2008-07-05 Independence Weekend Musings - How Good is That Search Tool?

Well, if you haven't invested 1,000 "person-years of work" in development it might not be good enough. In the Viacom et. al. v Google, Inc. et. al. 1:07-cv-02103-LLS (SDNY 2008), Google was ordered to turn over contributor and viewer records to determine potential copyright infringement. Google's search code was also requested, but that relief was denied. Plaintiffs asserted that Google's search code was modified to facilitate the search for copyrighted material. Defendant Google/YouTube countered by asserting that no code in existence can distinguish between infringing and non-infringing video clips, especially without some action by the rights holder.

Another surprise: At issue is 12 terabytes of data. Ok, a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. This seems to support a growing decisional perspective that mere volume of data searched is really no longer at issue in eDiscovery cases, as plaintiffs assert: "While the Logging database is large, all of its contents can be copied onto a few “over-the-shelf” four-terabyte harddrives"

As for privacy concerns, Google provided an affidavit stating in part that "'YouTube does not guarantee any confidentiality with respect to any User Submissions.'"