The personal viewing habits and online identities of millions of YouTube users are to be handed over to an American media giant after a court rejected arguments that such a move amounted to a massive invasion of internet privacy.

Under the terms of a US court judgment, Google, which owns YouTube, must now
surrender the details of video-watching histories, IP addresses and
usernames, to Viacom, which wants to use the data to prove that the site is
hosting thousands of television and other media clips in breach of strict
copyright laws.

Last night, Google said it intended to comply with the court order and
confirmed the ruling would affect “our global log”. At this stage, the
company had no plans to appeal against the ruling, a Google spokesman said.

Privacy groups described the ruling as a dangerous precedent that could lead
to worldwide breaches of internet privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet rights group, said the
ruling will allow Viacom to see what everyone is watching on YouTube. “We
urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps
necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users,” the
group said.

Viacom, which owns several US television networks including MTV and
Nickelodeon, alleged in a $1bn (£50m) US lawsuit launched in March 2007 that
almost 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes are available on
YouTube. Those clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times, the
company claims.

Its lawyers argued it needed access to the information on user viewing
habits to prove that copyright-infringing material is more popular than
user-generated videos on YouTube, which would strengthen its case against
Google.

In its judgment, the US District Court for the southern district of New York
agreed with Viacom and ordered Google to turn over the information. Google
argued that user data should not be handed over because of privacy concerns,
but Judge Louis Stanton dismissed those concerns as “speculative”. Viacom
also asked for the underlying code that Google and YouTube use to search for
keywords and video in order to demonstrate what Google could be doing to
block infringing videos. They also wanted access to Google’s advertising
database scheme in the hopes of proving that infringing videos are driving
advertising revenue.

But the court rejected all of those requests, arguing that the code and
advertising data was too valuable to Google.

Google hopes to limit the damage of the ruling by seeking assurances from
Viacom that it will respect users’ privacy.

Google’s senior litigation counsel, Catherine Lacavera said yesterday: “We
are pleased the court put some limits on discovery, including refusing to
allow Viacom to access users’ private videos and our search technology. We
are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing
history. We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to
anonymise the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Asked what the company would do if Viacom declined to co-operate with its
request, a Google spokesman said: “All we can say right now is that we ask
Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before
producing them under the court’s order. We cannot comment further.”

Viacom’s claims

160,000

The number of its unauthorised programmes that the US media company alleges
are available to watch on YouTube.

1,500,000,000

The number of times that Viacom claims those clips have been viewed.

- Robert Verkaik