It’s actually employee privacy that Google is more concerned with in its fight to keep YouTube user data anonymous. When Google was forced to turn over user data, including names and IP addresses, to Viacom as part of that media conglomerate’s suit over copyright infringement, Google worked with Viacom to come up with a way to provide the data while preserving end user anonymity. That sounds good, right? Until we learn that when Viacom specifically asked for YouTube employee data, Google backed out of the deal. As Greg Sandoval on CNET writes:
“YouTube’s employee information could prove crucial to Viacom’s case against Google, as it could go a long way to proving how much knowledge YouTube has about piracy on the site. If YouTube employees knew what was uploaded to the site — or posted pirated clips themselves — YouTube could lose its protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
So that’s how it is. YouTube users can rest easy as they probably aren’t Viacom’s real targets. But YouTube now is more squarely in the cross-hairs. And YouTube’s stated defense, that it’s simply a conduit and can’t prevent users from uploading unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos, comes up well short when we learn that YouTube employees themselves may have been among the scofflaw uploaders.
