YouTube and Viacom agree to mask user data in lawsuit

by Staff, Brand Republic 15-Jul-08, 10:05

NEW YORK - Viacom has agreed to allow Google to blank out identifying details in its YouTube visitor data before complying with a judge's order to hand it over to Viacom as it pursues a $1bn (£505m) copyright infringement lawsuit.

Google said last night that it would provide Viacom's attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and internet address data that could be used to identify individual users.

Google said in a statement: "Viacom and the other litigants have backed off their demand for YouTube user viewing histories. We have reached agreement to anonymise the data."

The move comes after a New York federal judge earlier this month ordered Google to turn over YouTube usernames, IP addresses, and viewing histories to Viacom, parent company of Paramount and MTV Networks.

Viacom said at the time that it needed the data to demonstrate video piracy patterns that are at the core of its case against YouTube. However, Viacom was subsequently widely criticised for intruding on people's online privacy, even though it said it had no interest in identifying individual users.

The media firm launched the $1bn lawsuit against Google's YouTube last year, accusing the video-sharing site of violating its copyright.

Google denies that YouTube infringes content owners' copyright, arguing that it removes copyrighted videos from the site when asked by content owners.

YouTube is also fighting a second lawsuit filed by the English Premiere League, along with music publishers and videographers.

As the two lawsuits are parallel, they are being treated as one for the purposes of preliminary motions and evidence discovery. Therefore, plaintiffs for the Football Association will also be handed YouTube's anonymised data, as per the judges request.

The cases are unlikely to come to trial before 2009 or 2010.