Judge Orders Google to Hand Over All YouTube User Data

The judge in the case of Viacom vs. Google wants Google to turn over all YouTube user data including their names, IP addresses, and their video-viewing history to Viacom.

Viacom filed a lawsuit against Google in March 2007 and sought more than $1.5 billion in damages for allowing users to upload copyrighted clips from Viacom properties. Google defended itself by saying that the law provide safe harbor for online sites as long as they complied with copyright takedown requests. Now the judge has made it even more complicated by allowing Viacom’s request to get all the user data from YouTube. You can see the full text of judge’s ruling in the PDF document. Google argued that if it turns over the data to Viacom it will invade its user’s privacy rights, but the judge described the argument as “speculative” and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four terabyte hard drives. Google should turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including their names and IP addresses to Viacom. Viacom wants to use this data to prove that videos with infringed materials are more popular than user-created videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is very upset with this judge’s rulings and has called it a “violation of the Video Privacy Protection act” and the ruling threatens to expose deeply private information of the users. Viacom also sought YouTube’s source code, which Google uses to identify copyrighted videos, but the judge dismissed their request. I hope Google puts up a big fight and says no to Viacom's request.