In a ruling that has caused disquiet throughout the online social community, a court order has compelled Google to hand over user data to Viacom. The federal court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google to pass on to media giant Viacom, owner of Paramount Pictures, MTV, DreamWorks and Nickelodeon, ?all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website?.
This decision has met with criticism on the part of both legal and social media professionals and users owing to the threat it poses to online privacy, with the potential fallout posing a much bigger privacy concern than AOL?s 2006 search fiasco.
Whenever a clip is viewed on Youtube, the site automatically records the user?s ID and IP address, the date and time of the request and the references of the video in the aforementioned database. The same information is also collected every time YouTube videos are embedded on third-party sites are played. In substance, the court order therefore confers upon Viacom the right to discover at whim who viewed what video originally posted on YouTube, when, from what computer and, as the case may be, on what website other than YouTube.
Viacom?s overt objective in making the request granted by the court is to furnish itself with adequate proof that the popularity of clips taken from TV programmes and movies (the posting of which infringes copyright), by far exceeds that of user-generated content (UGC) that can be circulated freely. This move aims to substantiate a $ 1 billion USD lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube and Google in March 2007, claiming that the popular UGC website illegally hosted over 150,000 copyright-protected videos that had been viewed over 1.5 billion times.
Critics have vocally denounced what they describe as the excessive breadth of the powers demanded and obtained by Viacom to defend its rights. In their view, individual users? privacy rights are severely violated by the order, which effectively bestows upon Viacom a right to pry in violation of US federal law.
Online rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, said in a statement posted on its website that the court order , ?erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users.?
The VPPA was passed after a newspaper disclosed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental records, and expresses the opinion of Congress recognized that media consultation habits are a strictly private matter that should be guarded against the misplaced curiosity of public and private organisations alike.
Google has not yet announced whether it intends to appeal against the decision.