Who's the asshole?

Trouble has been brewing for quite some time between Viacom and Youtube, but it's still not completely over just yet. Viacom has demanded that Youtube give up user data. What Viacom plans on doing with this, I don't know. Many are wondering. Will Viacom try and go RIAA on those users and sue them? Your guess is as good as mine. The best part is, a judge who probably doesn't know jack-shit about IT or about internet privacy concerns has ordered Youtube to give these records to Viacom, saying that privacy concerns are minimal at best. I'm sure I could track down some people with an IP addy and a list of searches as well as other contextual information.

he video-sharing site YouTube will be allowed to mask the identities of individual users when it provides viewership records to Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders behind a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit.

YouTube disclosed late Monday that it would substitute user IDs, Internet addresses and other identifiers before submitting the database to Viacom as required under a July 1 court order widely criticized by privacy activists.

"We remain committed to protecting your privacy and we'll continue to fight for your right to share and broadcast your work on YouTube," the company said in a blog posting.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton had dismissed privacy concerns as speculative in authorizing full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom and other plaintiffs argued that they need the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

Lawyers for Viacom and the other plantiffs signed an agreement with YouTube on Monday saying they would accept measures to help YouTube preserve the anonymity of the records. Under the agreement, YouTube can swap the identifiers with other values under a protocol that YouTube has a week to propose.

The new values will still have to let the plaintiffs determine which individual watched which clip and when, but they will mask cases where an existing identifier contains personally identifiable information — such as first initial and full last name in a user ID.

In limited circumstances, it may still be possible to track records to a specific individual based on that person's viewing habits, as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL discovered when it released to academic researchers some 19 million search requests made over three months. AOL substituted numeric IDs for the subscribers' real user names, yet the items searched produced enough clues to track down some of the users and identify them by name.
- Source

Fortunately, Viacom has avoided a major PR backlash by allowing Youtube to anonymize user data that it is ordered to hand over. But who is the asshole in this? Is it Youtube for agreeing to give up the data? They were forced to by a court order, so there's not much wiggle room. Viacom requested it, are they the assholes? What about the judge that dismissed any and all privacy concerns? I think it's a bit too early to tell. What is worrisome is what Viacom plans to do with the data. Hopefully, they will use the data for this case, and this case only, then properly destroy it. If Viacom gets any crazy ideas of going after individual users, they can expect a major resistance and alot of anger coming their way.