Farhad Manjoo

Does this sound like a task one might find in a game that critics have taken to calling a “Columbine simulator”? “Bully” was released to the public on Oct. 17, but it’s been the subject of raging debate for more than a year now. The debate illustrates the precarious political and cultural position that the video game industry finds itself in. A bipartisan gang of politicians (from Hillary Clinton on the left to Sam Brownback on the right), school officials, child-rearing experts, and family-values types blame games for inducing all manner of delinquent, antisocial and dangerous behavior in children. It’s an old claim, and there remains scant scientific proof for it — but that seems to matter little in the fight over “Bully.”

“Bully” was bound to spark controversy. For one thing, it’s made by Rockstar Games, the company that produced the indulgently violent and hugely popular “Grand Theft Auto” series. For another, “Bully” is set in a school. Critics have long feared the worst from it — that “Bully” would be “Grand Theft Auto” on campus, encouraging every long-suffering adolescent malcontent to live out his nihilistic revenge fantasies on school grounds.

Since long before its release, “Bully’s” critics have suggested the game might cause irreparable harm in teens. In March, the Miami-Dade school board passed a resolution urging local retailers not to sell the game, warning that it could “serve as a violence rehearsal simulator on which teens will prepare, either wittingly or unwittingly, for acts of violence in schools.” The nonpartisan National Institute on Media and the Family, one of the many national organizations that aim to clean up pop culture, says “Bully” encourages antisocial behavior. Experts at the Bullying Prevention Program at Clemson University fear that the game might exacerbate schoolyard altercations,and have encouraged boycotts. Days before the game’s release, the industry’s most relentless opponent, crusading Miami lawyer Jack Thompson, took his case against “Bully” to court, arguing that the game violated Florida’s public nuisance laws (usually used to prosecute environmentally unruly corporations). In response, Judge Ronald Friedman ordered Rockstar’s parent firm, Take-Two, to show him an advance copy of “Bully” so that he could determine its legality; after reviewing the game, he quickly ruled that “Bully” posed no nuisance.

Yet the very idea that a court screened a game before its release chills many in the industry. The move is in line with legislative efforts offered in a handful of states (including California, Illinois and Michigan) that aim to bar the sale of games like “Bully” to minors. In March, Clinton and fellow Democrats Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh proposed just such a measure in the Senate, seeking to fine retailers for selling “mature” games to people under 17. But because federal courts have previously struck down similar state bills on the grounds that they violate the First Amendment, the Democrats joined with Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback to push through a measure calling on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study how video games affect children. The move was considered a way to solve the constitutional problems that have so far bedeviled attempted bans on selling games to minors — if the CDC can prove that games cause violence in kids, then courts might agree to overlook free speech concerns.

But can anyone prove that games pose enough danger to warrant prohibition? Politicians often quote the views of leading scientific and medical groups, many of which have adopted tough-sounding views against games. In 2005, the American Psychological Association declared that exposure to violent video games “increases aggressive behavior, increases aggressive thoughts, increases angry feelings, decreases helpful behavior, and increases physiological arousal.” The American Academy of Pediatrics has adopted a similar view.

But scientists who’ve looked into the research are critical of these conclusions. The main problem, they point out, is that it is exceedingly difficult to design psychological experiments that show how games work on the adolescent mind. Making a kid play a game for 15 minutes in a psych lab is a very different experience from playing at home for hours. And how do you measure “violence” in such a setting — is the game harmful if it makes a kid more likely to hit a doll (a measurement used in several experiments)?

As a result of such difficulties, studies have yielded various views as to whether and how video games affect kids. Some show that violent games make kids more aggressive, while others show they do not increase aggression. One meta-study that reviewed a number of experiments into violent games found that they slightly increase aggressive behavior, but another meta-review found that the longer kids play such video games, the less tendency there is for the games to affect behavior. “The fact is that there isn’t a lot of very good research to back these claims up,” concludes Jonathan Freedman, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. “The argument is very weak.”

Lost in the political debate and scientific struggle, meanwhile, are the dazzle and complexity of the games themselves. “Bully” — whose basic storyline has the main character fighting, cajoling, tricking, befriending and escaping the school’s various cliques in an effort to upset the established order — re-creates a labyrinthine virtual world, one even more layered than the legendarily deep environment of “Grand Theft Auto.” But “Bully” is remarkable not only for its sophisticated artificial environment but also for the sheer cleverness of its plot and the striking originality of its characters. Here is a game that’s funny, that you play for the biting satire of its storyline as well as the action.

