You act like the people who watch YouTube can afford to take Viacom, or any other organization, on in civil court. Before you get too comfortable that a jury would acquit you, consider how much it would cost you to get anywhere near there, with fees for depositions and the like. There are no “grey areas” in this or any other “intellectual rights” proceeding…the company with the most money wins.

But feel free to feel a false sense of security, while companies like Viacom are forcing companies like Google, who maintain way too much information on their users, to cough it up. You really think this is going to be the only time a company like this is going to be forced to provide data? If so, you are a master of self-delusion…trust me, IP vultures are circling for much more. Ever email into a Gmail account (not sign up for one, but mail into one)? Your mail has been parsed, cataloged, and stored, ripe for the Feds to request with nothing more than a letter, or a private company to retrieve with nothing more than an order from a clueless judge. Ever search with Google (not using a proxy or Scroogle, I mean)? It’s logged, and attached to everything you’ve ever done at every other Google website, all designed to make a marketing profile of you but in reality giving government and private companies the ability to watch you without warrant or even your knowledge.

(Cheer up…this website retains logs for four weeks and then destroys them. Google could do the same thing…but doesn’t.)

This is serious, and kidding yourself that it isn’t by suggesting that anyone can face a company like Viacom in court is a huge mistake. While the immediate issue may be Viacom and YouTube, the real issue is the same one I’ve been pointing out for years - the laws allow private corporations to record and maintain way too much information about their users. And this will bite us all in the rear if allowed to continue.

Shucks, I’m no copyright lawyer, and I hear that there’s a whole lot of iffy “gray areas” in this complicated copyright bizness. I just have to assume that all this stuff on the internet is already LEGAL. How would any regular websurfer know any different? We’s all gen’rally purty stupid…

Let’s hope y’all never POSTED any infringing material…

Come on! Let’s picture the court scene: the lawyers wheel out a huge 88-inch flat-panel hi-def LCD monitor for the jury to watch the infringing YouTube clips. All twelve jurors lean far forward in their seats to try to glimpse the 2-inch square uber-compressed video on the screen. “Copyright infringement?!? I can’t even see what I’m supposed to be looking at!” “Okay, then, just listen to the dialog - you recognize those famous lines, don’t you?!?” “I dunno, can I hear it out of something other than a tin-can-and-string telephone?” “These are Kharma Grand Enigma monitors, there’s nothing better in the world.” “Well, I can barely hear what’s being said - you actually believe that your client is losing money because of THIS?!?”

Right.