Viacom wants YouTube visitors to stop watching their shows commercial-free and instead go to their websites such as Comedy Central where they can show you commercials to watch the same content. They expect YouTube to police every Viacom video and are embroiled in a lawsuit that is also becoming a huge issue over privacy and confidentiality on the Web. A court ruled that YouTube must provide the IP addresses of every member showing what content they watch. Viacom needs to see how many times their shows are viewed to calculate the financial impact to them for damages calculations. YouTube needs to keep their viewer’s habits confidential as part if their contract with them.

Today the parties sensing over-reach on the part of the court reached an agreement that says, with the court’s blessing, that anonymised data could be sent, meaning your history goes to Viacom but without any idea who you are or from where you are watching.

Both parties also want to avoid an e-bay roll of the dice situation where two rulings in the last few weeks have created mass confusion. A French judge held e-bay liable for selling fake Gucci handbags and ordered $44 million dollars in damages paid whilst Tiffany was not so lucky today when a US judge told them, “hey, you need to police your own brand.”

So it’s clear as mud in the intellectual property wars. We run the risk of having 169 separate national jurisdictions on IP law claims and like the Dutch coffee shop owners facing the marijuana v. tobacco v. café smoking ban, the line is not known until a judge says where it is. And when they disagree that’s just tough because precedent has been set in two different directions in two different countries in three weeks’ time. Go figure.

So the only ones benefitting here are, as usual, the lawyers as they can advise their client to take a course of action in the current environment and still say the court could rule against them in the future. Like the stockbroker they win when the market ‘fluctuates’ because buy or sell, up or down, they are in the deal.

Nice work if you can get it.

So if I use a Viacom logo in this story will I get a cease and desist letter? My lawyer says no.

We’ll see.