Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Information to Viacom

Today the decision has been made that Google (owners of YouTube) will have to fork up every record of every video watched by youtube users, including their usernames and ip addresses. Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007 wanting more than $1 billion dollars in damages for “allowing clips of it’s copyright videos to appear on YouTube”. Viacom says that copyright material is more popular than user created content, increasing Google’s liability if found guilty. Google also has to hand over any  Google however DOES have a system in place allowing any user to flag any video as copyrighted material then allowing it to go through a screening process and eventual removal. Google also argued that turning over this private data is a complete invasion of users privacy. The Judge described this as ’speculative’ aswell as saying that IP addresseds of computers arn’t personally revealing in and of themselves.  As with most things in this digital age laws revolve arround one thing, money. Copyright is no exception to that even if the whole country has to spy on us, what the hell is going on.

internet = police state:  no thanks.

For the Judges Complete Ruling click here.

Because of the fact that North Americas whole economy is based on intellectual property all the bigwig studios and music companies are shitting their pants from the internet. Call me crazy but get ready, things are going to change.

~ by fathomthefuture on July 3, 2008.