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. Read more

At a recent conference in Korea, John C. Dvorak found out just how much Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone hates fans of his shows:

[According to Redstone] When you post a clip of The Daily Show on YouTube, for example, that may indeed have a positive effect on the show and its ratings, but it’s not your decision to make. In the world of the media giants, a fan has no special privileges and is not part of the marketing department.

As a fan, your job is to watch a few ads (or buy a ticket), enjoy the show, tell your friends about it, and get out of the way.

Screw that. Redstone should be thanking fans for promoting his shows on YouTube. As Dvorak points out, a ten-minute YouTube clip of a one-hour show is clearly an excerpt, thus qualifying as fair use.

This is why I rarely link to Viacom stuff, even from their official site. If Redstone doesn’t want customer evangelism, why the Hell should I give him any?

(Image via BusinessWeek.)