Posts Tagged ‘Google’
I have just read a very interesting post on the Google vs Viacom lawsuit on Mashable.com (a leading social networking blog).
(N.B. If you are new to the topic check the previous post on this blog for background info).
The Mashable article is very condemning of Viacom in making their requests for logging history, and also critical of the US judge who ruled in their favour on the action, mainly out of anger that Youtube users might now be at risk from facing potential (and probably successful) copyright violation lawsuits from Viacom.
To draw a parallel with another similar high profile case - it is as if Metallica (the famous heavy metal band), who sued Napster over enabling illegal filesharing of their music a few…
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So Viacom’s lengthy court case with Google over Youtube copyright infringement is finally coming to a head. A US court has ruled that Google will have to hand over the entire Youtube logging database, approximately 12 terabytes of files, after Viacom complained about roughly 160,000 Youtube clips of their shows (total views; over 1.5bn), posted in violation of copyright laws.
The log files contain details of all userIDs and IP addresses for every single video view on record to date, which understandably Google is not keen to share with Viacom…
Google has consequently cited users’ privacy as a primary concern for not wanting to hand over the details, accusing Viacom of making an ‘over-reaching demand for viewing history’. Their statements are making…
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The folks at Facebook have had a busy week. They began with announcing a forthcoming data portability product called Facebook Connect, (which marks the abandonment of their fundamental ‘walled garden’ approach to user data management) and then went on to ban Google’s own data portability service (Friend Connect) from their Facebook API, stating a violation of terms of use as the reason.
Some bloggers and commentators have been contemplating if this might mark a new phase in the development of social networking, with the earlier co-existence of the main players now giving way to a more open tug-of-war for market share. After all, new user uptake is slowing down, and one way for social networking sites to continue to grow will…
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So, almost exactly one month after Google launched their App Engine, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced a considerable bandwidth price reduction. Google’s rival to AWS is still only in a closed beta release stage, but it has nonetheless already impacted positively on the breadth of options available to programmers - and now also contributed to reducing costs.
Amazon are unlikely to openly concede that their price cut is a response to the launch of Google’s free rival, but there can be no doubt that the reduction will make AWS more competitive against the GAE (N.B. the AWS price cuts are significant; heavier users could save somewhere in the region of 25%).
With Google’s App Engine still a limited beta release, and…
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The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) has this week ruled that Phorm’s service must operate on an ‘opt in’ basis, rather than the ‘opt out’ model which the company had initially intended to deliver. Good. I do not know a single person who was happy with the proposed ‘opt out’ concept, and even would go so far as to say that every setback for Phorm (as long as it persists with opt out) is a victory for the progress of the web…
(Those unfamiliar the recent Phorm controversy can check here and here for background info)
Pretty strong words I know, but let me continue… - like most other journalists/bloggers/web users I have no problem with targeted advertising. However, Phorm’s insistence on the ‘opt out’…
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