Invasion of Privacy?

[[vL]Kp]

If you have learned nothing else from watching the RIAA[1] in action so far, you should have learned that they're not particularly bothered by the idea of trying out absurd legal theories with little or no basis in case law, just to see what will stick. Even supposing that there's nothing in U.S. copyright law to make the individual viewers liable for viewing the copyrighted material (which I doubt, given the laws passed in recent years), organizations like this will probably entertain the notion of pursuing suits against individual viewers if they think it will be worthwhile in the end (whether through the money gained directly or the terror inspired by the threat of legal action).

If Viacom truly needed the information only to prove that viewers had a bias toward Viacom-owned material, it could be done with anonymized statistics. Assign each user a unique serial number, report how many Viacom copyrighted videos were watched by that serial number and how many non-Viacom-copyrighted videos were watched by that serial number. Give no indication of what non-Viacom titles were watched or on what dates. Provide no way to correlate the serial number to an IP address, username, or any other way of identifying the viewer.


[1] Yes, I know this is about Viacom, not the RIAA. However, both have demonstrated similar behaviors with regard to absurd handling of copyright cases.