Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - Google & Viacom Agree to Protect User Privacy

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, July 15. 2008 at 11:55 AM EDT 3 comments

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Good news for YouTube Inc. users -- Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA) won't be able to figure out how many times you watched that video of the dog on a skateboard. Or worse.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced today that the companies reached a deal that would protect user data, such as user IDs and IP addresses, that could be used to identify individual users.

The news comes after the judge in the case ordered Google to hand over its Logging Database to "help Viacom compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos."

Despite filing a motion asking for information in the YouTube database, including "user's unique login ID, time each video was watched, IP address, and the video's identifier," Viacom claimed last week that it wasn't interested in personally identifiable user information.

While individual user data will be protected by the agreement, there's still the matter of whether Viacom will be able to see which videos were viewed by YouTube staff. According to a court filing, the companies must meet within the next 14 days to discuss that issue, and if they can't reach an agreement, send the matter back to the court.

Tags: Business, Google, Legal, Technology, Viacom, Video, YouTube

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My Thoughts/Questions...
donaldleegraham
Rank: Caliph
Tuesday July 15, 2008 1:59:05 PM

no ratings

I'm not totally sure about the lawsuit by Viacom and I don't know all of the background about the suit, but my initial thoughts are why is Google being held responsible for its users uploading copyrighted material? Isn't that the user's responsibily and violation of the TOS? I understand Google hosted it because its their site, but then they removed it once Viacom complain... am I doing well so far?

I'm still not sure how Google is responsible. Anybody wanna help me out here?

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Re: My Thoughts/Questions...
Ryan Lawler
Staff
Tuesday July 15, 2008 2:41:08 PM

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I'm not a lawyer, but it looks like Viacom is claiming that Google knowingly profited off of copyrighted content that its users posted, and that it took no steps to create a mechanism for filtering that content out.

It's asking for user logs to see how much that content was watched, and asking for employee logs to prove that Google employees were aware of the copyrighted content, and allowed it to remain there.

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