After watching a Rockstar rep play “Bully” for a couple of hours, Judge Friedman summarized the game this way: “There’s a lot of violence — a whole lot,” he said in court. But, Friedman added, “less than we see on television every night.”

Considering this, maybe we shouldn’t be talking about banning “Bully.” Instead, given its depth and smarts, maybe we should be applauding it.

You need play “Bully” only for a short while to see that by the standard of “Grand Theft Auto” — and indeed by the standard of many movies, TV shows, pop albums and shelves full of contemporary fiction — it is essentially tame. The game allows you to fight other kids with your fists, your feet and a small arsenal of weapons, including baseball bats, a slingshot, garbage can lids and firecrackers. There are no guns, however, and the game’s physics and an elaborate system of consequences for using violence limits the damage you can inflict. For instance, your baseball bat disintegrates after you use it a few times. Or, when you shoot your slingshot at a young student, you get more or less immediately busted. It is impossible to go on a school rampage in “Bully.” The fighting feels, for the most part, cartoonishly unrealistic — there’s no blood or death. Instead an enemy meets his end in classic forms of high school humiliation: You make him punch himself, you rub spit in his face, you force him to say he’s sorry. When you’ve done wrong, you get taken to the principal’s office, have your weapons confiscated, and are forced to endure genuinely mind-numbing chores, like mowing the lawn and cleaning up chalkboards.

Critics allege, however, that even if “Bully” is less graphically violent than other things kids might play, watch or listen to, its specific storyline sounds alarm bells. Among the social messages that a player might take away from the game is that a good way to handle bullies is to fight back. That’s a dangerous lesson, says Barbara Coloroso, author of “The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander,” a kind of self-help book for victimized kids and their parents. What Coloroso — who lives in Littleton, Colo. — worries about is “the bullied bully who strikes back” after years of being taunted. “And when you begin to look at Eric and Dylan, you see that’s what happened,” she says, referring to the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, which has become the trump card for the anti-”Bully” lobby.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were fans of “Doom” and “Quake,” two of the most violent video games of their time. Their rampage provoked a spasm of commentary on the possible dangers of video games. Critics of violent video games, both scientists and activists, believe that games not only encourage a latent tendency toward violence but also may teach specific violent acts. Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University who is among the leading researchers on the topic, argues that video games are “excellent teaching tools — a video game captures attention, maintains attention, requires practice to improve skills in the game, and keeps people motivated.” Anderson doesn’t mean this as praise: Games can teach you bad behavior, he and other critics say — they function as simulators. In this light, “Grand Theft Auto” isn’t just a game about life in the ‘hood — it shows you how to steal, to shoot innocent people and police officers, and to treat women badly.

In the same way, this line of thinking goes, “Bully” teaches you how to beat kids up (use a baseball bat or a slingshot, and when they come after you, hide in a trash can). In one scene cited by critics, your character, Jimmy Hopkins, sits up in a tree with his slingshot and aims at football jocks practicing on the field. David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, told the Boston Globe that the scene pits you as a “sniper,” saying, “It glamorizes and rewards the kind of antisocial behaviors that teachers struggle with every day.” Coloroso — who isn’t a gamer, but who had her 28-year-old son buy the game and give her an account — pointed to one scene that involves Jimmy Hopkins visiting an adult book store. Then there’s the part where “in order to get some of the tools you need, you have to beat up a homeless man,” she said. “You’re getting a reward for doing something negative.”

But there’s a little too much agitation here. To suggest that shooting a slingshot at jocks is akin to the mission of a sniper is either to misunderstand the power of firearms or to exaggerate the lethality of a kiddie weapon. What about beating up a homeless man? Early in the game, Jimmy and his friends do go to fight the hobo who lives on campus behind an abandoned school bus. The scene looks like it’s going to mirror something from a “Bumfights” video — and if it had played out that way, it might have been not only disturbing but, perhaps worse, clichéd. The folks at Rockstar are too smart for that. Instead, as you approach the homeless man, your friends run off in fear, and rather than fight him, you talk to him and discover that he’s actually quite a character. The hobo is a Vietnam vet, and he loves working on old radios. And if you help him get radio parts, he’ll teach you some badass fighting moves to use against bullies.

