Viacom claims they need your personal YouTube information, purportedly to prove their claim that most YouTube views came from Viacom content. The latter claim is patently ridiculous, and so is the former.
Viacom obviously does not need your personal YouTube info to prove its purported point. They can use your personal information, however, to sue you. Viacom knows it, YouTube knows it, and people know it. Judge Louis Stanton, who ruled in favor of Viacom violating your privacy, either doesn’t know or doesn’t care. That’s why YouTube’s lawyers are asking Viacom’s lawyers that any data YouTube gives Viacom be anonymized first.

Louis Lee Stanton
United States Courthouse
500 Pearl St., Room 2250
New York, NY 10007
Courtroom: 21C
Chambers Phone: +1 (212) 805-0252
Deputy Phone: +1 (212) 805-0123
Fax: +1 (212) 805-0389

Viacom just sacrificed your privacy to further their billion-dollar legal harassment of YouTube. US District Court Judge Louis Stanton just ordered YouTube to hand Viacom all personal information of all YouTube users. That includes names, IP addresses, viewing histories, everything.
YouTube, of course, argued that this would violate your privacy. Stanton dismissed that argument as “speculative”.
Yes, you read that right. Judge Louis Stanton says that the privacy implications of handing all your personal information to Viacom are merely “speculative”.
Speculative. Speculative! As a tech blogger, I’ve heard a lot of stupid things from a lot of stupid people over the years. Stanton’s …read more

Neener neener.
A symbolic setback for Viacom in its $1 billion suit against Google’s YouTube. On Friday, US District Court Judge Louis Stanton denied the media conglomerate’s claim for punitive damages in the case. If the court had let the claim stand, it could have taken the damages associated with the lawsuit into funny money territory — at least theoretically.
Viacom is suing Google’s YouTube for a nice round $1 billion, but even that is a more-or-less made-up number based on a very large number of alleged copyright violations.
Frankly, I’m surprised it took a whole year to junk this ridiculous suit. That’s …read more