Ontario Privacy Commissioner to Google: Fight the Viacom/YouTube privacy order!

The Ontario Privacy Commissioner is urging Google to fight a ruling that will force it to turn over the logs of YouTube downloads to Viacom, stating that copyright enforcement should not be a used as the rationale for surveillance:

In an open letter to Google, the Ontario Privacy Commissioner encourages Google to challenge the ruling and states, “business should not, in my opinion, rely on the surveillance of consumers to protect their copyright interests. It is not acceptable to allow copyright enforcement to come at the expense of users’ privacy.”

Link, PDF Link to letter (Thanks, Chad!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Civlib • Copyfight

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

wynneth

@1
No, in the US the government agencies are the ones doing the illegal anti privacy surveillance.
Robbo

Wahoo! Works for me. Do they have similar government agencies on the state level in the U.S. to assist Google in resisting this ill-informed judicial clusterf*ck?

Cheers.
ambroisebachot

Maybe the commissioner will get a better response if she called Google on the bananaphone… Ann Cavoukian is the sister of Raffi, the children’s entertainer. Raffi may even have some sage advice for his sister on how to deal with Judge Louis Stanton. At the very least Ann and Raffi could team up to help the judge shake his sillies out, if not completely baby belugaing his ass.
Trevel

I’ll have you know that here in Canada, the bananaphone is a very popular way to communicate. We also have the iPhones as of today, but they have restrictive calling plans and are not a good source of potassium. My money is on bananaphones to win the inevitable conflict.
Ugly Canuck

Does one just slip on the bananaphone for hands-free operation? This is a strange tech to me…
Seriously though if US Law allows for this then your Laws need to change…
With all the tech advances of the past 100-150 years perhaps you should convene a general-purpose constitutional convention to better address your Society’s balance on these issues of surveillance on the Networks, copyrights, etc….but what you Americans do is up to yourselves as you are well aware…as a Canadian I know that I sometimes don’t appreciate what USians have to say about Canuckistani Internal Affairs, so turnabout being fair play I am very far from wanting to tell or to suggest to you how to arrange things in your own sandbox…although it seems I’ve done just that just now….
Human Rights are universal though and I cannot but oppose the current USian use of violence beyond its borders…and the USian denial to others of those Rights, which it grants to its own Citizens in all cases without question, is equally alarming particularly in light of the US’s historic role as both exemplar and advocate of those self-same Rights…I fear that some of you may find tyranny over others abroad, if exercised by your fellow Citizens, to be acceptable in some way…and finally, to see an erosion for the respect for these Rights within America herself is also disturbing, although it is after all your country not mine…and I do try to remember that the news reports frequently get the detail wrong in such a manner as to skew the big picture….
Antiglobalism

Screw these corporations who are trying to own us. We’re not their pets. They can have their degenerate products, as long as we are granted personal freedom to manage our lives and create culture.