A recent ruling has people reeling about how a judge recently ordered YouTube to hand over its history to Viacom. All of the sudden, your privacy is not being honored. To summarize the recent story, Wired says that "Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday."
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land is alarmed about the ruling. The fact is that every single person's YouTube video is being passed onto Viacom, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. Danny adds that "It's against Google in general. Asking for individual viewing data isn't necessary."
Forum members believe that Google should fight this -- perhaps in an appeals process. I know that Danny (from his postscript on Search Engine Land) is trying to alert the judge that his ruling was pretty brainless.
IncrediBILL adds that perhaps Google will win this battle through other means:
Maybe the truth is Google already knows the answer and the user contributed stuff is way more popular and Viacom is just pounding sand. Truthfully, I've never watched any Viacom material on Youtube and I've seen a bunch of videos so who knows.
Additional discussion continues and there's an ongoing debate about whether Google should just give in or fight it out. If Google gives in, some of the people who are being held accountable may not even be in the US and may not have the money to protect themselves. Google, after all, has already spent countless hours developing the platform and removing videos that are problematic. The debate rages on.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
