Viacom knows what you watched last summer.
- “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”
The judge’s contention that an IP address can’t be considered personal information shows a distinct lack of understanding about the matter. In most cases converting an IP to a household would simply be a matter of giving the ISP that owns the IP the address and time/date it was used and ‘asking’ them for the account holder’s details; this is possible regardless of whether it was a fixed or dynamic IP. Not that this is an option for most sites, the ISP would just refuse, meaning that IPs stored for e.g. in webserver log files aren’t particularly a privacy issue. Easily done by Viacom and Big Media’s high-price attack lawyers, however, especially as they already own quite a lot of ISP market share themselves.