Prompt's TechBlog

The web is buzzing this week about recent developments in Viacom's $1b lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement. Viacom alleges that many of its videos are illegally hosted on Google's YouTube, garnering over 1.5 billion page views and taking away potential profits for the video producer. A copyright lawsuit against YouTube is nothing new, but this story took a surprising twist last week when the judge ordered Google to provide Viacom with the viewing history and IP addresses of every user.

To put it simply: this is a ridiculous and frightening precedent. Google has been asked to provide personal information on its users to a third party. If this order holds up then many future cases will cite Viacom vs. Google to gain personal data, rendering the "personal" aspect of it completely worthless. And on a more immediately startling level: Viacom can dig through the IP addresses to find out which users have watched copyrighted content and subsequently sue them.

As a pretty heavy YouTube user myself, this is pretty scary. Not because I know I've watched copyrighted material, but because I don't necessarily know. As YouTube makes no distinction of content, so it's never something I've thought to avoid. I just browse videos and if something interesting comes up, I'll watch it and there has never been a warning of potentially illegal content. Viacom could pull my IP out, determine that my computer was used to watch a clip from one of its shows, and then sue me.

So please Viacom, don't turn this into an RIAA-like suing spree, do the right thing by leaving the end users alone. Even more optimistically: hopefully this order will be overturned and our personal information remains personal.

Labels: privacy, video, youtube

# posted by Zach Hofer-Shall at 8:41 PM