YouTube to keep user details away from Viacom
Last Updated: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 | 9:41 AM ET
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Viacom has backed off its demands to gain access to the viewing habits and personal data of YouTube users, information it had originally asked for in its copyright infringement lawsuit against the video-sharing website.
The two sides agreed on Monday that any material YouTube was ordered to hand over would be stripped of personal information, including user ID, IP address and visitor ID.
"We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand for all users' viewing histories and we will not be providing that information," YouTube wrote on its company blog Monday. The company also posted a copy of the stipulation to the order on its website.
Viacom, which owns several U.S. television networks including MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, had originally asked for the information as part of its $1 billion US lawsuit against YouTube, which is owned by internet search giant Google Inc.
Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the English soccer Premier League and music publisher Bourne Co. Viacom and the other plaintiffs alleged in the suit, launched in March2007, that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of its programming are available on YouTube. Those clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times, Viacom charged.
It argued Google wasn't doing enough to keep its copyrighted videos from television shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report off YouTube.
It had originally asked for access to the user histories to prove that copyright-infringing material is more popular than user-generated videos on YouTube.
Two weeks ago a U.S. federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over this information, a decision San Francisco-based privacy advocacy group The Electronic Frontier Foundation said was "a setback to privacy rights."
Viacom issued a statement Monday, saying it never asked for personally identifiable information and only wanted the data as evidence in its case.
"Viacom will use the data exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google," the company said in a statement.
At issue in the case is whether Google has fulfilled its requirements under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The DMCA gives websites protection against infringement claims provided copyrighted material is removed upon notification. Viacom has argued Google could do a better job of blocking the infringing material but doesn't do so because infringing material makes up a significant portion of the website's traffic.
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