Major net privacy setback-
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Privacy rights at stake as judge orders YouTube to hand over data about who's watching what
Anastasia Ustinova,Ellen Lee, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, July 3, 2008
(07-03) 18:06 PDT -- In a wide-reaching ruling that could have serious privacy implications, a U.S. district judge has ruled that the popular Internet video site YouTube must hand over details about what people are watching online.
The decision, handed down by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton on Wednesday, is part of an ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit that Viacom Inc., the entertainment group that owns Comedy Central, VH1, Nickelodeon, among others, filed last year against Google, which owns YouTube. The suit says YouTube hasn't done enough to remove copyrighted material and is making money off that material.
Viacom demanded to review all the logging information to prove that copyrighted clips are more popular than amateur videos on the site. The logging data includes how often and how much time users spend watching videos, their login ID information and Internet Protocol addresses, the unique identification assigned to individual computers and devices.
The case, and this ruling, could have wide implications for Internet content and user behavior. The sharing of copyrighted materials online, both in music and video, has become commonplace in recent years, creating tension between copyright holders who believe they should control their material and Internet users who wish to share and manipulate such content in a variety of ways.
Today, Google requested that the judge reconsider the ruling.
"We see no reason why Viacom and the other plaintiffs seek or require such information," Google said in a letter filed with the court. "Given plaintiffs' stated reason for seeking information from the logging database ... potentially personal identifiable information should be irrelevant."
Google counsel Catherine Lacavera expanded on that point in an e-mailed statement: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order."
Viacom officials said that it has not asked for personally identifiable information of any user and that all the data will be handled by its advisers confidentially and used only to prove its case against Google.
"YouTube and Google have put us in this position by continuing to defend their illegal and irresponsible conduct and profiting from copyright infringement," the company said in a statement.
YouTube is the leading destination for watching video online, accounting for more than 75 percent of all U.S. visits in May, according to a recent Hitwise report. To fulfill the judge's orders, Google and YouTube will have to hand over 12 terabytes of information, a daunting task.
This week's ruling could threaten the privacy rights of the hundreds of millions of people who use the site, experts said.
"It's breaking the user's trust," said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research. "When users were watching these streaming videos on YouTube, they did not expect that information to be passed along."
Citing the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, Google argued that "the data should not be disclosed because of the users' privacy concerns."
"The court's order grants Viacom's request and erroneously ignores the protections of the (act), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users," Kurt Opsahl, senior attorney the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog posting. "As Congress recognized, your selection of videos to watch is deeply personal and deserves the strongest protection."
Art Neil, an attorney for New Media Rights, a non-profit consumer group, agreed.
"It's disturbing because there is a chilling effect for the online content," Neil said. "When big companies find ways to go after people, they use it beyond what the law allows them to do in terms of enforcing."
The judge's ruling could pose concerns for other sites, too.
"If Viacom wins this lawsuit, then there's going to be others who will step up and ask for this data" from YouTube and other companies - perhaps even Apple and its iTunes store, Owyang said.
Google has maintained that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, a law passed by Congress to encourage Internet development, protects YouTube in the Viacom lawsuit and has allowed people to share ideas by uploading videos.
While the judge said Viacom had a legitimate need for the users' information, he rejected Viacom's requests for Google to disclose its search engine source code. Viacom had said it needed that information to show that Google makes more copyrighted videos available to users than amateur clips.
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