Viacom, Google agree to mask 12TB of YouTube user dataAccording to our Google/Viacom scoreboard, the Big G beat the Big V 3-2 in court earlier this month, but that still meant Google had to turn over a 12TB database of every YouTube video ever watched—complete with user IDs and IP addresses. The decision immediately raised privacy concerns, but Google and Viacom have now signed an agreement to anonymize the logging database before the handover.
According to a document filed yesterday with the court, both sides in the $1 billion copyright infringement case have agreed that the actual user data isn't so important after all. Viacom apparently wants to see just how popular allegedly infringing content was on YouTube, on the theory that YouTube largely owes its success to big budget (and infringing) fare like The Simpsons and The Colbert Report, rather than to clips of the often amusing interplay between cats and ferrets.
"When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the order," says the new agreement, "Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID." The protocol for actually making the change will be hashed out over the next week.
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Originally Posted by Reppy
glad i had to browse youtube using Ultrasurf (its SSL encryption kills my isp's 20kbs limitation - yes, they also throttle youtube 
) so they don't know my real IP 
And yes, my ISP's limits suck really, but who knows, they may end up opening new doors; for example i may end up learning every technical detail about their shaping equipment, which will be useful later if i follow a PC/networking career 
like us..
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