LJNDawson.com, Consulting to the Book Publishing Industry
Book Publishing Industry Consultant

Google Library

This, from the Wall Street Journal, this morning:

Last week, in the context of Viacom?s $1 billion copyright suit against Google?s YouTube, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube.

This doesn't strike me as a good idea. In the past, libraries and bookstores (and BuzzMachine has a great piece on this) have adamantly opposed government efforts to turn over user information (who buys which books, who withdraws which books). Once you start doing that, you get into questions of what people "should" and "shouldn't" be accessing. And that's not a uniform consensus - that's subject to political whim entirely. (And the concept of "fair use" is indeed a political one.)

Google is resisting the judge's order so far, asking instead to be able to "anonymize" the user logs.

And who is Judge Stanton? He is a Reagan appointee, a Yale and UVA graduate, born in 1927. Beyond that, we know very little. Obviously, HE has managed to keep his user data private.
Bookmark this post: Add this post to del.icio.us Digg it! Add this post to Furl StumbleUpon it! Add this post to Technorati Add this post to Google Bookmarks Add this post to Windows Live Add this post to Netscape Add this post to BlinkList Add this post to Newsvine Add this post to ma.gnolia Add this post to Tailrank
Posted by Laura Dawson , July 7, 08, 9:30 AM , comments(0) , permalink , Email this post
FRONT PAGE
Site design: thesuperheavy.com   Site engineering: Hamidof.com   Powered by: PHPBlogManager.com