Google Ordered to Turn Over YouTube User Data

Judge Stanton, of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, has ordered YouTube Inc and YouTube LLC (collectively, YouTube) to disclose to Viacom International Inc (Viacom) all data "concerning each time a video has been viewed on the YouTube website or though embedding on a third-party website". Viacom had filed a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google Inc in March 2007, alleging that YouTube uses the Internet to "willfully infringe" copyrights on Viacom shows. Dismissing privacy concerns as speculative, Judge Stanton ordered the video-sharing web site to disclose who watches which video clips and when. Although denying Viacom's motion to compel production of the source code for the YouTube.com search function, Judge Stanton ordered YouTube to produce copies of all videos that had been removed from YouTube.com, and all data from YouTube's Logging database, including the unique "login ID" of the user who watched the material. Viacom argued it needed access to the information on user viewing habits to prove that copyright-infringing material is more heavily watched than user-generated videos, which would strengthen its case against Google. Google argued that the data should not be disclosed because of users' privacy concerns, saying that Viacom "would likely be able to determine the viewing and video uploading habits of YouTube's users based on the user's login ID and the user's IP address." Judge Stanton noted that Google's data-retention policies are based on the idea that IP addresses are not specifically attached to a single person and, therefore, are not personal data. In an attempt to address the privacy complaints, YouTube disclosed on July 14th that the two sides had agreed that any material YouTube was ordered to hand over to Viacom would be stripped of personal information, including user ID, IP address and visitor ID. The US decision does not apply to Canadian YouTube users. And the recently proposed amendments to the Canadian Copyright Act would not allow personal information to be released unless a copyright owner can convince a court to order the ISP to produce it (see E-TIPS®, "Proposed Changes to the Canadian Copyright Act", Vol 6, No 25, June 18, 2008). For related news stories, see: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/15/viacom-youtube.html; http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/07/03/viacom-google.html; http://tinyurl.com/5s4ts4; and http://tinyurl.com/6k6tfc For a copy of the reasons for judgment, visit: http://tinyurl.com/5r9l5f Summary by: Clare McCurley