The Media Conglomerates Own You
The BBC reports that Google must divulge YouTube log
Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.
The ruling comes as part of Google’s legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.
Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”.
The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.
While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.
Apparently copyright is more important than civil rights, and the right to privacy. This is getting more than a little tiresome with media companies able to troll through the records of people who have absolutely nothing to do with the claims involved.
4 comments
Capitalism trumps community safety, too. A major fire is burning here and the TV stations and radio stations still run the syndicated shows and Ugly Betty.
At least one radio station has gotten the clue and is offering up information…in and out of the power surges/outages.
Talk about getting tiresome.
I commented about that over at your place. Here, when there’s a hurricane, everyone goes to a pool feed based at the largest TV station in the area. The other stations supply people and resources to the TV station, and the radio stations all carry the audio feed.
The local stations provide any extra local info, but these are generally region wide problems.
I can’t believe that California hasn’t developed something similar.
thanks for the comment, by the way. It really is amazing that we haven’t gotten “our act together” in regards to emergency information. We’ve got the fires…floods…earthquakes…
I’ve got a temp job at the County (in the Elections department) and talked with one of the head honchos who said the County got out information about the fire…health, evacuations, etc. to every single media outlet…which most apparently promptly ignored. The other problem seems to be that the County is not “the lead” in dealing with the fire. It’s the US Government via the Forest Service. The Forest service service went down…they couldn’t use their phones…blah, blah, blah.
I say a major emergency is not time to play my body part is bigger than your body part.
We have a lot of Federal stuff down here, but it is easier for everyone when information is released through the county-level Emergency Operations Centers. The EOCs are linked, so you can use any of them to get the word out to any other center. We routinely have briefings that include people from the state capital, Tallahassee, as well as the hurricane center in Miami.
I realize we don’t have mountains to contend with which makes microwave links relatively easy to set up and maintain, but California really needs to do a little modernization.