by Glenn Chapman
US District Court Judge Louis Stanton backed Viacom's request for data on which YouTube users watch which videos on the website in order to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google.
Viacom charges Google, which bought YouTube in 2006, acts as a willing accomplice to Internet users who put clips of Viacom's copyrighted television programs on the popular video-sharing website.
"We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history," Google senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera told AFP in an email Thursday.
Stanton brushed aside privacy concerns on Tuesday while ordering Google to give Viacom log-in names of YouTube users and Internet protocol (IP) addresses identifying which computers they used for viewing videos.
Stanton contends that Viacom needs more than pseudonyms and IP numbers that are tantamount to addresses on the Internet to identify individual YouTube users.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt Opsahl called the court's ruling a significant reversal to privacy rights.
The judge's ruling ignores US federal law as well as a "fiasco" that resulted after America Online gave researchers what it thought was anonymous search data, Opsahl said.
People's online searches can unintentionally divulge identities even without accompanying onscreen nicknames or IP addresses, according to Opsahl.
"The court's erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube," he said.
"We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."
Viacom issued a statement Thursday saying it is only out to bolster its case against Google and not to expose or pursue viewers of copyrighted videos.
"Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google," Viacom said.
"It will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner."
In what Google claims as a partial victory, Stanton denied Viacom's request to get its hands on secret source code used in YouTube video searches as well as for Internet searches.
Stanton also refused a Viacom request to order Google to provide access to the videos YouTube users store in private YouTube files.
Google lawyers opposed each of the Viacom requests, which were made in a "discovery" evidence-gathering phase of a lawsuit filed in March of last year in US District Court in New York state.
The Viacom stable includes Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and more than 130 other television networks around the world, plus an array of websites.
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