Viacom Big Score

Viacom have successfully convinced a judge in the US to force Google to give up:

1. All videos that have been deleted from Youtube
2. 12 terrabytes worth of database on who has watched what, and how many times videos have been watched. (which could be submitted on "three over-the-shelf 4TB hard disks", but I hope will be submitted on 1,000,000,000 sheets of A4 paper).

They didn't succeed in gaining access to private videos or Google's source code.

Here's a comment on the story that I found hilarious:

Any video ever pulled, eh?

Well here's hoping that some corporate shill at Viacom has to watch 50,000 duplicates of 2girls1cup.

But Viacom doesn't want this information as some kind of anti-piracy crackdown.  It's simple: If you get a list of who (by country) watches what video, what each video is rated and what each video contains, you've got a massive amount of demographic data there. That TV production company will know what people want to watch.

The source code that Viacom didn't get, would have been very handy for them to create a Youtube clone. But they're not weeping; they now have access to one of the most valuable databases in the world. Not only will they know how well-watched their own shows are online, but they will also know how well-watched their competitors' shows are.

I'd be very surprised if this decision doesn't get overturned, though. The vast majority of deleted videos from Youtube are not Viacom's intellectual property, and by the laws that Viacom are claiming to enforce, this is now allowed. A higher court will surely find the original decision to be invalid.

Let's not forget the Streisand effect; Viacom's actions will just encourage people to put Viacom shows online. Or the Napster effect; people will start putting their shows up on a non-American video sharing site so there's no way for Viacom to find the people behind the videos. Of course, we'd probably find that all other sites will put a rolling-delete system in place, whereby old logs are deleted perminantly, and deleted videos are irretrievably erased.

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I found out today that I still don't forgive the Spice Girls.  I don't even forgive them for the song Right Back Atcha, much less "Tourgate". I notice they haven't released a live DVD here yet either. Maybe they were telling the truth when they said that they hadn't recorded one.