I was upset a couple of weeks ago when I found out about Viacom's victory in their litigation case against Google, specifically concerning their subsidiary YouTube. Viacom's win in the courtroom meant that Google had been ordered to hand over all the information on all the users of YouTube, because an estimated 160,000 clips that infringed the media giant's copyright had been viewed 1.5 billion times.However, privacy protection groups around the world were outraged by what they considered to be an invasion of privacy, as Google would have to hand over IP addresses and personal YouTube account information on all of their users.
Thankfully, an agreement has been reached that will protect Viacom's interests, while at the same time will keep our personal information out of their databases. In negotiations between the two companies a deal was struck for Google to indeed hand over the information required by Viacom, but they are to remove user names and IP addresses.
But is the $1 billion lawsuit enough to break YouTube, and if so is the Viacom giant about to swallow another media company? Our names may not be in a database, but we may see one of the greatest user content driven sites become another advertisement playground, where watching a clip on squirrel catapults will also require me to see what's on MTV or Comedy Central, or what film is being released next month by Paramount and Dreamworks. Before you know it, we might even have to pay for it, and free Internet services, such as Skype, is what makes the Interent such a wonderful place.
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