Google fights to keep four executives out of prison over video clip | Hacker News Reader

Google fights to keep four executives out of prison over video clip

technology.timesonline.co.uk

32 pointsjacquesm36 comments

The real culprits are the makers of the video camera, for not requiring any recorded video to be sent to a moderator first before storing a single bit.

Hilarious and ridiculous. Google could legitimately afford to pull out of all business in Italy, close all offices and reject traffic from IP addresses originating in Italy. It'd be interesting to see that as a precedent.

Alternatively, people living in Italy can post up scandalous videos to all the video sites and shutdown all the video internet companies in Italy.

And banks in the U.S. can shut down any email addresses by sending financial information to them, don't forget.

I am not a lawyer and I really have no idea how these things work...but wouldn't Google's stockholders sue the executives if they made a decision like that? It would surely harm their profit and the stock price, so wouldn't it be a breach of fiduciary duty?

Tongue in cheek as it was, this suggestion would most likely improve google profits long term.

The court is talking about putting senior Google execs in jail. Considering they'd be limiting their legal liability by cutting off service to the country, I think they'd have a pretty good rebuttal to any lawsuits.

The way things are in Berlusconi's Italy, I would not be surprised if this case is being kept alive by his friends to benefit his media companies which are undoubtedly pissed off at youtube.

Imagine if Rupert Murdoch became president of the US. That is, in a nutshell, the situation with Berluscony and Italy.

Murdoch did by proxy for 8 years. It wasn't pretty.

It's hard to consider a free and public internet service provider as a "content provider." In the case of television and print, this makes sense as the people providing the content are under the employ of the organizations distributing said content. This is definitely not the case for content-driven sites based upon public submission.

This is the end of user-created content in Italy.

Fortunately other countries are not this irrational. Today.

It's totally nuts.

24 hours is probably a little on the sluggish side for a response, but still well within the accepted normal response time for a takedown notice (or a cease and desist).

I really fail to see how the executives can be directly held personally responsible for this, and how it could possibly amount to 3 years in jail and a fine if they're found guilty.

if they are guilty, they'll just go to a higher court and so on until they are allowed to go to the European courts where they certainly would win the case. It might take a few years to get there tough

That's my thought too. There might be political pressure in Italy to hinder competition to traditional media, but once this goes to the European courts, it's only going to go in Google's favour.

The problem more often than not is old laws which were legislated when something like youtube was inconceivable.

I'd wait until the end of the court case. Even if it gets through all the Italian court system, there's still the EU courts. It seems extremely unlikely Google will lose in the long run.

Turkey is irrational. Maybe not that much but very irrational. Blocking site access to Turkey for any site governmental organization TIB - Telecommunication Communication Presidency (Yeah I don't know what it means either) reviews and decides outlaw without even court decision. Also there is a blocked site list only shared with "certified by TIB" blocking software developers.

Youtube was blocked beacuse of some obscure videos nobody knows over a year. Google sites are blocked. With Adnan Oktar's Lawyers' unbelievable effort Richard Dawkins' site is blocked. Blogger is blocked. Wordpress... And counting. Some of them managed to "obey law" and unblocked some of them could not. But the insanity continues.

Well years ago we had a news groups moderator jailed for two years because of a post that he had not managed to "know" is outlaw.

Wonder why there's not more publicity about this. I only heard about the youtube thing, but I suspected it was a fluke. You're describing the worst case scenario for what Australia (and others) are trying to implement... there should be a lot more discussion about this.

I think this is a growing trend in the world. Politicians has learned about the "tubes" and trying to control it. of course every children must be protected from the dangers of devil's tool Internet.

In Turkey there is law numbered 5651 giving TIB to control Internet access. They have the uncontrolled power of "deciding" wheter any content is outlaw or not. And ordering ISP's to block access. I think they even "self decide" to block sites where court orders are required. Our trust ISP TTNet obeys any order from TIB. And the funny thing is they do block whole domains. Not content. If a subdomain.example.com is decided to be outlaw then access to example.com is blocked. Funnier thing is they do this by hijacking domains at the service provider level. And the funniest thing is our Prime Minister once answered a question about Youtube's access restriction with "I can access Youtube, so you can".

It's done at dns level? So technically a private dns linked through a tunnel to the outside could bypass this?

This makes me think we need an international "constitution guidelines", with common sense stuff like don't let a non-judicial institution do this kind of censoring.

Some of the blockings are done really this way. Nearly every Turkish Internet user learned about opendns now :). Also there is a huge demand for ktunnel like applications.

