Viacom's vs. Youtube

[Geraldo8022]

http://www.businessweek.com/te...index+page_top+stories

Briefly, Viacom persuaded a federal judge to order Youtube (Google) to turn over records of who watched what. That includes IP addresses and user names. Viacom has said that it is only interested in how many instances there were of people watching copyrighted material on Youtube, however, quoting from the article: "Bloggers and consumer advocates warned of the potential privacy violations, particularly if Viacom uses the information to track down and sue people who watch copyrighted video clips on the site."
All of this is starting to annoy me. How am I to know if something is copyrighted? Do I care? Where will it end? Perhaps Viacom won't come after me for watching a Colbert Report episode on Youtube, but someone else might for another Youtube entry.
Is anonymous surfing the answer? Many years ago I played around with anonymous surfing just for the fun of it. It was slow, very slow. I didn't need it. And today how effective is it if the website doesn't have the little "s" by the http in the address?
I don't download music as there is so much to listen to at places like Pandora or Imeem. I am more interested in ebooks than movies.
The whole privacy issue is one that I never thought applied to me, but now I am beginning wonder.
Is anonymous surfing the answer? Is it even effective? Should I have watched that video of George Carlin? Hard not to.

 

[akhilles]

Tor may be the answer. It's come a long way in terms of ease of use. Back then, I had to read a bunch of guides to install the damn things and even brought up command lines. Now it's just click to install & forget. Even switch identity on the fly. There's a Torbutton for firefox that toggles between anonymous & normal. I use this for forums. I let my ISP see what I want them to see. Like reading cnn.com, google.com, etc.

http://www.torproject.org/overview.html.en

Yes, it is slow, compared to normal browsing, but it's much faster than years ago. This forum loads in seconds. If you want faster & more anonymous through encrypted traffic, you have to cough up for that.

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/index.php

Click privacy software near the bottom of the page.

 

[pcslookout]

Nothing is truly anonymous.

 

[Lemon law]

If GWB&co gets their way, everyone will have to maintain huge record data bases they will be required to turn over to the government. IMHO, google and other companies should simply not maintain any such records, and then when the government wants to look at them, there will be no records to see.

As it is, there is not enough money or time in the world to satisfy the insatiable demands of these clueless idiots who think they can be a BIG BROTHER is watching you 24/7/365
for fun and political corruption. And if You tube infringes on private copyrights, private companies thus ripped off need to take google to court, this crap of going after private individuals is totally insane.

 

[Geraldo8022]

here is another example, about torrents, but still...
"Leaseweb, the former ISP of BitTorrent trackers such as Demonoid, What.cd and Waffles.fm lost the appeal against the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The Amsterdam court concluded that Leaseweb has to permanently shut down the BitTorrent tracker everlasting.nu, and hand over the admin?s personal information."
And hand over personal info. Shut down I can understand, but not the part about handing over personal info.