The many layers of the discovery order in Viacom v. YouTube

There was a time twelve terabytes of data would require multiple mainframes to store and process it. Now, as the judge in the ongoing Viacom v. YouTube litigation has noted, there are affordable and fairly portable four terabyte hard drives available. Twelve terabytes of data is a lot of data. As has been reported, the data in question in the Viacom/YouTube litigation is the log of every video that has been watched on YouTube and the IP addresses of every logged in user who has watched each particular video. Privacy activists have raised concerns that IP addresses could be personally identifiable. However Judge Stanton relied on Google's position that IP addresses are not personally identifiable. According to Google "[t]he reality is though that in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot [identify... [read full story]