US court orders Viacom to be given all YouTube usernames, IP addresses and viewing histories

Friday, July 4th, 2008

It’s been a week in which big business concerns have really shown their claws, what with Virgin Media colluding with the BPI in sending out letters to customers threatening them with disconnection (something Virgin now says was a “mistake”) and now Viacom getting some stupid judge in the US to order Google to disclose the viewing habits of everybody in the entire world who has ever watched a video on YouTube.

The common factor is boundless greed, of course, and both cases show the absolute contempt of the businesses involved for our privacy. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a “set-back to privacy rights”. The viewing log to be handed over to Viacom will contain the log-in ID of users, their computer IP addresses (online identifiers) and video clip details. And although the legal battle is being fought in the US, the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits all over the world.

Viacom, which owns MTV and Paramount Pictures, alleges that YouTube is guilty of massive copyright infringement. Whether it is or isn’t—and arguably it isn’t, because one company cannot reasonably be held responsible for the actions of its entire customer base numbering millions of people—it is Viacom that is already the loser in this case when it comes to how the company is being perceived by the public as a direct consequence of its invasive and outrageous tactics. In short, Viacom stinks.

Google works hard to remove any suspect material as soon as it is discovered, and while Google has its own dark and twisted business imperatives—notably in colluding with the Chinese government—the company has no way of knowing whether newly uploaded material by its users is copyrighted or not. While the extensive library of clips can be swept for keywords, there is a need to know what keywords should be searched for; and then, there’s no guarantee that clips will have been helpfully named in such a way as to make their content obviously in breech to automated software.

A clip can be given any name, so the only way to completely weed out copyrighted material is to do so by having human eyes and ears checking every single clip. That this would require an army bigger than that of the US and EU combined means there is a real threat to the very future of YouTube.

Viacom seeks nothing less than the closure of YouTube, presumably planning to offer its own paid-for alternative on a subscription or pay-per-download business model. The UK’s Premier League association is also seeking class action status with Viacom on the issue, alleging YouTube, which was bought by Google in 2006, has been used to watch football highlights. But really, who gives a shit? Football fans may well check out highlights of a game online, but they still watch the matches in full. And when have you ever met a Star Trek fan proud to show off his or her collection of ten-second clips or fan-produced mash-ups, who couldn’t care less about all those lovely DVD collections? Answer, never.

No, what Viacom and the Premier League want is for even 10-second clips to be paid for. They want us to pay for everything, preferably more than once. This is where another link to this week’s other news story about the BPI comes in: they want us to buy music on CD, then buy it again if we want to listen to it on iPods, and again if we want to use any tracks from those CDs or downloads as ringtones on our phones, etc etc. Copyright is a useful tool these days not for the protection of income for the people who make the content, but for increasing the bank balances of those who own the asses of the people who made the content, namely their distributors, publishers and so on.

Actors, it is true, get revenue (not much) from repeat showings of TV episodes and films. The same does not hold true of footballers, who are already paid obscene sums just to stand on the pitch. Mostly it is the content facilitators and distributors, and football and other sports organisations, who get money from clips being shown on TV. The people who make the content possible don’t see any of that revenue, though the bigwigs would argue it’s the extra money grab that allows them to commission new content, build new stadiums, blah blah blah. Yet they get richer all the time despite all the alleged reinvestment that goes on. And we’re still drowning in dirt-cheap reality TV shows and mediocre cinema releases.

When it initiated legal action in March 2007 Viacom said it had identified about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes on the website, which had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. But if people like a show, they aren’t ever going to be content with clips—they’re going to want the whole thing, and complete TV shows, sports matches, and films are not available on YouTube.

Viacom should be seeing YouTube as a means of enticing people to buy, a free archive of promotional material often put together by fans instead of advertising agencies. It is also a historical archive, providing people with access to advertisements and shows decades old that nobody actually wants to air because they wouldn’t get enough people watching at any one time to sell advertising space. Many of the ads are for products no longer for sale anywhere in the world, and clips of old news items from magazine-style shows, and region-specific material, would likely never see the light of day again without YouTube.

Following the launch of the billion-dollar lawsuit, YouTube introduced new filtering tools in an effort to prevent copyright materials from appearing on the site.

The US court declined Viacom’s request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube, saying it was a “trade secret” that should not be disclosed. Well, at least it got that right—but it said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were “speculative”. How so? Viacom is about to get its dirty mitts on my personal information, and yours as well.

“We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s over-reaching demand for viewing history,” said Google’s senior litigation counsel, Catherine Lacavera. “We will ask Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court’s order.” Yes. Why didn’t Viacom request the information without user IDs and IP addresses? Does it plan to write to everyone who has ever viewed an unauthorised Viacom clip on YouTube, demanding money from them in payment and threatening court action for non-compliance? Does the company know how many decades it would take for courts across the world to process a war on YouTube users?

More to the point, does the company really want to go that far? Or does it simply want to destroy the distribution model, namely YouTube? If it succeeds, a successor to YouTube won’t be far behind and may be far less conscientious. And then there will be another. And another. And another. You cannot close the door after the technology has bolted. Through it all, Viacom will gain the worst possible reputation with the public and may have to start hiding its branding on products released by its many subsidiaries for fear of being boycotted. And a boycott is likely if it continues with this insane action.

The ruling will see the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users given to Viacom, totalling more than 12 terabytes of data. Viacom said it wanted the data to “compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing video with that of non-infringing videos.” Well it doesn’t need to know our usernames or IP addresses then, does it?

We can only hope Google is able to challenge the ruling if Viacom does not accede to its request that the data first be stripped of user-identifying information. And, so far, Viacom has not shown itself to be reasonable or fair at all, but vicious and bloody-minded.

Of course Viacom may yet lose its court action, and if it does so, it will lose big. Another thing to hope for. Because Viacom deserves a serious kicking for being so greedy and invasive. For now, those of us who ever tune into MTV (okay, not that many do these days) could seize the opportunity to watch competing music channels instead. That’s if we care about strangers getting our personal information. If you don’t, why not head out the house today with print-outs of your name, address, telephone number, email address—stuff like that—and hand out the sheets at your local supermarket, bus stop, train station, and on the street?

After all, if you don’t mind Viacom having access to your information, why not make it a free-for-all?