The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes a fairly persuasive argument that the judge’s order is a legal error, based on a U.S. law (the Videotape Privacy Protection Act, believe it or not) that prevents the publication of information about which videotapes a customer has rented. Unfortunately, Google’s own legal arguments appear to have worked against the company this time: its data-retention policies are based on the idea that IP addresses aren’t really personal data because they aren’t attached specifically to a single person, and in his decision the judge specifically quotes Google’s view that “in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot [identify a user].”

As the EFF notes in its discussion of the issue, the AOL privacy breach of a couple of years ago is ample evidence that an IP address and some other user information can be used to quite easily track down individual users. Is that what Viacom has in mind — and if so, are individual lawsuits a la the RIAA the next thing on the agenda? If so, then the judge’s decision effectively emasculates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is supposed to protect hosting companies if they abide by takedown requests. Mike Arrington says the judge is “a moron.”

Just to recap, the cartoonist and the search engine have teamed up to offer, well… I don’t know what to call them except maybe cartoon “webisodes” — a series of 50 two-minute clips that will be distributed through Google’s AdSense program and will be collectively known as Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. As described (both of the times it has been announced), the clips will be animated and will carry advertising in some form, whether banner or pre-roll/post-roll. MacFarlane has called them “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in the New Yorker, only edgier” (notice he didn’t say funnier).

I guess my problem — if I have one — is that this deal seems to be neither fish nor fowl. It’s not so much that it blurs the line between TV and animation and the Web, because I’m all in favour of that kind of line-blurring in digital media. It’s more that Google and its advertising program seem like an odd fit with an artist like MacFarlane; even just writing a sentence like “the deal between the search engine and the cartoonist” reminds me of that old saying about the fish and the bicycle. What are these two things doing together?

Are the clips that Seth creates content or advertising? They will be distributed through AdSense, and carry ads, but they aren’t technically advertising (to blur matters even further, Seth will create special versions of the clips for advertisers). In many ways, this is the kind of thing that Yahoo might do, and in fact has done, in the past — creating content or contracting with someone to create content, although without the advertising piece. Does that mean Google is becoming a content company, and if so, is that necessarily a good thing?

I think Anderson’s piece is an interesting thought experiment, and it forces us to think about how the sheer quantity of data we have available to us changes how we do things. However, like many others who have responded to his article (check the comments on the article for more), I think it has a number of serious flaws — and they are all summed up in the title, which implies that having a lot of data and some smart algorithms to sift through it means “the end of the scientific method.” That’s just ridiculous. It reminds me of philosopher Francis Fukuyama writing a book in the early 1990s about “the end of history,” in which he argued that the clash of political ideologies was more or less over, and that liberal democracy had effectively won. As we’ve seen since then, this was more or less complete rubbish.

Anderson argues that “The Petabyte Age is different because more is different.” There’s no reason for believing that this is true, however. Expanding the amount of data — even exponentially — doesn’t change the fundamental way that the scientific method functions, it just makes it a lot easier to test a hypothesis. That’s definitely a good thing, and I’m sure that scientists are happy to have huge databases and data-mining software and all those other good things; but that doesn’t change what they do, it simply changes how they do it. With all due credit to Craig Ventner of the Human Genome Project, sifting through reams of data about genetic pairs and sequencing them can help tell us where to look, but not what to look for, or what it means.

Whenever a game-changing technology like Google comes along, it’s tempting to extrapolate its benefits to virtually every sphere of our lives: “Hey, this thing Archimedes came up with called the screw is the best thing ever — now we never have to use nails or pulleys ever again!” But to take what Google does with PageRank and extend it to all of scientific research is absurd, (Kevin Kelly thinks so too). Even Google’s fiercest defenders would probably take issue with Anderson’s argument that its approach to ranking pages works because “If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required.” The fact is that many of Google’s results are useless and bad, despite the fact that PageRank is functioning exactly as advertised.

And for the record, correlation still doesn’t mean causation, and likely won’t for the foreseeable future. Correlation just means that you found some data that shares some kind of relationship with other data; it can help suggest causation, but it doesn’t replace it.

Getting content from a computer to your TV hasn’t been easy until relatively recently. If you were into Linux you could play around with something like the open-source MythTV.org software, and many people I know — geeks, naturally — modified their Xboxes to act as streaming media servers, while some built their own standalone media boxes. Now most game consoles will serve that function, and there’s the Apple TV and Mac Mini as well, which do the job quite well. And, of course, if you’re really desperate you can always use Windows Media Center :-)

It will be interesting to see how much traction Google gets with its offering — and as Steve points out in his post, this is clearly just a small part of the Web company’s push into the living room.

“Unlike the services from comScore and Nielsen, Google’s will be offered to marketers free, according to ad executives.”

Another industry destabilized by Google’s devotion to free services, and the fact that its massive online advertising engine produces so much free cash that it can afford to offer such features for nothing (in much the same way that Microsoft’s dominance in desktop software produced so much revenue that it could afford to offer Internet Explorer for free, which cratered Netscape’s browser business). The service, called AdPlanner, is aimed at helping advertisers target their offerings better, based on an understanding of what kind of demographic is seeing their campaigns at what websites.

It will be interesting to see whether Nielsen and comScore (whose stock price had lost about 18 per cent of its value the last time I checked) will try to make the argument that Google is so large it is effectively being anti-competitive by offering such services for free. And it’s also worth considering — as some people have mentioned — that advertisers might not want to base their campaigns on data from the same company that is trying to reel them in as customers. Is the Google fox trying to convince advertisers that the henhouse is a nice place to spend the night?

At the same time, however, the numbers that come from comScore and Nielsen are notoriously unreliable, and there will be plenty of companies eager for whatever information Google can provide. Investors in comScore might want to consider having an exit strategy.