Viacom Wants To Know What You’ve Been Watching

Before the interwebs slow to a crawl with all the folks out celebrating living in the land of the free and home of the brave…we can indulge in a bit of paranoia from this story at Threat Level:

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

One wonders why users’ names and addresses are required for such a mining exercise.  Surely Viacom could conduct its exercise using anonymized data, just like most of us who work with consumer data do.