Judge Orders YouTube to Give User Data to Viacom

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If you wanted to keep your obsession with hyperactive YouTube phenomeon “Fred” a secret, you’re in for some bad news. A federal judge yesterday ordered that records of every video watched on YouTube be handed over to Viacom as part of its ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the ruling and has a breakdown of how this decision may actually violate federal law.

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Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington writes that there’s only one use for all this data Viacom is to receive: to sue individual users (or at least threaten to) who have watched copyrighted material on YouTube.

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But it wasn’t a total loss for Google yesterday. The judge ruled that the company did not have to hand over YouTube’s source code. The company can rest easy that no one else will build a YouTube clone.