Farhad Manjoo

The legality of Internet gambling in the United States is routinely described as “murky.” With few exceptions, it is illegal to set up an Internet gambling site in the U.S. But is it legal for a U.S. resident to place a bet at an offshore site, or to use an American bank account or credit card to pay for bets? The answer depends on whom you ask: representatives of state governments, the federal government, federal courts, various legal experts, and trade organizations with an interest in the matter all offer conflicting interpretations of how the law applies to gambling online. But the one thing that all of these parties agree upon is that, regardless of legality, gambling is thriving online, especially with Americans.

In the absence of regulation, gamblers have devised elaborate grass-roots systems to vet the hundreds of online casinos now in operation. There are dozens of “gambling portals” — like Winner Online, where Screwed was sounding off — and “player’s associations” set up to work like an Internet version of a neighborhood watch program, with everyone keeping an eye out for thieves. Some of these groups even act as arbitrators, getting back thousands of dollars for players who were cheated.

On Oct. 1, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, in an attempt, many members of Congress said, to stem the rise of online gambling. The bill, sponsored by Reps. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, and John LaFalce, D-N.Y., prohibits financial companies — such as banks, online payment services and credit card companies — from making payments to “unlawful” gambling sites. “We shut off the money, we shut off the sites,” Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., told the Associated Press.

Maybe. Many gamblers note that American financial companies have already shied away from processing Internet casino payments. Many players now use foreign-based payment systems that are probably outside the scope of U.S. law. Which means, gamblers say, that people will continue to bet online even if the bill passes — only then, they warn, the online gambling economy will be completely underground, under the domain of foreign governments over which U.S. law might be powerless. (It’s not clear that the Leach-LaFalce bill will pass, as it still requires approval by the Senate; that body is currently bogged down with weightier issues, and the end of the congressional term is fast approaching.)

Lawmakers who support the Leach-LaFalce bill offer two main reasons for their opposition to Internet betting: they worry that online casinos could be used as fronts for money laundering, and they worry about problem gamblers. But pushing gambling further underground only exacerbates those problems, proponents of legalized gambling say. If everyone betting online is using a foreign payment service, how will the government know if someone is using a casino to hide ill-gotten money? Even gambling-addiction help groups aren’t very keen on the House bill. People with gambling problems, they argue, would be better served if there were rules governing online casinos’ responsibilities to those groups, and if there were online casino-funded programs to help them.

In the face of the proposed legislation, which they view as flawed, online gamblers are issuing a curious plea to the government: Monitor us! Instead of using their ad hoc regulating systems, virtually everyone involved in online gambling — from the casinos to the players to the consultants — would prefer to live under the sunshine of the legal system. Online casinos are perhaps the world’s only industry that is actively inviting U.S. taxation. The only way to make online gambling less of a crapshoot, they say — the only way to make it safer, for both players and society — is to do what’s done for other forms of gambling in the 47 states where some sort of wagering is legal: Regulate, regulate, regulate.

Among Internet gamblers, it’s an article of faith that the government can never shut down online casinos. Sounding much like MP3 downloaders who defy record companies to stop them from trading music, gamblers say that the Internet is too vast, too fluid and too international to prevent any site from offering games of chance in return for money. “They can’t do anything about it,” said Damian Dunlap, a real estate broker in Los Angeles who was one of few Internet gamblers willing to talk to Salon on the record. “What are they going to do? Unless they start checking everybody’s computers, and they can’t do that.”

The Leach-LaFalce bill doesn’t say anything about checking people’s computers. Its main function is to prevent American financial firms from paying casinos — but it also outlines a thicket of exemptions and exceptions to the rule, actually creating a class of “lawful” Internet gaming sites in the process, and not offering a clear definition of what’s legal and what isn’t. Because of these caveats, it was the sort of legislation that virtually everyone could agree on: It passed by a voice vote, earning the unlikely support of both the Christian Coalition and the National Thoroughbred Horseracing Association (the former supported the bill in the belief that it would stop betting online; the latter in the belief that it would not).

But Dunlap, the gambler in Los Angeles, and several other regular players pooh-poohed the idea that the government could stop gambling by outlawing payments to gambling sites. “Now they have Neteller,” he said of gambling sites. “You can even send your check in. The government can’t stop that.”

Neteller, an online payment system that’s a virtual clone of PayPal, but which is based in Canada and not subject to U.S. law, is another article of faith among online players. There are now several Neteller-type systems based all around the globe, and Americans can freely transfer funds to those accounts, which can then be transferred to online casinos. To hear American gamblers tell it, these systems guarantee that betting online will forever remain free of impediments.

