By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
Thu Jul 3, 3:57 PM ET
NEWYORK - Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered thepopular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches whichvideo clips and when.
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U.S. DistrictJudge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs afterViacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed thedata to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavilywatched than amateur clips.
The data would not be publiclyreleased but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would includeless specific identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address.
Lawyersfor Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes ofdata — equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books — would beexpensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy.
Thedatabase includes information on when each video gets played, which canbe used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entryis each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP,address for that viewer's computer.
Stanton ruled this week thatthe plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that theprivacy concerns are speculative.
Stanton rejected a requestfrom the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code — thetechnical secret sauce — powering its market-leading search engine,saying there's no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms totreat copyright-infringing videos differently.
The court has yet to rule on Google's requests to question comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Viacom's Comedy Central.
Viacomis seeking at least $1 billion in damages from Google, saying YouTubehas built a business by using the Internet to "willfully infringe"copyrights on Viacom shows, which include Comedy Central's "The DailyShow 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 copyrightinfringement and can do more to stop it, a finding that could dissolvethe immunity protections that service providers have when they merelyhost content submitted by their users.
Though Google said givingthe plaintiffs access to YouTube viewer data would threaten users'privacy, Stanton referred to Google's own blog entry in which thecompany argued that the IP address alone cannot identify a specificindividual.
In a statement, Google said it was "disappointed thecourt granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We areasking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize thelogs before producing them under the court's order."
Google did not say whether it would appeal the ruling or seek to narrow it.
Stanton'sruling made only passing reference to a 1988 federal law barring thedisclosure of specific video materials that subscribers request orobtain.
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the ElectronicFrontier Foundation, said Stanton should have considered that law alongwith constitutional free-speech rights, including a right to read orview materials anonymously.
He said a user's ID can sometimes include identifying information such as a first initial and last name.
Viacomsaid it isn't seeking any user's identity. The company said any dataprovided "will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our caseagainst YouTube and Google (and) will be handled subject to a courtprotective order and in a highly confidential manner."
This isnot the first time Google has fought the disclosure of user informationit had been stockpiling. While gathering evidence for a case involvingonline pornography, the U.S. Justice Department subpoenaed Google andother search engines for lists of search requests made by their users.
AfterGoogle resisted, a federal judge ruled that Google was obliged to turnover only a sample of Web addresses in its search index, not the actualsearch terms requested.
