Viacom: All your YouTube viewing data are belong to us

Davey Winder
Thursday, 03 July 2008 15:14

Business IT - Networking

A judge has ordered that YouTube must hand over every record of every video watched by YouTube users to Viacom. That's the user name, address and IP address relating to every video clip you ever watched. The data, contained on a set of four terabyte hard drives, is to be used to help Viacom prove that copyright infringing material is more popular than user-generated video content. And increase the liability of Google if Viacom wins its $1 billion copyright infringement case, of course. Meanwhile, it seems, all your YouTube viewing history belongs to Viacom...

It all started in February 2007 when old school media giant Viacom (whose brands include DreamWorks, MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures) issued in excess of 100,000 takedown notices against videos posted to YouTube which it claimed were violating its copyright. It went on to claim that these YouTube clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Then, a month later, Viacom filed a lawsuit against Google claiming more than USD $1 billion (AUD $1.04 billion) in damages relating to the ability of users to upload Viacom copyright video material to YouTube. Google responded with the safe harbor argument that it complies with copyright takedown notices to remove such content when identified.

You might imagine that, quite sensibly, would be the end of it. You would be wrong. You did not factor in Judge Louis Stanton. "The motion to compel production of all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website is granted" Judge Stanton declared.

So in his ruling in the federal court for the Southern District of New York yesterday, which is set to impact upon user generated content services and online privacy the world over, US District Judge Stanton agreed that Viacom could have access to YouTube user data in order to further explore its case.

Suggesting that handing over such data would invade user privacy was speculative says Judge Stanton. Read what else he had to say on the next page...

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