Viacom vs Youtube | Privacy Scare - All User Details to Be Handed Over

In a shocking turn in the gigantic court case between Google and Viacom, a judge has ordered that Google hand over records of every video watched on YouTube. The information to be handed over to Viacom includes user names and IP Addresses.

Viacom has ordered for the data to be handed over so they can prove that Copyrighted material is more popular than the user created video. They believe that Google is purposely leaving the Copyrighted content online as long as possible to attract users to the site.

This would invalidate, to an extent, their augment at they are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as Google would receive financial benefit from having the copyrighted material on their site. If Viacom do prove that this Copyrighted material is more popular then Google could be forced to pay over more than the $1 billion in damages already requested.

But what does this mean to us?

Well Viacom will own information about every YouTube you’ve ever watched, quite rightly Google and privacy groups are in an uproar about this breach of privacy. Though the Judge pointed to Google that they themselves have said that IP addresses aren’t personally identifiable, what about the User Names? Most people don’t use their own name as a user name, but what of those who do? What protection is offered to them?

I think it will be interesting to see how Viacom react to the uproar that the internet is in at the moment about the breach of privacy, and I feel sorry for the people who have to look through the set of 4 tera-byte hard drives.