Viacom Is The Net-Fucker
Viacom can haz your IPs? Yes they can, due to a recent court order in the Viacom vs Youtube case. Viacom has demanded, in an effort to pin down the what Youtube is mainly used for: Original user content or pirated uploaded material. The idea here is that whichever has the most unique viewers is what Youtube is really for, and if they’re there for piracy then Viacom may be able to make a case against them in court. Because of this, a federal judge has ordered that Google must turn over all of the IP addresses of viewers of all of their content since they started in 2005 for analysis to determine which content is viewed the most. Of course, this ruling was made without the appearance of any privacy or consumer advocates having their say first.
So I bring you Viacom, the Net-Fucker. The old media giant that won’t let go of the age of the television. A company that cannot adapt to the rapid changes in technology that are commonplace in our world. So, in an effort to hold on to their media in a world where all media can be found and viewed for free the company is gouging our privacy rights and attacking the biggest video website in the world, a website that even was a major part of the presidential debates. This is all being done while placing many of their own shows on the internet for free, the very thing that they’re attacking Youtube for doing. In my opinion, even if you’re the owner of the content, when you yourself purposefully place media on the internet you have to understand two of its basic rules. 1: What goes up will never come down, and 2: If you put it on the internet, someone is going to make it free, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that.
Of course, there’s the privacy issue that we’ve got to talk about as well. While Viacom has pledged that they will only use the massive amounts of viewing data for this court case, the precedent this case has set up is a dangerous one for the future of privacy on the net. This opens up the door for offended companies to sue companies out of their data in an effort to counteract piracy through a massive amount of lawsuits against individual viewers. And of course, Google is objecting to this ruling, saying that it violates the expectations that they have set for their users, the expectation that any information collected by Google will stay on Google servers for the protection of the users. The company, unlike Yahoo, won’t even turn over the information on dissidents in China to the Chinese government with whom they cooperated with to censor their search engine in the country.
In an effort to help Google, and to make sure that when Viacom gets that data, I’d like to propose a little project. Operation: Bear Force One is designed to drive up the views on a single video to overshadow any viewing of a Viacom clip. The more people who click the above link, the better, so pass that link around to everyone that you can. If Google is fighting to keep our information private, the least we can do is make sure that once our information is turned over, we all look like we love gay techno more than South Park.
Tagged : viacom, google, youtube, homoerotic techno, south park, lawsuit
