Google Convicted In Italy

They will pull out of Italy and France where the same kind of repression is going on. More and more democratic governments are starting to filter and police the net, not just Korea and China.
Then when you start making the host liable in addition to the end user... it just doesn't make business sense to try and watch the 20 hours of video going up on youtube in one minute from Italy alone!
The manpower necessary to hire, and train to catch any content that poses a contingent liability is just too high a price to pay in relation to the return.

This is a difficult one. I am very opposed to policing the internet but some things have to be controlled. I have no idea how you can control something like this without everything becoming paid membership or making the wrong person accountable, but posting videos like that just isn't on. Blaming Google executives obviously isn't the right answer but something has to be done. If the BBC allowed that on their channel then the CEO or some employee would be accountable. I remain on the fence without knowing more about it.

Well Craigslist was held responsible for allowing hookers to peddle their wares openly (and at least one of them got murdered). Websites are responsible for what they post and allow to be posted. Don't autistic children have a right to privacy? Doesn't anyone have a right to privacy. Google doesn't think so. I do.

Lol the best quote ever... "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post,". Sorry but lol . Why would they even do this...

This is ridiculous.

There is absolutely no way for Google to screen everything before its posted. I believe its sufficient enough to have removed the video as soon as it was reported. If they want to talk about privacy, how about the fact that they had Google hand over personal information of the uploaders?

They might as well start going after facebook users. With the amount of pictures being uploaded, there are bound to be hundred of thousands of photos of people who never consented to having their pictures uploaded.

If you don't follow the laws that are outlined in each country, then the gov can do what they think is OK to do in order to re-enforce the laws.

I don't see anything wrong here.

Tal

If someone were to carry a portable DVD player down the street showing this same video to the cars passing by, would that mean that the city is now responsible for the privacy violation because they provided access to the sidewalk that this person was walking down while violating privacy. NO!!! Everyone would say that's ridiculous.

Google is no different than the "city" in this case. They have simply provided access to the "sidewalk" that someone else used to violate another's privacy. That should not make Google liable. The person that should be prosecuted is the person that posted the video in the first place.

Well Google will find it getting itself into more and more heat due to privacy issues and I'm glad to see it.

You blame the "facist" Italians ... I blame a company that thinks that they have a right to do just about anything they want to do without consequences.

Google's Buzz Draws Privacy Lawsuit | Avvo News

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These governments don't want the small fish i.e. the people committing the crimes... they want the people facilitating the crimes like Google.

It is not a matter of what will solve the problem... it is matter of who will pay for solving the problem. They can stop it outright by going after the facilitators that provide the means for publishing this content... or they themselves can foot the bill by going after each and every small fish that breaks laws like these.

Google may very well be peaking... Privacy issues will be for Google, what monopoly issues was for Microsoft.

I can agree with those who think this is outrageous but let's put a different hypothetical (or not so) spin on it.

Over the next two years, thousands of videos similar to the one in question get uploaded to youtube from colleges, internet cafes, via proxies etc, completely untraceable, impossible to catch the person responsible.

What is YOUR solution? If you can't come up with one then you shouldn't be so quick to judge.

I don't want anything policed but without coming up with an answer to this question, like I said earlier, I remain on the fence.

Lee

Before suing google or any other content network ask first how many people cops can handle in real life that people expect content network to monitor humans to check each video. really no-brainer here to understand that number of videos uploaded and viewed are beyond reach of human monitoring.

The privacy issues for those who lament Google's use
of info PROVIDED BY USERS is a non-starter for me.

The issue is one of reasonable expectations. NOBODY
can claim to have a reasonable expectation of privacy
for anything they voluntarily provide on the internet.

So... it all comes down to contractual obligations.
Read the TOS... most sites, Google included, lay out
pretty clearly what they will, and will not, do with the
info provided.

If you don't want Google to use your info don't give
it to them. If you don't want Google mining your info
from other sources, don't post it.

Seems pretty simple to me.

As for the case cited in the OP... it's a joke. I doubt any
such result could be obtained in a U.S court.

Tsnyder

I'm browsing Google Hot Trends right now and noticed here is a hot search term

shamu kills trainer 2010 video

Is it reasonable to expect to actually find a Youtube video of the actual death of this trainer?

How about a few good snuff flicks?

Google not responsible?

To all of you that are saying Google needs to suffer the consequences for this, I want to ask you something. Are you willing to wait for 6 months to a year for your content to be approved for your IM sites? That is what it will come down to, plain and simple. Many of you use Youtube for the hosting of your instructional videos. How are you going to like it when they start charging you $150 to post so that they can afford to have a censor review it? That censor might get around to approving it in, oh, maybe 8 months if you are lucky.

Lets put this another way, you find a super hot niche, say like the last airbender movie with its toys and whole marketing franchise available. You find and register a domain name and get a hosting site for the niche marketing that you are going to do. You submit your site and when you go to the site to see how everything looks, what you find is a message that reads: "This site has been submitted for review. Once it passes the Italian, German, Chinese, Australian, Yugoslavian and Qatarian review boards and is deemed to not pose any risk of lawsuit to us, the hosts of the site, it will be made available for the general public. All this should be accomplished in 2 to 20 years barring no complications." Now, in that time the hot niche will be no more and you will still have to pay for the domain name and the hosting site during that time as well.

YEAH, Lets make Google pay for this situation and hold every other big for profit company like YouTube and every host in the world liable for what some stupid punks put on a site. You will make tons of money that way. Way to go, people.

There is a reason why the founding fathers of the United States made the first amendment to the constitution what they did,(For those that don't know, it is freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion) they knew that anytime you have government sticking their noses in any one of these areas the results were catastrophically bad. Censorship, no matter how needed is never right.

Here is a great example, an online game with a chat room instituted censorship software. This software monitors what is being typed in the chat room and replaced any "banned" words with stars or asterisks. The problem was that over half the players were from French Canada and one of the words on the banned list was tard because some use it as a shortened version of retard. The problem is that in French, tard means late. It has nothing to do with any insult or cursing. That game is no longer in existence because the few English speaking players were not enough to keep it afloat and the French Canadians all left because they felt like they were being singled out.

My point is don't be such asinine jerks just because you have a thing against Google. In this instance, Google was in the right and that case is idiotic and sets the completely wrong precedence to be followed. Mark my words, if that case is permitted to stand, either Youtube will shut down as will many others and you will see all your sites being "evaluated for content issues" or you are going to see tremendous jumps in fees to cover the outrageous expenses that censorship inevitably costs.

What if its mainly being used to allow people to post pirated software? credit card#? hacked accounts? stolen identities? child porn?

Even if the site owner didnt intend it for that purpose.

Like I said, at some point we must hold site owners and even hosts responsible for user generated content.

Google as always is trying to conquer the world!

ridiculous. that all they are left to do?

Google got what it deserved. They admitted that it was several hours between the time they were notified of this video to the time they finally took it down. It should only have taken minutes, not hours. Google easily has the resources to hire people to respond more quickly. They have elected not to do so, preferring to hire armies of attorneys at 10X the cost instead.

Had they acted responsibly this would never have been an issue.