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Fri 07 Jul 2008YouTube case opens can of worms on online privacy
NET RESULTS:A US JUDGE'S decision to award entertainment conglomerate Viacom access to millions of Google records about user access to video site YouTube - including IP addresses, user names, and viewing records - is a stark reminder that privacy on the internet remains relative and that EU protections may in practice, be meaningless.
The records were demanded as part of a $1 billion copyright lawsuit that Viacom has brought against Google, which owns YouTube. It's the type of lawsuit that has always been predicted for the video storage site and one of the reasons that many web observers wondered how YouTube, in its pre-Google ownership days, would ever find a business plan before going down in legal flames.
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