YouTube has lost the fight against Viacom…for now.
It seems that the war against YouTube has been won by Viacom and that’s not a happy outcome for the most YouTube browsers. Last night the verdict was that YouTube has to “turn over a mountain of information” to Viacom: every user’s IP address, user name and the list of every video watched on the site. Google also has to give Viacom a copy of all videos that have been downloaded from YouTube.
What about user’s right to privacy? The court justified the verdict on Google’s own defense of its data retention tactics (an IP address alone won’t reveal any personal information about a specific user). Many voices are already saying that the next step for Viacom will be to sue the users who watched the videos.
The war will likely not stop here as Google will continue the fight in court, but in the meantime, it’s time to think twice what when you’re watching a video on YouTube as it’s all too likely that’s about to become a matter of public record.
Sphere It
Filled under: Software
Tags : address user, google, ip address, public record, right to privacy, viacom, youtube
Comments
2 Responses to “YouTube has lost the fight against Viacom…for now.”
11:32 pm on Jul 8th, 2008
This is a complete invasion of privacy on the part of Viacom and our user information doesn’t have any relevance to their billion dollar lawsuit against Google. Google should be able to anatomize the user information before handing over 12 terabytes of personal information so my privacy and the privacy of millions like me are protected. I have a campaign that will force Viacom to allow Google/YouTube to protect us or 100,000 will boycott Viacom and all its subsidiaries: https://www.thepoint.com/campaigns/stop-viacom-from-invading-our-you-tube-privacy
12:24 am on Jul 9th, 2008
I totaly agree and maybe we should start sending Viacom some data each day just few bytes of random data as an email attachment or no better on 3.5 floppy discs !
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