YouTube must surrender Viacom video logs

A federal judge overseeing a €637 million (US$1 billion) copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

An Associated Press report also said US District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips.

The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user's real name or email address, the Associated Press report said.

Lawyers for Google, which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data, equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books, would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy, the report said.

The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed.

Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer.

Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative.

Stanton rejected a request from the plaintiffs for Google to disclose the source code, the technical secret sauce, powering its market-leading search engine, saying there's no evidence Google manipulated its search algorithms to treat copyright-infringing videos differently.

Viacom is seeking at least €637 million (US$1 billion) in damages from Google, saying YouTube has built a business by using the internet to 'willfully infringe' copyrights on Viacom shows.