In the latest ruling issued on July 1, 2008, by Federal District Court Judge, Louis L. Stanton in the Viacom v. YouTube case, Google was ordered to turn over the  copies of all videos that were once available for public viewing on YouTube.com but later  removed for any reason and all data from YouTube’s logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website.

Google argued that the data should not be disclosed because of the users’ privacy concerns, saying that “Plaintiffs would likely be able to determine the viewing and video uploading habits of YouTube’s users based on the user’s login ID and the user’s IP address.” However, citing Google Public Policy’s own posting, stating that IP addresses alone should not be considered Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) (Are IP addresses personal?), the Court found that IP addresses and anonymous user names were not enough information to implicate a sufficient privacy concern to prevent disclosure to Viacom.

Despite the fact that anonymous user names and IP addresses provide insufficient information to identify an individual, the negative publicity has sent Viacom on the PR offensive to let the world know that it’s not an overweening ogre, but just your average multibillion dollar content owner next door looking to protect its interests.

Viacom also made a play for “the computer source code which controls both the YouTube.com search function and Google’s internet search tool ‘Google.com’.”  Reason prevailed and this information was not ordered produced to Viacom.  Viacom had claimed it would use such information to determine whether YouTube was doing everything it could to prevent online copyright infringement. 

In a possible commentary on the near impossibility of preventing online copyright infringement, the Court noted that “If there is a way to write a program that can identify and thus control infringing videos, plaintiffs are free to demonstrate it.”

Liked This Article? Bookmark It

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.