Privacy loses in YouTube-Viacom suit

Looks like private user data is free game in the copyright infringement battle between Google's YouTube and Viacom. Google must turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, due to a decision handed down yesterday by Louis Stanton, the judge in the U.S. District Court Southern District of New York handling the case.

In an interesting twist, explained well by Wired's Ryan Singel, Google lost its bid to protect YouTube user privacy due to its own stated data retention policies. Still, Google was able to keep its intellectual property, including YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema, out of Viacom's hands.

And that means the court thinks Google/YouTube corporate IP is more important than user privacy. Interesting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has already reacted, calling the order a violation of the Video Privacy Protection act that "threatens to expose deeply private information."

But that's New York. Separately, another test of Google user privacy never made it to a Florida courtroom, as the defendants in the case pleaded guilty. In that case, the defense planned to submit Google search queries to prove that the defendants, who were hit with racketeering and other charges as a result of running a multimillion dollar porn empire, were abiding by community standards and were no less mainstream than most people in Pensacola (who tend to search for porn-related terms a lot).

As UPI reports:

Defense attorney Lawrence Walters said that publicly accessible search data from Google will likely show that Pensacola Web surfers seek out plenty of racy sites.

"Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," Walters said. "We can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed."

The EFF has yet to react to that one.