When Private Concern Becomes Public Domain
Sui Generis–a New York law blog:
This week’s Daily Record column is entitled “When Private Concern Becomes Public Domain.”
A pdf of the article can be found here and my past Daily Record articles can be accessed here.
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When private concern becomes public domain
Federal judge Louis L. Stanton caused an uproar among privacy advocates last week when he issued an order in Viacom v. YouTube Inc., 07 Civ. 2103, a closely watched case pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The lawsuit, in which Viacom is seeking $1 billion from YouTube and Google for copyright infringement, is
now in the discovery phase. The order related to Viacom’s demand for, among other things, YouTube’s source code and user records.
Using the data demanded, Viacom seeks to establish that YouTube unlawfully profited from the unauthorized viewing of Viacom’s copyrighted works by reviewing the frequency with which its copyrighted videos were viewed compared to other video content on YouTube.
Judge Stanton denied the request for YouTube’s proprietary source code, but ordered the production of “all data from the logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube Web site or through embedding on a third-party Web site,” despite the fact Viacom
could just as easily make its case in the absence of specific user data.
In other words, the court required the production of 12 terabytes of data containing, for every video ever watched on YouTube, the unique login ID of the YouTube user, the time the individual began to watch a video, the IP address of the person’s computer and identification of the particular video being viewed.
Judge Stanton rejected YouTube’s privacy concerns, grounded in the protections set forth in the Video Protection Privacy Act (VPPA), stating that “their privacy concerns are…