In focusing on examples of how “Bully” might act as a “simulator” of violence, its critics have overlooked its social and narrative complexity. There are at least 80 individual characters in “Bully” — students, teachers, townies, prefects and others, each with distinct voices, singular motivations, and ever-changing relationships to each other and to your own character. They’re all different, and they all bear the mark of Rockstar’s wit. There’s the nasty lunch lady, Edna, whose date with the chemistry teacher you’ve got to keep students from ruining; or Earnest, the nerd who’s running for class president, whom you save from embarrassment during a campaign speech by shooting kids (with a slingshot) who want to throw eggs at him; or Mandy, the queen of the cheerleaders, who will cotton to you if you paint over the naughty posters of her that have been plastered around town (posters whose distribution, in the tangled world of “Bully,” you bear some responsibility for in the first place). And that scene involving the adult bookstore? It reveals the incongruity of appearances: Jimmy’s buttoned-up boarding school is located close to a den of sleaze, where he runs across the gym coach, Mr. Burton, lurking outside.

Considering all that goes on in the game, attacking “Bully” for its depictions of physical violence is a narrow maneuver; it’s akin to banning “Huck Finn” because it uses the word “nigger” throughout the book. That’s not to say “Bully” is on the level of Twain, but it’s certainly in the tradition of entertaining fiction — it keeps you engrossed while at the same time putting forward a distinct point of view.

And what is that view? It’s starkly negative. “Bully” is a world where the fat kids get teased, where the gym coach encourages you to mount a panty raid, and where money and athletic prowess inevitably lead to fortune. As Clive Thompson put it in Wired News recently, the game revels in the “cliquishness, unfairness and brutality of everyday society.”

Across the country, school officials are rushing to take measures against “Bully.” As Dennis McCauley, the editor of the fine blog GamePolitics.com points out, the game industry’s credibility with parents and educators was shot in last year’s “Hot Coffee” scandal, in which gamers discovered that Rockstar had hidden secret sex scenes inside “Grand Theft Auto.” “Frankly it’s just a very bad time for the game industry in terms of image,” McCauley says.

In this regard, it’s understandable why a school official might err on the side of caution, says Arielle Maffei, who participated as a nonvoting student representative on the Miami-Dade School Board when it considered its anti-”Bully” motion in March. The adult members of the board, she says, faced constant pressure from activist groups to take a hard stand against video games. Maffei, now a freshman at Vanderbilt, opposed the “Bully” measure because, she says, “I felt it crossed the line — who is the school board to tell people what to do with their time?” Yet she says she can see why the board condemned “Bully.” “They were looking at it from a safety point of view — they really wanted to make sure that nothing bad happened in one of their schools.”

Yet, even those psychologists who are most concerned about the possible dangers of video games stress that a game, by itself, isn’t going to drive anyone to violence. They point out that there are a variety of known risk factors for violence — among them poverty, abusive parents and substance use. Exposure to media violence, according to Craig Anderson, falls somewhere in the middle of this list, neither the biggest nor the smallest possible factor. Meanwhile, researchers who question the science behind the idea that entertainment media can drive people to violence point out that if video games pose any risk, it must be extremely small, because youth violence has been falling dramatically for more than a decade — a period in which video games have seen a huge upsurge in popularity. In 2003, there were half as many incidents of violent crimes in school than there were in 1994; today, despite hyped-up news accounts, there are far fewer homicides at school, far fewer kids carrying weapons, and far fewer kids who report fearing for their physical safety than during the 1990s.

According to a recent study by Nielsen, 117 million Americans routinely play video games. More than half of these people are of voting age. Yet polls suggest that for politicians, there is no downside to campaigning against video games — the tactic turns parents on and doesn’t necessarily turn young people off.

In campaign ads this year, Clinton has been highlighting her work to “shield” children from violent video games. At the same time, according to a recent survey by Young Voter Strategies, her popularity among people under 30 years old is rising. Danny Goldberg, the music executive who wrote a book chastising the left for attacking pop culture, says that although he doesn’t agree with Clinton’s criticism of games, he can see why young voters might not care much about her stance toward pop culture. They’re justifiably less concerned about censorship, he says, than about “war and peace, and what we’re doing about what happened in New Orleans.”

Indeed, it was those issues — and not concerns about video games — that propelled young people to vote in record numbers last Tuesday. But Democrats haven’t proven any less eager to attack pop culture than Republicans — remember Tipper Gore? So game lovers, beware.

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.”