Legal News

The End of Internet Privacy? A Look the Viacom-Google Order

By Dan Slater

Last week, in the context of Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google’s YouTube, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ordered Google to turn over to Viacom its records of which users watched which videos on YouTube. To give you an idea of how many users might be affected by the order, the WSJ reports that, according to comScore, Google sites, which include YouTube, were the top U.S. video property in April, with more than 4.1 billion videos viewed, or 38% of all online videos. (Here’s more on the order from the NYT.)

Viacom wants records from a YouTube database that records each time a video is watched and pairs that with two kinds of information about people who viewed it: log-in names (for YouTube users that have accounts), and IP addresses (for YouTube users without accounts). (Though additional info is usually needed to link IP addresses to individuals, privacy experts say the process is easy enough to cause concerns for consumers.) Viacom wants the data to help prove how often its copyright-protected videos are watched, compared with amateur content on YouTube. That data could bear on the plaintiff’s argument that its copyright-protected content helps draw users to YouTube, leading to a financial benefit for Google.

In his order, Judge Stanton wrote that privacy concerns were “speculative” and argued that the YouTube database was needed for Viacom’s case because it is the only existing record of “how often each video has been viewed during various time periods.”

Thanks to Doc Stoc, here’s a link to the order.

Wendy Seltzer, a law prof and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told the WSJ that Stanton’s ruling “is the wrong legal conclusion from the facts.” She said the ruling could set off many new requests for information by plaintiffs in such cases.

“We realize that there’s this giant vault of private information held by Google and YouTube and other companies, and [the ruling] makes very clear that any federal judge in the country can order access to it,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia law prof. “The stuff people look for when they’re online is pretty embarrassing, about the most revealing stuff.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 07, 2008 (boomark / email).