Millions of people use YouTube (Correction, "GoogTube") to watch thousands of videos online, but you might not know that YouTube might be watching you. After getting a subpoena in May, YouTube has been keeping tabs on users who are known to post copyrighted materials, and has even given a name to lawyers from a movie studio.

The studio turned out to be Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures and they went ahead and sued Chris Moukarbel, for copyright infringement, in federal court. Even though Chris broke the law, the point here is that YouTube gave user data without putting up a fight. Now you'll need to be careful when you post copyrighted material on the popular service because you won't receive YouTube's protection.

Lawyers defending the music industry use tatics such as warning users, and later suing them for piracy. And it now appears that others are using the same idea against YouTube users. This choice by YouTube goes against everything Google has fought for (Now that YouTube is owned by Google). Recently, the United States government sent a subpoena to numerous search services, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. While Yahoo! and Microsoft complied to hand over user information, Google fought back to defend user's rights to privacy. Google is now fighting the Brazilian and Indian governments over user privacy. MarketWatch expects that over 40 million of YouTube's users might now be in legal trouble after this latest example, but could this signal the end of video online?

Last Modified: Thursday, January 1st, 1970 @ 07:00

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