The internet wasn't built for censorship, but that means it should be built for piracy? 

This is other people's intellectual properties and Viacom's as the vanguard for those rights is trying to make a case that the industry is being financially damaged because of youtube's lax policing of copy infringement.  This is a civil court case and Viacom needs to justify its financial damages of up to one billion dollars due to youtube.  To do that they need to prove that these video's in of themselves steal a significant audience from standard viewing via regular hours or with a tivo.  That's why they would need the numbers, and I can understand why they aren't going to just take youtube's word for it and verify those numbers themselves. 

They could in theory go after every illicit content uploader and they would be welcome to subpoena youtube for the appropriate information needed to identify the user in question.  Obviously the problem is so sweeping that Viacom has decided to sue youtube directly for not adequately respecting copyright laws on its site by purging illicit materials in a timely manner.  Also this is an enormous amount of data and the likelihood of viacom to take time out of the compilation of their court case to catalogue individual viewing usage i.e. "gee 65.076.234 sure  likes Bushhitler videos" would be a total waste of their time.  A billion dollars is at stake.  No time to be petty or play master spy.  This is an ongoing trial and they have a deadline to crunch their numbers for evidence. 

Google is making a mockery of common sense bringing up that this is a privacy issue, as if viacom cares that I have a thing for Jessica Alba when a billion dollars is at stake.  Frankly I can't even bring up crocodile tears for them since they threw principles into the wind to help China stifle the internet access of all its trouble makers who have this crazy idea that Mao Tse Tung slaughtered millions of people.

You are an imbecile through and through...

"Financial damages" have always been debatable, because in most cases, it's no different than taping shit shown on the television, or even if it's actually illegal, it usually helps promote a product and in the end more people buy it.

Also, all this "copyright infringement" has been going on forever and WILL NEVER stop, it has been going on since the tape era but they just bitched less back then... Or can you honestly say you never taped something from the radio or TV? Or that you never copied one of your friends' tapes?

That's the point I'm making chief.  They are suing for a billion in damages.  Viacom wants, scratch that, needs that information to justify their damages and make their case.  Glad we agree.  Do you feel better now that you've got that off your chest?  I may be new but was the flame necessary?

Well chief its not about buying the product.  Its about the ad revenue.  The networks don't make shows to sell 'em they make to get you to tune in so they can sell the ad space.  Some dude ripping them sans the commercials and throwing them on youtube where google makes ad revenue for providing the interactive medium seems to rub them the wrong way understandably so.

Also Viacom understands that people are taping shit off of television.  But the effect is no where near similar.  The audience for such viewings is severely limited when said tape is kept off the internet.  Even you would agree there.

Yes it was necessary because we're arguing totally opposed views. I think Viacom are fucking douchebags, as are all big media companies and have only to have absolutely NO SCRUPLES whatsoever to claim they are actually losing money.

Big media companies like, Google???  This is hardly the big guy vs. the little guy.  If it were Viacom would be suing the uploaders which they are not.  They are suing google/youtube for collecting ad revenue on their content and doing little about it.  But if its all about ethics with you I can tell you only one of these companies helped China screen the internet of offensive materials for its people to "safely" consume, and it wasn't the evil Viacom corporation.  How is that scrupulous?

While not big guy vs little guy, I think most people have a tendency to view it as vaguely 'good guy vs bad guy'.

Google's argument for access in China was that it was the lesser of two evils; I.E., better some access in China than no access in China. They made no secret about how they felt about China's censorship laws and petitioned to change them. While it's not an ideal situation, giving some help to the average Chinese citizen is better than not allowing any Google access at all.

However, in order for this case to work, Viacom should have to demonstrate actual financial harm caused specifically by YouTube's policies. YouTube has an active moderation system which consistently prunes videos that are tagged as copyright infringement. I find it hard to believe that this is anything but a misdirected measure to fight 'piracy' when honestly it's incredibly hard to find consistently good licensed content on YouTube either way because it's removed so quickly and the length of clips is limited. But then again, every time they go against an actual distributor like TVlinks, copycats in protected countries just pop up.

It's a losing battle and they should find a way to market free programming and still make money, like what NBC does with all of its programs (free HD streams with some ads) or South Park Studios.

Oh god... It's useless talking to you... I'm not advocating for google? Just saying media companies suck balls!
Anyway... Since you're so obviously unable to read I'll stop discussing right here.

It is pretty hard to imagine how a better system to block copyrighted videos would work. Manual approval by youtube staff of every video with suspicious keywords would obviously be unrealistic, with the huge traffic they got and stuff. Refusing any video that contains copyrighted terms wouldn't work either, it would do much more harm than good.
Maybe uh. Encouraging users to flag pirate videos somehow? like give them POINTS for that. haha. that would create CHAOS. Maybe giving some users a special status that makes them like YOUTUBE COPS and makes them hunt down videos in exchange of youtube cred....


But!! Even if it was truly impossible for YouTube to stop piracy on its own site, why should Viacom care? Youtube still makes ad money on their material, n that ain't fair.

But even after getting sued and paying up, what can Google do? The infringements will continue, there really is nothing they can do about them. Would viacom just SUE THEM AGAIN like periodically? Heey our monthly Google check, nice! I don't know, I really cant imagine how this will work in the long run. Also if this works, more companies will follow suit. C...c...could this be youtube's downfall.....?