By Joseph Menn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers and Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers|July 04, 2008
A billion-dollar court clash between old- and new-media giants took on unexpected privacy ramifications this week when a federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over the log-on names and Internet addresses of every person who had viewed material on the Web's top video site -- tens of millions of people.
Viacom Inc. wants YouTube's logs to help it determine whether unauthorized material makes up a major share of what's watched there. The media giant, which owns the rights to shows such as "The Colbert Report" and "South Park," is suing YouTube and corporate parent Google Inc. for copyright infringement.
Viacom General Counsel Michael Fricklas pledged "unequivocally" Thursday not to use the data to learn the real names of YouTube users in order to sue them for uploading unauthorized clips, as the recording industry has done to people who illegally shared music online.
The New York company said a protective order dictated that only its outside lawyers and experts could access the raw data, and that it could be used solely to make the case against Google.
But the ruling, filed late Wednesday by Judge Louis Stanton of U.S. District Court in New York, shocked privacy advocates. They fear a broader effect from his finding that so-called Internet Protocol addresses -- the unique numbers assigned to all computers and devices connected to the Internet -- need not be strictly protected because they aren't tied publicly to individual names.
"It's a very important privacy moment," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. "It will remind folks that companies like Google are sitting on top of a lot of personal information that they can't always control."
Viacom and YouTube are discussing a plan to replace the Internet addresses with codes, a move designed to prevent the linking of a YouTube log-on name with a particular computer. If that happens, Google has no plans to appeal, according to people working on the case who requested anonymity because of the high financial stakes of the litigation.
Google had objected to Viacom's request for the data, arguing that it would violate users' privacy. But the Mountain View, Calif., company drew fire from privacy groups because it had written elsewhere, when defending its long-term collection of data on users' Web surfing habits, that Internet addresses aren't "personally identifiable information."
