“Media giant Viacom’s copyright violation case against Google took a new twist in a ruling that could have serious privacy implications.”
San Francisco — Rejecting privacy concerns, a federal judge has ordered Google to disclose to Viacom the video-viewing habits of everyone who has ever used YouTube in a decision that triggered an outcry on Thursday from Internet giant and privacy advocates in the midst of a legal showdown over video piracy.
The judgment filed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in New York is part of a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit that Viacom Inc., the entertainment group that owns Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon, among others, filed last year against Google, which owns YouTube.
Viacom charged Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, of acting as a voluntary accomplice to Internet users who posted clips of Viacom’s copyrighted television programs on the popular video-sharing website.
Judge Stanton backed Viacom’s request for information on which YouTube users watch which videos on the website in order to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright-violation lawsuit against Google.
“We are disappointed the court approved Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history,” Google senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera, said in an email statement Thursday.
As part of the lawsuit, Viacom asked for an surprising array of information: the source code for the search functions that power Google and YouTube, the source code for YouTube’s new “Video ID” program, a complete set of every video ever removed from the site, databases containing information on every video ever hosted at YouTube, and a copy of every private video.
The data, however, would not be openly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user’s real name or e-mail address.
Lawyers for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data — corresponding to the text of roughly 12 million books — would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users’ privacy.
Stanton further rejected a demand from the plaintiffs for Google to reveal the source code — the technical secret sauce — powering its market-leading search engine, saying there’s no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.
“Google need not disclose its search code to Viacom, but its YouTube subsidiary must disclose a database listing who watched what video, when, and from where,” Judge Stanton ordered Tuesday.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl called the court’s decision a significant reversal to privacy rights.
The judge’s verdict ignores US federal law as well as a “fiasco” that occurred after America Online gave researchers what it thought was anonymous search data, Opsahl said.
People’s online searches can accidentally reveal identities even without accompanying onscreen nicknames or IP addresses, according to Opsahl.
“The court’s incorrect ruling is a set-back to privacy rights and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” he said.
The case, and this judgment, could have broad consequences for Internet content and user behavior. The giving out of copyrighted materials online, both in music and video, has become commonplace in recent years, creating tension between copyright holders who believe they should control their material and Internet users who wish to share and manipulate the content.
Google requested Thursday that the judge reconsider the ruling.
“We see no reason why Viacom and the other petitioners seek or require such information,” Google said in a letter filed with the court. “Given plaintiffs’ stated reason for seeking information from the logging database … potentially personal identifiable information should be irrelevant.”
The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry are each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.
Google lawyers argued each of the Viacom requests, which were made in a “discovery” evidence-gathering phase of a lawsuit filed in March of last year in US District Court in New York State.
“We are delighted the court put some limits on discovery, including refusing to allow Viacom to access users’ private videos and our search technology,” Lacavera said.
“We will ask Viacom to revere users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”