As we celebrate Independence Day we can mull this over. Regardless of the facts of the case and Viacom’s complaint it would seem that, as the NYT reports, “the order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.”

Via the New York Times:
A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P., or Internet protocol, address. Both companies have argued that such data cannot be used to unmask the identities of individual users with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using records of their online activities.

Here’s the back story on the lawsuit from FindLaw:

Viacom and its companies filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google seeking at least $1 billion in damages.

The media company charges that “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale,” by taking “the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube’s benefit without payment or license. The suit alleges that the copyright infringement is on such a large scale that it “identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times.”

Viacom details the “legitimate licensed channels” that it works with to distribute the company’s copyright-protected content. These partners include Apple’s iTunes Music Store and Joost.

The suit also charges that YouTube selectively deploys filtering technology “[b]y limiting copyright protection to business partners who have agreed to grant it licenses,” even though copyright holders are entitled to protection of their works under federal copyright law without such business agreements.