DEFENDANTS AND plaintiffs in two related copyright infringement lawsuits against YouTube have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers during evidence discovery, a spokesman for Google said yesterday.
Earlier this month a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the videosharing website.
Google said it had now agreed to provide lawyers for Viacom and a class-action group led by the English Football Association a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube username and internet address data that could be used to identify individual video watchers.
"We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class-action group," Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. "They have agreed to let us anonymise YouTube user data."
Viacom, owner of film studio Paramount and MTV Networks, requested the information as part of its $1 billion (€629 million) copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and its parent, Google.
Privacy activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups argued that the order threatened "to expose deeply private information" and violated the US Video Privacy Protection Act. - (Reuters)
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