I wrote about the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube (Google) last year when it first was filed last March (see Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for $1 Billion); at that time, Mark Cuban was openly musing that Google's aquisition of YouTube was a mistake.

Now, I think we've moved past that issue (aquisition a mistake or not) so there's no point musing about that - but it appears Google LOST to Viacom (B.L. Ochman has a post on this topic that I like - Worried About the YouTube Order? You Didn't Have Any Privacy Anyway):

A federal judge in New York, presiding over Viacom's $1 billion copyright suit against Google, has ordered Google to give Viacom a three terabyte database showing every clip users have watched on Google-owned YouTube, the Internet's largest video site. Here's a YouTube video that explains it all to you, with musical accompaniment.

U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton, an 81 year old Reagan appointee, issued the order, renewing concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or be obtained by third parties.

Judge Stanton ordered Google to provide Viacom with records revealing the users' log-in identities and the Internet addresses for their computers. Both companies say discussions are underway to anonymize the logs.

Here's a YouTube video that explains the debade, made last year, at that, when the lawsuit from Viacom was first brought against YouTube/Google.

I decided to use Radian6 to probe the Viacom - Youtube story and see what else I could find - setting up a profile with the following keywords

I typically set the default measurements to give more emphesis to on topic posts and on topic inbound links, as I always do - this makes sense to me and it one of the unique features of Radian6 that many of the other platforms I've looked at recently don't have - see Social Web Analytics EBook - print it out and read it.

Here's where it gets interesting - as what I find out via Radian6 is a much more "balanced" view of the news - all coming into one dashboard - something that RSS Aggreators should do - but don't actually do. 

Here's a list of the Influentials on the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit from Radian6's New Influencer Widget:

Also, you can hover over the graphs in the Media Viewer (for each post) and get a count of the number of comments at any point in time (on the chart) - an intersting feature for those who need to follow the development of a story and it cascades in the news.

For example, the TechCrunch post was viewed as the most "engaging" and influential of the latest news on the Viacom -YouTube lawsuit -with Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves with the Judge allowing Google to protect itself at "our" expense - something that doesn't quite show up in the news the way it's typically read:

"…If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle."

That was a pretty serious thing AOL did …. and TechCrunch says this could be much worse - meanwhile - Google gets off scot free:

"…Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code as it could “cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment.”"

So what's the deal here … "user beware" of Social Media?  You use it, you buy it?  I don't know, but I find an interesting thread here - and Radian6 pointed out the "User Engagement" by noting the extreme number of user comments that were from unique IP Address - which is an Engagement Metric.

But what the TechCrunch post is really saying is that the Judician System may not be equiped to pass Judgement on Technical Issues of Privacy - in this case, the Judge, Judge Stanton, might be too old and out of it ….. just might not be up to date on what is really involved here:

"…I can understand why Judge Stanton, who graduated from law school in 1955, may be completely and utterly clueless when it comes to online video services. But perhaps one of his bright young clerks or interns could have told him that (1) handing over user names and a list of videos they’ve watched to a highly litigious copyright holder is extremely likely to result in lawsuits against those users that have watched copyrighted content on YouTube, and (2) YouTube’s source code is about as valuable as the hard drive it would be delivered on, since the core Flash technology is owned by Adobe and there are countless YouTube clones out there, most of which offer higher quality video.

YouTube&
rsquo;s core value is in it’s network effect - the library of content along with its massive user base.

The privacy fallout of this ruling is spectacular. The EFF has already chimed in, noting that the order is highly likely to be in violation of federal law."

 

The idea of "justice" is that people who understand the issues being brought before them, make an impartial judgement - but what if those making the judgement calls are incapible of understanding the issue in the first place - is that what we've ended up having - a goverment run by incompent and out of touch polictial and legal appointees?  Is appears so.

We've seen what that does in the Executive Branch - I don't have to elucidate - the evidence is all around us - in our world, which appears to be "falling apart".  According to TechCrunch:

 "…Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing v. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for far more data than that, and there’s only one use for that data: to sue individual users (or shake them down via the threat of lawsuit, which has been perfected by the RIAA) who have watched a few music videos or television shows on YouTube."

I say this with the utmost respect, but Judge Stanton is a moron. And Google simply cannot hand this data over without facing a class action lawsuit of staggering proportions."

Engagement, as I've defined it, using Radian6, also picked out the top news sources from the River of News, as it's termed in Radian6.

From a Search Persecptive, I could see writing a post that picks up on the Keywords that are being "talked about" the most around the topic of a profile, in this case being the "Viacom - YouTube" issue that I'm focusing on, today.   

For that, the New Topic Cloud Widget is most helpful, and I'll adapt the keywords and title of this post to be in allignment with that teh Topic Clould finds are the main keywords:

The phrases I'd use here are "Youtube Infringment", "Viacom copyrighted video information ruling" with "Viacom", "Video", "videos", "information" "watched clips", "youtube infringement, etc - but this is not so much for a keyword volume standpoint, as "contextual" targeting - because this is what people are "talking about" in Social Media - and therefore - we're focusing on who the influentials are who are talking about relevent issues surrounding at topic.

Also, when we're looking at a target topic, like Viacom - Youtube, once we've isolated the keywords that stand out, via conversations, we can look at the frequency they appear over a specific time period (like the last two days) and this may be useful to figure out how to respond to the developing story (depending on who you are, in this case) by using the New Comparitive Topic Monitor: