YouTube's multibillion-pound success was built initially on user-generated content; so successful has it become that the company's owner Google recently announced plans to pay contributors shares of advertising revenue. But as anyone who uses the site knows, and who doesn't, there are also vast amounts of professionally-made material, so why, says one film and TV giant, shouldn't it be paid as well?

Hello, and welcome to This Week In God.

Viacom's cases are far from being user-generated. Much of YouTube's most popular content is actually made at great expense on a commercial basis by film and television companies. And that for such material simply to be regurgitated free of charge on what essentially is a rival channel amounts to copyright theft.

A New York court has granted Viacom access to Google's records of Internet Protocol addresses—every individual signature of every individual computer which has been used to watch clips on the site. Viacom has given what it calls an unequivocal promise not to use the information to uncover users' identities; it says it simply wants to find out how much of YouTube's business is predicated on people watching copyrighted material. So is there a real risk to privacy?

It's actually much harder than it might seem to, to truly anonymize this quantity of data. It's not just a matter of taking off the usernames or even replacing the IP addresses with random-looking numbers. If you've got records of individuals viewing tens or hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of different YouTube videos, it actually can be quite easy to link those together and then to link them back to a given individual.

Google says it's disappointed that the court granted, what it calls, Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history, and is pressing to be allowed to anonymize the information before it hands it over. But the search engine company has come into criticism itself from electronic privacy campaigners for keeping user data for commercial purposes. This high-stakes bet between old and new media giants has thrown a light on wider-reaching issues of privacy and anonymity on the Internet.

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regurgitate:v. to repeat facts, ideas etc that you have read or heard without thinking about them yourself - used to show disapproval