body alone that was responsible for the product and that therefore he is not morally obliged to share the creation or profits from the creation with anyone else.

Wrong. It is also the publisher's/record company's mind (I emphasis that because the brain is a part of the body and the word you are looking for is mind not brain) and body as well, therefore he is obliged to share the profits of the creation with them.

However, I was not discussing profits, so that is beside the point.

In the case of a novel, complete ownership/control would not mean most of the book’s sentences, or 95% of the sentences, but all of the sentences.

I am not saying certain sentences are exceptions. I am saying that using small extracts (any extract) in no way violates his intellectual property rights.

Therefore, if, say, Ayn Rand, flatly refused to grant permission to quote from The Fountainhead, no reviewer could use a single sentence from that book without violating Rand’s rights.

Well, if she done that then yes. But almost no author/musician/etc does that. They know allowing reviewers, websites, etc to include small extracts helps them. So, there is no breach of rights in most cases of small extracts being used.

For a price.

Usually, but not always - sometimes a story, picture, song, etc is placed online or elsewhere for free - but that is beside the point. The point is they do share and that doing so is a part of the point. You don't need to write a story down or record a song if you don't intend to share it. You certainly don't go to the point of publishing them or recording them unless you want to share it.

There is nothing objectively right about allowing 100 words in a review but forbidding 101.

The exact quantity is not the point. The point is the concept.

Unless you subscribe to the idea that you can take someone’s property without his permission as long as you do something that benefits the owner, then the Argument from Advertising doesn’t wash.

Nonsense. As has already been stated, intellectual property and physical property and fundamentally different and thus so are the rights involved. You cannot compare the two. You are trying to compare apples and oranges. Nor was it an "Argument from Advertising. It was a statement that a form of free advertising is the result of such usage.

Finally, let me ask you a question. In her non-fiction books Ayn Rand used quotes from articles, essays, books, etc a lot. Sometimes she was arguing the same point as the person she quoted from, but usually she was arguing against them. Do you think she was being immoral and breaching their copyrights? If so you should stop reading her non-fiction books because to do so would be to condone her doing so and would be pragmatic.

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