Farewell Viacom, it was nice knowing you
Since a US court ordered YouTube to hand over logs of the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video using the service, I’ve seen several comments across the web noting the massive violation of privacy that this represents and commenters asserting that they will no longer be using YouTube. I don’t have an account with YouTube and, following this ruling, I’m not going to be in any rush to open one. But neither am I about to stop following links to the site.
As part of an ongoing copyright dispute between media giant Viacom and Google, the court has ordered that YouTube’s usage logs be handed over to Viacom. This represents a massive blow to the privacy of YouTube’s users who, simply by signing up to the site, are now assumed to be violating Viacom’s copyright. But to close your YouTube account now is not only a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted but also completely fails to recognise the impact of this ruling.
As part of an inter-corporate dispute, a judge has been asked to overrule all of Google’s privacy restrictions so that Viacom can go on an extended fishing expedition for people who they think might be violating their copyright. This is a hugely worrying precedent and one that affects any social networking or rich content site that allows users to upload content - all of them, in other words.
Given the ubiquity and usefulness of networking websites, it isn’t practical to completely cut ourselves off from this growing part of the web. And nor should we have to. Viacom shouldn’t be demanding this amount of personal data from a rival company and the judge in question certainly shouldn’t be granting them the power to make speculative searches into random individuals’ behaviour.
Much has been said about the foolishness of giving up liberty for security. Scrapping privacy for the sake of someone else’s copyright is nothing short of insane.
The full implications of this will probably take a while to play out, and I’m not entirely sure how they should play out. But for now, I will be giving Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a miss.
Monday 07 Jul 2008 | Paul | Corporate Maneuverings, Technology
