Why is that when corporations sue each other, we’re the ones who end up suffering? Case in point is Viacom’s ridiculous lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom wants Google (who owns YouTube) to bleed to the tune of a billion dollars because clips from programs like ViaCom’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and SpongeBob SquarePants are sometimes uploaded to the service. A recent court ruling in the legal squabble between entertainment giants has seen the judge presiding over the case order Google to give Viacom its record of, essentially, who viewed what videos when on YouTube. News reports tell us that the database to be handed over “includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.”


This lawsuit should not exist in the first place. At the very least, individuals should be allowed to re-purpose corporate copyrighted material transmitted over a monopolistic cable system which, though overseen and controlled by the government and theoretically the citizens of the United States, utterly and totally excludes us from any active participation (unless you call voting for your favorite on So You Think You Can Dance programming). In other words, throw us a bone. But no, this is what repressive anti-user-rights copyright law leads to: corporations suing corporations over who has the right to make money off of us. Corporation 1 (Google) thinks they should make money off of us by allowing us to upload short clips of material produced by other corporations. Corporation 2 (Viacom) thinks even that tiny amount of participation in our own mass culture – basically making our own commercials for our own favorite tv shows – is too much to allow the average citizen. Either way, we’re getting screwed but who cares about people when you’re raking in the bucks?


Which brings us to the lawsuit. Telling one mass media entertainment corporation that they have to hand over all their viewing records to another mass media entertainment corporation is, frankly, pretty bizarre. Bad enough that Google is recording everything we watch and keeping those records on file forever. But, hey, you should send them to another company and why not make a copy for the Justice Department and the CIA while you’re at it? Why should any company’s greedy desire for more cash be privileged over our right to look at whatever we want when we want to look at it? What’s next? Is Random House going to sue the New York Public Library system for lending us books from which we copy passages and quotes which we then append to the bottom of our email messages? And is the court going to say, well, let’s just see how many books we’re talking about here and tell the library system to give Amazon a list of everyone who’s taken out a book, including the title and how long they kept it at their home?


The library analogy isn’t a spurious one. For decades, and particularly since 9/11, librarians have fought a running battle to keep law enforcement’s hands out of that particular cookie jar. We should have the right to borrow a book from the library without our reading preferences (and what they reveal about our lives) being subject to scrutiny by a rival library system, an angry corporation or a government agency. I don’t see how this is any different – what we watch should be between us and the bean counters at Google and no one else. Moreover, what we watch has value – if we want to share that information with anyone else (other than Google who we agree to give the info to for free in exchange for the service they provide) we should be compensated. But who cares about us? We’re just people and, as we’ve seen time and time again, when the titans clash people don’t matter.