YouTube has been forced by the US Supreme Court to supply Viacom with user data.

Tuesday, 8 July 2008

The US broadcasting station, Viacom responsible for MTV and Paramount Pictures have won their battle to obtain information on over a 100 million YouTube users from the US and UK.

Proceedings began against Google in a $1 billion lawsuit in March 2007 over the illegal use of copyright material contained in about 160,000 videos. Viacom’s complaint is they have lost revenue as consumers view YouTube as a cheaper alternative to their channels. The clips in question have attracted over 1.5 billion hits on the UGC site.

The user details to be given up include unique internet addresses, email accounts, past viewed videos and usernames for Viacom’s analysts to examine. The 12 terabytes of data is a highly sensitive source of material that most internet users believe to be safely under lock and key, and to have no other use besides making the journey online a faster and a more pleasurable experience.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group from San Francisco said ‘the court's erroneous ruling is a setback to privacy rights’. It could mean that other cases surface in court hoping also to make use of the libraries of information held.

"Governments and organisations are realising that companies like Google have a warehouse full of data. And while that data is stored it is under threat of being used and putting privacy in danger," said Simon Davies a leading privacy expert speaking to the BBC News.

Google have pledged to clean out personal material before passing on data to Viacom to protect people’s privacy. Data protection is a hot topic at the moment - what material is kept? Where it is kept? And how it’s used exactly are amongst the many questions being asked. We now wait to see what becomes of this landmark case.