Entertainment - Beyond Privacy

Last year, media major Viacom slapped a $1 billion lawsuit on YouTube owner Google, accusing the latter of not doing enough to prevent its users from uploading copyrighted material. A US federal judge has ordered Google to release data about all users who have ever viewed a video on YouTube. That includes users outside the United States. The immediate fear raised by the order was that Viacom would use this information to target individual users for copyright violation, like the recording industry did a few years ago. However, the company has tried to quell fears in this regard. But such a ruling can have a big impact on privacy rights. The information that Google has been asked to disclose can be used, quite easily, to identify individuals by name and this can be paired with a person's viewing habits. At a time when people are already nervous about the extent to which their lives are visible to the public on the internet, this order has raised concerns that there will be more demands from corporations — and, indeed, from governments — for private data. This ruling also has implications beyond privacy concerns. In recent weeks, judges have displayed a tendency to back rights owners over websites relying on user-generated content, such as YouTube, or eBay. The latter was recently ordered to pay damages to the tune of $65 million to luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton-Moet Hennessey for allowing the sale of counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags. So, in the question of whether a forum can be held liable for what its users do, more judges are finding that they can. In the case of Viacom vs YouTube, the future of new media — at least, legitimate forms of it — may be at stake. All television companies, including Viacom, should accept that file-sharing websites are here to stay. Even if Viacom wins its suit against YouTube, other websites would spring up where protected content could be shared — and these might not be as easy to go after as Google. The reality is that people can share video content online just as easily as music files. The sooner that television companies wake up to this, the better off they will be. The music industry was forced to overhaul its business strategy to cope with the internet after spending years — and a small fortune — going after ordinary people for copyright infringement. Do television companies want to repeat history?