US Court forces Google to release your private history data
Please immediately tell this person (details updated, thank you Peter)
Judge Louis L. Stanton
Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse
500 Pearl St., Room 2250
New York, NY10007Phones
+1 212 805-0252Faxes
+1 212 805-0389
that obtaining your personal history will in no way assist Viacom in identifying which of their intellectual properties has been illegally distributed. Please add that the phenomenal (how many millions of users?) negative impact on personal privacy utterly outweighs any spurious copyright swinery...
Read it: Judge orders YouTube to give all user histories to Viacom (Wired) and eff response and Viacom CSR
Man this is infuriating, and while I'm on the topic can I add that the making available argument is tantamount to arresting car owners because their ownership makes available the possibility of running over a pedestrian or saying that owning a gun is legally equivalent to shooting someone:-(
Time to increase my donations to the EFF, and you should too OK?
Note:
The name of the court building is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse.
The judge's name is: Judge Louis L. Stanton.
@Peter
Have updated details, thanks for the clarification.
I've been wondering about this one, can Google just keep stalling / appealing or does this ruling have some kind of inevitability?
To be honest, Google could probably protect our info by simply buying any plaintiffs...
Truly just a guess on my part but Viacom might be susceptible to pressure from consumers because the lawyers are negotiating with Google over how much the data can be redacted to preserve privacy. Google is simply asking Viacom to accept less than the judge ordered Google to provide. It's conceivable that influencing the respective boards of directors might influence what they tell their respective legal teams to do. And might influence how hard each side fights over this.
If corporations are going to try to replace government as the powers that be, then consumers have to organize into unions that can act quickly and in concert in order to have influence.