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Judge Says Plaintiffs Entitled To Obtain YouTube Viewer Data
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Published: July 4, 2008
NEW YORK - NEW YORK - Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.
U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.
The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address.
Attorneys for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data - equivalent to the text of about 12 million books - would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy.
The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer.
Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.
Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code - the technical secret sauce - powering its market-leading search engine, saying there's no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.
The court has yet to rule on Google's requests to question comedians Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart of Viacom's Comedy Central.
Viacom is seeking at least $1 billion in damages from Google, saying YouTube has built a business by using the Internet to "willfully infringe" copyrights on Viacom shows, which include Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" cartoon.
The lawsuit was combined with a similar case filed by a British soccer league and other parties.
Together, the plaintiffs are trying to prove that YouTube has known of copyright infringement and can do more to stop it, a finding that could dissolve the immunity protections that service providers have when they merely host content submitted by their users.
A Google statement said it was "disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."
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