U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton last week ordered Google to supply Viacom with records that reveal which users watched specific videos on its YouTube site. The ruling comes in the discovery phase of Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement.
Stanton decided Viacom needed more than user log-in names and IP addresses to target unique YouTube visitors. Nonetheless, privacy advocates are calling the ruling a blow to online privacy.
Some are criticizing Viacom for making the discovery request. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), doesn't entirely disagree with those concerns, but he said the larger issue is Google's business practices.
"Viacom is doing what an aggressive corporation does when it files a lawsuit, which is to try to learn as much as it can about whether its rights have been violated," Rotenberg said. "Google, because it's sitting on all this information, is making it much easier for Viacom to pursue litigation."
The IP Address Connection
While the court denied Viacom's request that YouTube turn over the source code that powers its search engine, Stanton did require YouTube to hand over information that records all video viewing for the site. That data shows which users watched which videos and when.
"The logging database does not identify users by name, but it does contain users' IP addresses and unique log-in IDs. A log-in ID will be whatever the user chose -- which could be anything from a nonsensical set of characters or a random word to the user's actual name," wrote Dave Sohn, senior policy counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Sohn figures that in a substantial number of cases, the ID will contain name or e-mail information. In those cases, the ID, perhaps aided by the IP address, could be sufficient to determine the real-world identity of the user....

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