A US judge's order that Google hand over to Viacom details of everyone who has ever used YouTube has no immediate bearing on SA, says World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck.
Reuters reports US District Court judge Louis Stanton last week ordered Google to surrender the data as part of its $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against the popular online video service. Google owns YouTube.
The news agency quoted privacy activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation saying the order "threatens to expose deeply private information" and violates the US Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 federal law passed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental habits were revealed.
But Goldstuck says activists and YouTube users must bear in mind "the intention of the ruling is not to identify individual users, but rather to establish the extent of access to copyrighted material; it will mean no more than exposing broad patterns of use".
He adds that the ruling itself has "no immediate fall-out for local video sites [such as Zoopy] as it is specific to YouTube, and the court does not have jurisdiction over South African sites".
"But it does set a precedent for Internet-related law. The only way in which it would affect South Africans is that it will lay open the general patterns of browsing YouTube by South Africans."
Reuters reports that the two companies are seeking a way to gather the information while ensuring personally identifiable information is secure.
Viacom says by statement it needs the data to demonstrate video piracy patterns that are the heart of its case against YouTube. It adds it has no interest in identifying individual users.
"Viacom has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any user," the statement says.
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