The truth is somewhat more complicated, though. Just as the record companies couldn’t shut down all the file-trading apps but could make file trading more frustrating, it appears that authorities who’ve gone after “financial instruments” used for online gambling have had some success. This year, Eliot Spitzer, New York state’s attorney general, has pressured many credit card companies to block payments to Internet betting, which — by court decision — is explicitly illegal in New York. In March, Spitzer also managed to get PayPal to stop letting New Yorkers pay online casinos. And when eBay announced plans to purchase PayPal in July, the company said that it would cease to do business with casinos altogether.

“And that caused the [online gambling] industry to really go through a contraction,” says C.M. Booth, the director of marketing at bet2gamble.com, a site that rates and reviews online casinos. “The end of the credit card payment method has really put the hurt on them.”

But the contraction may be only temporary, as gamblers and gambling sites scramble for alternatives. There’s an undeniable demand for Internet casinos, and gamblers say they’re finding all sorts of unregulated payment systems to get around the PayPal and the credit card ban — a fact which should alarm lawmakers, some of whom have expressed concern that Internet casinos may be used to aid organized crime and terrorists.

The specter of casino-financed terrorism was first raised by Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, and Dennis Lormel, chief of the financial crimes section of the FBI, at a House hearing not long after Sept. 11, 2001.

“We’ve heard from law enforcement officials that there’s a link between offshore Internet gambling, and money laundering,” Oxley said. “A lax regulation of offshore Internet gambling operation would seem to lend itself to the possibility that large amounts of terrorists’ funds could be laundered through these sites with relative impunity. What are your comments in that regard?”

Lormel responded that Oxley’s scenario was a “possibility.” Sept. 11′s hijackers, he said, “certainly exploited our system as well as they could. So it certainly is a concern and we certainly should be vigilant in monitoring that. And certainly, beyond the terrorism, the network of enterprises that certainly do exploit that particular area is something we must look at.”

Lormel said that, at that time, the FBI had two pending investigations in “our organized crime side of the house” looking into money laundering through online casinos. He did not detail the specifics.

Could the mob or al-Qaida be using online casinos and payment systems to transfer funds? Many gamblers say that these are, at best, alarmist hypotheses; there’s no proof — at least no public proof — that it’s occurring. But if evil people did want to use these systems for evil ends, they’d probably find the current, freewheeling atmosphere — where everything is illegal and nothing is monitored — more accommodating than a closely watched environment.

“We already see the beginning of an ‘arms race’ of alternative payment processors targeting the gambling market,” said Mike Craig, co-owner of the Online Players’ Association, a group of online gamblers and casinos. “Many are not regulated as financial institutions. The effect of this particular bill is to give a boost to the industry of anonymous and unregulated international electronic money transfer.” The Leach-LaFalce bill, Craig added, could end up making money laundering easier than ever before.

In the real, off-line world, where gambling is strictly regulated, the man who called himself Screwed might have found recourse in the law. In the online world, he lodges his complaint at the “Best and Worst Casinos” section of the Winner Online message board, where there are many messages about various casinos’ practices.

Screwed’s original message was followed by a flurry of player opinions on the matter. It turned out that Screwed’s problem was not your typical case of online flimflammery; the casino he was playing at is a reputable firm, and, as many of the people in the message board saw it, the company had not blatantly stolen his money, and had indeed suffered a genuine problem.

Screwed, too, conceded that there was a real glitch. The question to the group, though, was what to do about it. Should Screwed collect any of his winnings, even though — technically — he hadn’t been playing with his own money? Should he collect half? None?

The debate at Winner Online was rigorous, covering all aspects of the supposed scam. Some people were convinced that Screwed was trying to pull a fast one on everyone in the group; many people said that it was his fault for not noticing that he’d been playing with more money than he’d put in. Screwed responded that he hadn’t noticed because it was late and he was tired, and the casino should pay. A few people agreed with him, and condemned the casino, saying they’d never go there.

In the offline world, there would have been a clear-cut, courtroom resolution; one party would have been reprimanded, one would have been vindicated, and the whole proceeding would have had the imprimatur of the government. Here at Winner Online, though, each party goes home poorer: Screwed doesn’t get any money, and the casino may lose some customers.