This is dns hijacking by the government.

YouTube isn't profitable yet, is it? Google should just block Italy from accessing YouTube for awhile.

(That said, I have no idea if YouTube is at all popular in Italy. This could backfire if another video site fills it's place)

Crazy. What on earth are Vivi Down hoping to achieve?

EDIT: ok, it appears they want Google Italia to switch to premoderation.

As if that's even remotely feasible.

Of course it is. It will far bit of money and man power but it's not infeasible by any stretch of the imagination.

Feasible = economically feasible. According to some youtube stats on average every minute 10 hours of video is uploaded, that means that you'd have to have people screening 2 manyears of video every day, that translates if you take into account three shifts of workers to about 2000 ftes.

If one of those happens to be slacking on the job when that privacy invading video comes by you are still open to a lawsuit, and now you have a much bigger problem liability wise because by screening you took responsibility for the content.

That 10 hours every minute is a november 2006 figure, no idea what the current amount is.

First of all, videos originating in Italy would be a substantially smaller subset of the global figures so I don't believe the task is so incomprehensibly vast as you may think.

Second, I think the legal complaint here is that there is no attempt at screening the content until it has already been published.

I obviously don't agree with it, but it's what's being contested by the plaintiffs. And I think just showing you have safe-guards in place would show a proper intent and meet a standard of reasonable prudence.

But back to the technical issue of screening.

The solution is easy. Drop the realtime requirement. Say:

"hey, sorry Italians, we have to screen everything, we've got 100 people working on it around the clock and your video will get uploaded in two week's time. We'll email you when it's ready."

It'll make youtube less attractive, sure, but every other video publisher (vimeo, justin.tv, et al) would have to do the same thing so all in all, the courts will be happy, the italian users will have a diminished service, and the world will spin on.

From some other pages about this case:

(italics mine):

"Prosecutors say they are aware Google cannot screen all videos, but maintain the company didn't have enough automatic filters in place as well as warnings to users on privacy and copyright laws. They also say Google didn't have enough workers assigned to its Italian service in order to react quickly to videos flagged as inappropriate by viewers."

So, they already know screening isn't feasible, for the rest it's really only about a matter of degree, and that should carry jail terms ?

I'm not defending the prosecution's legal position, only your claim that it would be infeasible to screen the content.

You're entitled to your opinion that it's feasible.

Just as I'm entitled to mine, and it seems to be shared by Google, and the prosecution in this case.

Of course that is not a guarantee that I'm right.

But let's just say that maybe for 5 years or so I operated an office with people screening live video and because of that I'm all too aware of how fallible that is. You'd have to screen double, have an open channel between your screeners and the uploaders, and you'd need positive identification of everybody in every video uploaded.

And our screening parameters were a lot less strict than what google/youtube would have to operate under in order for this to be done so that in the future this could not have happened.

For one, any video that has a person in it could be construed as a breach of privacy, so now you have to figure out who that person is, maybe ask their permission and so on.

The burden of proof that a video is ok to upload should lie with the uploader, only they have the ability to make that call, everybody else is missing just too much context.

And why would a child with Downs have different privacy rights than anybody else ?

So a ruling that would be favourable to the plaintiffs would quickly be seized by follow ons from other people that felt that their privacy was somehow violated, possibly in different media (text ? photographs ?) and so on.

If there ever was a slippery slope example than this would be it, and I think it really ought to stop right where it is at this point.

Dropping the real-time requirement doesn't help. If you don't have enough resources to screen all of the videos you receive today in 1 day, your queue just gets larger and larger -- eventually large enough that an uploaded video will take a few years (or more) to be posted.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to block access to Google video services in Italy.

$$$

I agree with the prevailing sentiment here regarding censorship of user submitted content on sites like youtube. I can also see it would make more economic sense for google to simply deny the service to Italy if the case succeeded. But wait a minute! Doesn't google already censor content for China?

It's not about retroactively censoring, it's about proactively making sure the content isn't there in the first place, aka monitoring, which would be impossible at scale.

Also, monitoring would open Google up to even more liability: "We're not quite sure if this video is illegal, let's bring it to court. Hey, the courts have found this video to be illegal! And you reviewed it and approved it. You're responsible!"

Google does proactively censor:

Search for June 4th: google.com 2,780,000 hits, google.cn: 164 hits

Try posting a blog entry and reference "June 4th" in it and see if it ever shows up in google.cn

Don't be evil, unless there's yuan at stake...

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