Google expressed disappointment Thursday at a judge’s order to give entertainment giant Viacom details of video-watching habits of visitors to its popular video-sharing website YouTube.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday US District Court Judge Louis Stanton backed Viacom’s request for data on which YouTube users watch which videos on the website.<\/p>\n
Viacom is seeking the data as potential evidence for a billion-dollar copyright suit against YouTube and Google, which Viacom charges intentionally avoid preventing Internet users from putting clips of Viacom’s copyrighted television programs on YouTube.<\/p>\n
"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.<\/p>\n
But in what Google claims as a partial victory, Stanton this week denied Viacom’s request to get its hands on secret source code used in YouTube video searches as well as for Internet searches.<\/p>\n
Stanton also refused a Viacom request to order Google to provide access to the videos YouTube users store in private YouTube files.<\/p>\n
Google lawyers opposed each of the Viacom requests, which were made during a "discovery" evidence-gathering phase of a lawsuit filed in March of last year in US District Court in New York state.<\/p>\n
"We are pleased the court put some limits on discovery, including refusing to allow Viacom to access users’ private videos and our search technology," Lacavera said.<\/p>\n
"We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order."<\/p>\n
Google has condemned the lawsuit as an attack on the underpinnings of the Internet, while Viacom argues that the California-based Internet search colossus and especially its subsidiary YouTube are involved in "massive" copyright infringement.<\/p>\n
The Viacom lawsuit has been merged with a similar civil litigation being pursued by the Premier League of England’s Football Association, which says soccer game clips are routinely posted on YouTube without authorization.<\/p>\n
Google shielded itself with 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, US legislation that says Internet firms are not responsible for what Internet users put on websites.<\/p>\n
Stanton brushed aside privacy concerns on Tuesday while ordering Google to give Viacom log-in names of YouTube users and Internet protocol (IP) numbers identifying which computers they used for viewing videos.<\/p>\n
Stanton contends that Viacom needs more than pseudonyms and IP numbers that are tantamount to addresses on the Internet to identify individual YouTube users.<\/p>\n
The judge ordered Google to give Viacom copies of the millions of videos that have been deleted from YouTube.<\/p>\n
Industry insiders suspect Viacom is using the lawsuit as a negotiating tactic and has no intention of taking the matter to trial.<\/p>\n
Viacom’s goal could be to reach into Google’s deep pockets for royalties for videos played on YouTube.<\/p>\n
Viacom, however, said it had no choice but to sue after "a great deal of unproductive negotiation" failed to curtail YouTube’s "unlawful business model."<\/p>\n
The Viacom stable includes Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and more than 130 other television networks around the world, plus an array of websites.<\/p>\n