Google Ordered To Expose Identities Of Its Users

Turning down the privacy concerns, a federal judge presiding over a billion dollar copyright infringement against Web’s largest video sharing website and also the world's third-most-visited site YouTube, has ruled that Google must reveal all the details about the logging pattern of each and every user who has ever viewed a video on Google-owned YouTube.

The order from a district court judge Louis L Stanton in New York came after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders filed an infringement lawsuit against Google last march.

In the lawsuit Viacom (the parent company of Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks and MTV) has claimed at least $1billion as compensation for the damages from Google and this has resulted in a ruling that Google must divulge who watches which video clips and when.

The orders have raised privacy concerns among the users.

Google said that Viacom is “threatening the way millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression".

The claimants argued that they require the details to figure out whether their copyrighted videos are more heavily watched and posted as compare to amateur clips.

The database that will be handed over to the plaintiffs would include details about every video clip uploaded on YouTube, its username, the associated IP addresses and the videos that have been viewed or posted by the user.

The data would only be revealed to the plaintiffs/claimants.

Besides, the data would not contain specific identifiers like user’s real name or his e-mail address. Username would help identify only those who have created it using their real names.

Viacom has gone a step further and guaranteed that individual users will not be prosecuted using the data.

Google Inc.’s lawyers strongly put forth a point that producing 12 terabytes of data would be time-consuming, expensive and also a threat to privacy laws but all in vain, Stanton declined saying the privacy concerns are unfounded.

“While the logging database is large, all of its contents can be copied onto a few off-the-shelf four-terabyte hard drives,” he said.

Stanton gave a significant order in favor of Google to keep the source code restricted from the claimants maintaining that no evidence could be found that Google manipulated the way search engine works.

The effort of all the claimants is to prove that YouTube was well aware of its copyright infringement.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said that the decision is a “setback to privacy rights [that] threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users. We urge Viacom to back off this overboard request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users”