http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7488009.stm

It seems like it's a breach of users privacy to me. If Viacom win a ruling that says Google are guilty of copyright infringement, then fine. Stop it happening and hit them with a penalty, whatever. The law's the law. However, what the users looked at should not be the business of Viacom and they should not be allowed to force Google to hand over this info if you ask me.

Meh. I don't think Viacom is going to care what any one individual it watching; I'm guessing they want information on what people watch so they know what to produce.

What that has to do with their copyright infringement I'm not sure, unless their monetary claims are based on how many times something of theirs has been watched.

I don't know if they should be allowed, but for what practical purpose do they need with this data. They estimate that there are about 1.5 billion people who have used YouTube. Who's going to go through all that data by hand? I mean wtf, since you obviously can't prosecute anyone for looking at the YouTube videos, I don't see what purpose Viacomm has in asking for the logs?

For datamining. Cross-referencing this with the data Viacom already has about it's customers is at least supposedly useful for marketing purposes.

You can't know too much about the customers or about the people you do business with.

Every bit of information is useful when you're doing business.

A database of 1.5 billion people is extremely lucrative if you're able to use the data appropriately.

since you obviously can't prosecute anyone for looking at the YouTube videos

I would have thought that Viacom could argue that as you had viewed something that you knew was illegal, you were therefore just as guilty as the person who had posted it. It could be argued that legally this is the same situation as illegally downloading music or films. The only difference is that you were accessing the videos online as opposed to downloading them then viewing them. This would could especially the case if your browser caches ANY images from these copyrighted films.

Being extremely cynical, it may also be a case of attempting to use the recent backlash against the distribution of copyrighted products to gain an extremely significant amount of market research for essentially no expenditure - a risky strategy, but possible.

I shouldn't have said can't. I should have said won't. It's completely unfeasible for Viacom to prosecute 1.5 billion individuals.

I can see why Viacom would want to protect its copyrights, and so I can see why they'd want some data about THEIR productions that were illegally posted on YouTube. But it looks like the court threw out the baby with the bathwater. I've never watched anything I'd be embarrassed about on Youtube but nonetheless I don't like the idea of Viacom getting their pudgy hands on my personal viewing habits of stuff I viewed legally.

I think the generality of the information was just used in lieu of monitary compensation. It's valuable information. As to how legal or moral it is, this isn't really private information. This is no more private information than what you bought at the grocery store last week. While you may find it disturbing to see that scrawled across the internet, it's really only the stalker-issue that would have me concerned (i.e. why do you have cause to know this, not how dare you tell people).

I shouldn't have said can't. I should have said won't. It's completely unfeasible for Viacom to prosecute 1.5 billion individuals.

You've obviously never heard of RIAA :p

There's a difference between class-action lawsuits and individually suing mass numbers of people.