Next up on YouTube - You!

YouTube users are the losers in the carve up between YouTube (Google) and Viacom. The NYT is one of many reporting the issue, but this says it well:

the judge’s order, which was made public late Wednesday, renewed concerns among privacy advocates that Internet companies like Google are collecting unprecedented amounts of private information that could be misused or could unexpectedly fall into the hands of third parties....

....Google’s lawyers asked their counterparts at Viacom to agree to allow Google to remove information from the data that could potentially be used to identify individuals.

The legal judgement is a red herring - this is the fundamental issue: there is no good reason for Google to collect the amount of user data it does, or retain it for as long as it does, in order to serve a YouTube video. By doing so it puts its own users at risk (not just from legal challenges but from all sorts of rogue behaviour), and thus if it is not yet Evil, it is far from being a Good Thing.