Viacom lawsuit: YouTube users to be revealed

Bobbie Johnson, technology correspondent
The Guardian, Friday July 4, 2008

The internet giant Google is being forced to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube website as part of a billion-dollar court case in the US.

A judge in New York has ordered that Google, which owns YouTube, must pass on the details of more than 100 million people - many of them in the UK - to Viacom, the US broadcasting company which owns channels including MTV and Nickelodeon.

The data will include unique internet addresses, email accounts and the history of every video watched on the website, giving Viacom's experts the ability to conduct a detailed examination of the viewing habits of millions of people around the world.

The decision is the latest twist in a long court battle between the two companies over claims that Google encourages copyright infringement on the video sharing website. Judge Louis Stanton, who is presiding over the $1bn lawsuit, said the data handover was required in order to allow Viacom to build its case.

Google's lawyers had argued that the cost of producing complete logs of YouTube's viewers would be prohibitive. But that line of reasoning was rejected by the court, which said that concerns over privacy were speculative. "While the logging database is large, all of its content can be copied on to a few 'over-the-shelf' hard drives," Stanton wrote in a 25-page adjudication.

While information on who has watched YouTube's countless videos of sneezing pandas and laughing babies may seem trivial, civil liberties campaigners fear the ruling could set a precedent for the level of privacy afforded to people using the internet, and that internet companies could now be sued in order to get hold of sensitive personal data.

"The court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group based in San Francisco. "We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."

YouTube, which was founded in California in 2005, was bought by Google just a year later for $1.65bn and has since become the biggest video site on the web. It has an estimated 72 million users in the US alone, and its videos are watched more than 2.5 billion times each month.

The site is used by a number of broadcasters, including the BBC, as an outlet for their videos and clips - but a number of rivals claim that YouTube is a hotbed of piracy and encourages people to upload copyrighted television shows. Although Google has brought in a series of systems to help with the removal of illegal material from the site, Viacom argued that it does not go far enough and launched its court action in March last year.

The court's decision also means that Viacom has succeeded in getting hold of exactly the same sort information that the American government has failed to access in the past.

In 2006, the US department of justice asked Google to reveal information on millions of web searches conducted on its website, as part of a wide-ranging investigation into illegal activity online. Google challenged the order and successfully fought it off in court, arguing that such a move would invade users' privacy and expose commercially sensitive information.

In a statement yesterday, Google said it would lobby for the data it provides to be scrubbed clean of personal information.

"We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order," it said.