Viacom got a partial victory in the $1 billion lawsuit against Google Inc. and its YouTube practices, after a federal judge’s decision forces YouTube to give Viacom a complete log of its users’ activities, including their names and the videos they’ve watched.
The plaintiff plans to use the logs to prove that YouTube is guilty of copyright infringement. For users, this means that Viacom will have access to all the videos they have watched on YouTube, which might open another delicate issue, that of exposing private user information.
The judge dismissed Google’s arguments that the order violates user privacy and their own privacy policy, saying that these concerns are speculative.
Viacom is trying to prove a point by obtaining the logs, and that is to show how the videos infringing copyrights are in fact the most watched by YouTube users, which means the site supports copyright infringement, despite its attempts to filter the copyrighted clips.
Viacom may chant victory over this decision, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the decision ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which protects “personally identifiable information.”
The court order, EFF said, ordered the production of not just IP addresses, but also associated information in the Logging database, which reminds us of the AOL search fiasco, when data of over 650,000 users got on a compressed text file posted on a website for research purposes.
Questions on the ethical implications of such a research started to emerge after the New York Times managed to locate one user with the help of that data.
However, what Viacom didn’t get this time from the judge was the spurce code, which the judge said would cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google, by giving others the tools to create similar programs in no time.
In March 2007, Viacom initially filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against YouTube, and consequently its owner, Google, for “massive intentional” copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties.
The lawsuit was re-filed in a modified form this year. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials, seeing that at this point YouTube’s solution for this problem enables owners to complain about a certain post and block it from being viewed.
So far, Viacom said it has records of more than 150,000 unauthorized clips uploaded on the popular web site, among which several shows from MTV, Comedy Central and also other network broadcasts like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "South Park."
However, YouTube said that it has already implemented a system that enables the immediate detection of most copyrighted clips. In addition to that, the site also relies on users to report videos, but according to Viacom, that’s not enough.
Viacom complained that unauthorized copies of its copyrighted works are posted everyday on YouTube and are viewed tens of thousands of times, and Google does absolutely nothing to stop the copyright infringement, instead engaging in promoting and inducing the infringement.
In response, Google said Viacom goes against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which encourages the development of services such as YouTube. Furthermore, Google added that the Congress wouldn’t allow them to function if they faced liability for copyright infringement.
Google expressed its concern that such a lawsuit could be considered a direct threat to freedom on the Internet. Also, its officials wanted to make clear that YouTube’s policy regarding the copyright issue goes far beyond its legal obligations and that the company provides a significant aid for owners protecting their work.