Viacom and others back off from demands for YouTube user data!

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 13:07

Business IT - Networking

Earlier this month, US District Judge Stanton agreed to a request from Viacom that it should be granted access to the YouTube's logging database to explore its case further. At the time, Google said it would seek to anonymize the logs before complying.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation described the ruling as "erroneous" and "a set-back to privacy rights".

In early 2007, Viacom demanded the removal of more than 100,000 video clips from YouTube. By March 2007, the matter had gone to court, with Viacom seeking $US1 billion damages. Other parties including the English Premier League and Bourne filed a class action suit in May 2007.

Under the current provisions of the Digital Milennium Copyright Act in the US, YouTube owned by Google has a defence against hosting copyrighted material uploaded by users if it acts on take-down requests received from copyright owners. However, complainants have pointed to the cost of making the YouTube site comply because of the huge volume of copyrighted material that is continually posted to the site.

Google claims its actions go beyond that required by the law, and in October 2007 started beta testing a tool to help copyright owners automatically detect and request the deletion of unauthorised YouTube clips.