Doodoodoodoodoo...Viacon!

Listen to how out of control Viacom is.

Viacon is the right-wing media conglomerate that helped ruin MTV and owns numerous cable channels and film production houses. Last year, Viacom - already one of the richest corporations in the land - filed a lawsuit against Google, demanding over $1,000,000,000 (a billion) for failing to stop users from uploading copyrighted material to YouTube (which Google now owns).

Meseems YouTube's growing habit of deleting anything and everything because it made someone cwy is no longer enough to appease Viacom.

Now right-wing federal Judge Louis Stanton (a Reagan appointee) has ordered Google to turn over the records of every instance of videos ever being watched on YouTube to Viacom. So now, if you've ever viewed a video on YouTube, Viacom gets a record of it, along with your IP number and (if it was through your account) your name. The excuse for this is so Viacom can "prove" YouTube is used to watch copyrighted clips.

Turning these records over to Viacom violates a federal law that bars such data from being disclosed. Therefore, I withhold from Viacom permission to possess my data. They can't have it. But if Judge Stanton doesn't mind Viacon knowing how many times he viewed the Pop-Tarts commercial from 1976 to try to figure out how they got the toaster to talk, let him deal with it.

It sounds to me like Viacom's real goal is to collect the names of ordinary people who viewed videos and harass them.

Viacom also demanded that Google turn over copies of all videos marked private - which is exactly like going into someone's house and taking their family videos. The judge actually ordered Google to turn over data about how many times each private video was viewed.

What's really ironic is the role of Viacom and other media giants in prompting the recent writers' strike. The strike resulted largely because Viacom and other companies refused to pay writers for promotional Internet materials. So how can Viacom expect to recover for materials posted online?

(Source: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/judge-orders-yo.html)