Because of such problems, a few groups more formal than this message-board system have emerged to make monitoring more stringent. The most powerful of these is Mike Craig’s OPA; its mission is to connect “honest players” with “fair casinos.” When a dispute arises between a player and a casino, the executives of the OPA — who are independent of the casinos — try to mediate a resolution. They have some leverage with each party: If a player is found to be dishonest, he can be stripped of OPA membership, and will no longer have the right to get money back from a casino. If a casino is found to be unfair, it can end up on the OPA’s “not recommended” list, which is not a good thing. The carrot-and-stick approach seems to work well — in the two years that the group has been operating, it has recovered $400,000 from casinos.

But players still have problems with shady casinos, and shady casinos tend to be the only ones available to people in countries where Internet gambling isn’t explicitly legal, Craig said. In an e-mail message, he noted that the United Kingdom has legalized Internet gambling, letting gamblers “play online with similar protections to what they have around the corner at home.”

But “this is not available to Americans, Canadian, Hong Kong, or Australian bettors, unfortunately,” he added. “Some jurisdictions in small countries have legalized online gambling and have gaming commissions, but they have not been very responsive to players’ complaints or effective in offering clearly superior casinos to those operating completely without regulation. There is also a significant percentage of completely fraudulent casinos that don’t even attempt a pretense of play or payout.”

Casinos based on the Isle of Man, the self-governing territory island in the British Isles, are generally recognized to be the most well-regulated, and therefore the most fair. “The Isle of Man is the hardest place in the world to get a casino license,” said Booth, of Bet2Gamble.com. “They also require background checks; they require casinos to have X amount of money.”

Because of its strict policies, there are only a handful of Internet casinos based on the island, according to Booth. Most recently, MGM Mirage, the company that owns some of Las Vegas’ biggest hotels, unveiled its own online casino — www.playmgmmirage.com — based on the Isle of Man. But MGM Mirage’s casino and the others based on the island refuse to take bets from Americans; the uncertain U.S. legal atmosphere makes it impossible for them to do so.

“They’re doing this at their own risk,” said Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association, the commercial casino industry’s trade group. “They have to be very careful about who they offer bets to. Should it be shown that they’re accepting bets from Americans or allowing minors to gamble, they face very serious sanctions from [state governments, like Nevada's] that provide them licenses.” MGM Mirage did not respond to requests for interviews.

Fahrenkopf described MGM Mirage as the commercial gaming corporation most “bullish” on the Internet. Other land-based casinos, he said, are more conservative, and as a matter of policy, his group is officially against the legalization of online gaming. “It’s very clear,” he said, “that the regulators do not believe it’s possible today, that the mechanism exists so they could properly regulate it.”

But he did not rule out the possibility of his member casinos someday embracing legalized online gaming, because many of them, he said, see it as a source of added revenue. MGM Mirage obviously expects to make money from its venture; if it works, other casinos will surely see an opportunity there.

And Fahrenkopf dismissed the idea that online casinos were any kind of competition for the real deal. “We realize that people who go to Vegas don’t just go to stand in front of a slot machine and push a button. They go for the entertainment — the meals, the shows, the hotel rooms,” he said. “The guy who’s going to sit in his den with a can of Coors while playing against some robot machine in Belize — he’s not the same customer.”

Lawmakers who support legislation to make it harder to gamble online often cast Internet gambling as a morally dangerous activity. For example, James Leach, co-sponsor of the House bill, has called Internet gambling “a danger to the family.”

And certainly some of the gamblers’ opposition to the proposed law is in response to this talk of gambling being immoral. “I should be able to do what I want with my own money,” says Dunlap, the gambler in Los Angeles. “I live in Los Angeles, and there’s casinos all around here. What about those? And I can pay for porn but I can’t gamble online?”

But others aren’t happy with the law because they think it won’t do any good. Keith Whyte, the director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, is someone who’s aware that gambling is, for some people, a life-and-death problem; it can be a danger to families and individuals. But he doesn’t like to put the issue in moralistic terms. Instead, he says, problem gambling is a recognized mental health disorder, and people suffering from it need clinical help.

“When you consider how widely accepted it seems to be, you see that gambling is normal in America,” Whyte says. Eighty-five percent of Americans have gambled once in their lives, and legal commercial gambling makes about $65 billion a year. In most states, Whyte says, “nobody with a telephone has any problem betting on sports.”

Whyte concedes that “there are risk factors to Internet gambling — the use of credit, and we know from clinical studies that problem gamblers tend to do it when they’re alone.” But out of the billions that casinos make each year, only about $20 million is spent on treating problem gambling, Whyte says. “We would rather see efforts made to help people with the problem — funding research, that type of thing — rather than making something legal or illegal. This is like trying to stop alcohol abuse by making drunk driving illegal.”

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”