Share
The drawn out legal wrangling between Viacom and Google rumbles on this week with news that American media conglomerate Viacom Inc. has acquiesced to a Google request that will protect the user identities of its hugely popular video-sharing service YouTube.
Viacom agrees to let Google remove personal user info from court-demanded YouTube data logs. Image: thms.nl/Flickr.
The agreement follows on from a federal court ruling issued earlier this month instructing Google-owned YouTube to deliver 12TBs (tera bytes) of data logging information into the hands of Viacom’s legal team.
It is believed that the New York-based media giant is looking to use the procured log data to prove that Viacom-owned material is viewed much more often on YouTube’s pages than its user-created clips and that YouTube has benefited financially as a result.
The Financial Times reports that a source close to the ongoing courtroom shenanigans has revealed the user anonymity agreement will not cover those users who are also YouTube employees. Apparently Viacom is eager to show that they too watch copyrighted content through the site and are well aware that illegally posted material frequently appears on its pages.
This latest twist in the ongoing struggle between Google and Viacom comes as the media company is seeking to bring YouTube to book in a $1 billion USD copyright lawsuit that it launched on March 13 of 2007.
According to Viacom, YouTube has committed “massive intentional copyright infringement” by failing to adequately protect copyright holders through the implementation of a submissions system that prevents users from illegally uploading owned content.
Viacom’s lawsuit contends that approximately 160,00 clips of its copyrighted content -- taken from popular TV shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart -- have been illegally posted to YouTube, and have subsequently created revenue for the service by being viewed upwards of 1.5 billion times by users.
On July 11 of 2008, the court decision to grant Viacom’s lawyers with access to personal user information, including user names, viewing habits and Internet addresses, angered privacy advocates from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organisations, who collectively exclaimed that any such action was in violation of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.
With Viacom insistent after the ruling that it holds no interested in the individual names and service habits of YouTube’s general audience, service owner Google said that, while it would abide by the court’s decision, it would also appeal to the media company in order to have the data logs scrubbed of any revealing personal information connected to its user base.
This week’s agreement between the two parties will see Google and YouTube replacing any personal information such as log-ins and IP addresses with numbers or other such random data that can not be used to connect back to individual site users.
Interested in a more interactive TTH? Join our Facebook Group Want regular updates from The Tech Herald? Follow us on Twitter
Advertising
Comment on this Story