“Legal fighters agree on deal to shield user IDs in video logging database with other values.”
San Francisco — Apparently submitting to privacy complaints, Viacom Inc. would not be given the identities of users who watch video clips on the popular video-sharing site YouTube.
A deal reached Tuesday allows Google to cloak identities of YouTube users while complying with a court order to show Viacom the video-viewing habits of everyone who has ever used the popular website. The companies have agreed to keep personal identities anonymous as they wrangle over the legal arguments in the copyright case.
Google will withhold user names and other information that could identify individual users. Viacom is seeking $1 billion for copyright infringement.
If you were concerned that your YouTube viewing habits were about to be revealed to the world as part of the Viacom lawsuit against Google, you may rest easier.
A Google spokesperson quoted as saying to The New York Times and other news media on Monday that the two companies have agreed how to share data about YouTube during Viacom’s copyright-infringement lawsuit and still protect the privacy of users. Last year, Viacom sued Google and its YouTube site for $1 billion, alleging unauthorized use of video clips from Viacom properties.
The agreement was forged after Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court of Southern New York ruled that Google had to hand over the personal records of YouTube visitors — including login IDs, the videos they watched, and the time they watched them — as part of the discovery phase in the lawsuit Viacom filed last March. Viacom alleges that Google allowed nearly 160,000 copyrighted clips to be viewed without authorization.
Some privacy advocates were appalled by the ruling; for example, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco warned in a blog post that the ruling “threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users,” and violated the Video Privacy Protection Act, a 1988 law passed after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental habits were revealed.
Google said it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs’ attorneys for Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and Internet address data that could be used to identify individual video watchers.
“We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class-action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. “They have agreed to let us anonymize YouTube user data,” he said.
However, other privacy advocates raised the question of why Google is collecting and retaining the video-viewing data in the first place.
“It is better than providing that information without that substitution, but I do not think it addresses the privacy concerns by a long shot,” said Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
For example, someone might be frequently viewing videos of themselves or the bands they are in. Even with anonymous identifiers, Seltzer said, that person can still be linked to other clips they watch.
“She added that Google and YouTube ought to reconsider whether to even retain the data.”
The YouTube data would not be publicly released, but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, likely under a court-sanctioned confidentiality order. Even without the marquee names, this case would no doubt be closely watched in the legal community and picked over by netizens who follow such developments.
The agreement to redact data is a good compromise that should satisfy both parties’ needs, Kevin Levy, cochair of Gunster Yoakley’s technology and emerging growth companies practice groups, said in a statement.
Still in dispute is whether YouTube would be able to make viewing records on its own employees anonymous as well. If a YouTube employee had viewed an episode of “The Daily Show,” for instance, Viacom could argue that YouTube directly knew of copyright infringement. And that could dissolve the immunity protections that service providers generally have when they merely host content submitted by their users.
Assuming the case goes to trial, the legal arguments the two sides make could well carve out new protections for the use of copyrighted content online — or not. More than likely, though, the case will be settled out of court — if only because neither side would want to risk losing. Google, for its part, does not want to lose its customers’ goodwill.
“Viacom also has pledged not to use the data to identify individual users to sue.”