YouTube Must Share Viewer Logs
YouTube must create a viewer log database.
U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton has been faced with a difficult lawsuit involving copyright infringement. This week he reached a decision that has the potential to effect media distribution on the internet.
Viacom Inc., as well as other plantiffs, have filed a lawsuit in order to gain access to YouTube viewer logs in order to determine if their copyrighted videos are viewed more than videos submitted by users. The data they are requesting would only be viewable to the plantiffs, and not made accessible to the general public. The information being requested is vague, and would not include intrusive details such as a real name or email.
Google Inc., YouTube's owner, has argued that this database of information would violate privacy. Kurt Opsahl, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agreed with Google, stating that providing such information would violate free speech rights, specifically the right to anonymously view or read media.
Google's lawyers also argued that creating a database of viewer logs would be costly and very time consuming. The requested information would be twelve terabytes of data, the equivalent of all the text in twelve million books.
Judge Stanton dismissed the privacy concerns and ruled in favor of Viacom and the other plantiffs stating that they had a legitimate reason for the information. This decision gives Viacom access to a log of when each video is viewed, the login ID of who is viewing the video, and their IP address. This lawsuit is part of a bigger lawsuit filed against Google. The plaintiffs, including Viacom, claim that Google has had knowledge of copyright infringement on YouTube, and they can do more to stop it. They are seeking one billion dollars in damages.
If the lawsuit is decided in favor of the plaintiffs, the immunity that service providers such as YouTube have when they host content submitted by users would no longer exist, and they could be held accountable for the content.
Google released a statement after the decision, saying that they were "disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court's order." It is not known yet if Google is planning to appeal the decision.
