No appeal from Google on YouTube data ruling

Davey Winder
Saturday, 05 July 2008 16:29

Business IT - Networking

An appeal by Google against the decision of a federal judge in New York that it must hand over details of every video ever viewed on YouTube to Viacom was not only widely expected, but thought to be pretty much a given. A comment by Google's senior litigation counsel seems to suggest otherwise...

File under 'almost as big a shock as the original ruling as Google lets slip a comment which would seem to rule out an appeal over the YouTube video privacy debacle. The Boston Globe yesterday published a brief statement from Catherine Lacavera, the senior litigation counsel at Google. It was not what the world was expecting.

"We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history" she said, which on its own could win the understatement of the year award. But this is where things get really interesting, because Lacavera also added "We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."

Now, yes, it is a good thing that Google want to anonymise the logs in order respect user privacy. However, the tone of that statement does suggest that handing over the entire logs is something of a given. Remember that this is a lawyer speaking, who will have chosen her words very carefully.

Note that Lacavera did not say "if we produce them under the court's order" or "if the court's order is upheld" both of which would suggest that expected appeal is coming. What she said was "before producing them" as if this was a done deal.

But wait, there's more. This time in the form of an ironic twist to the privacy argument. Read on to find out what it is...

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