It’s the End of the World as We Know It…
And I feel fine...
By morning most likely everyone will have blogged about the recent court ruling that Google hand over the YouTube logs to Viacom (MTV & Paramount Pictures parent company).
Oddly enough I saw a clip on BBC News that was mentioning popular articles on their website. The first thing my wife said was, "Does this mean I should stop going to YouTube?" My immediate response was, "Why?" To which she responded, "If I watch something that's copyrighted, can't I be sued or something?"
Now this was the way the short little news clip presented itself, and I'm definitely not a lawyer but my answer was, "No." Now maybe I'm wrong, and I'll probably be the only one to say this, but I don't see how this is a big deal. Viacom wants to compare the viewing habits on their copyrighted material vs non-copyrighted material. I actually think they have a right to do that. It comes down to this... find a way to keep the copyrighted material off the site or give people who's copyrights are violated access to statistics.
Based on the article, that's all Viacom wanted... statistics. Well at one point they wanted to YouTube source code but that's a ridiculous request. Google probably should have just granted them access to the statistics right away. I honestly don't care if Viacom figures out who I am and what I've watched on YouTube.
I do hope that Google gets the right to anonymize the logs before passing them on, but they should have been doing that all along... there was no real reason to store IP Addresses for any length of time.
Anyways... it'll be interesting to see what Viacom gets in the end, and how many people cry that this really is the end of the world.