Viacom's big daddy lawsuit aims to prove that YouTube is little more than a beehive of copyright infringement.
In the latest development, YouTube must turn over 12 terabytes of user history logs, a massive trove of demographic and behavioral data around the size of the entire printed works of the Library of Congress. You could make the case that this information is so potent that YouTube shouldn't even be storing it -- just as people worry that Google shouldn't be storing all of our searches. Do we really want some for-profit business to have a permanent record of everything we watch online -- a record we can't even access ourselves?
For the record, CBS isn't suing YouTube. Nor is Universal Music Group, Fox, HBO, Showtime, Oxygen or Scripps. In fact, all of those companies have deals with the site under which they can share in any advertising revenue generated by their content.
