Hooray! Lawyers in YouTube lawsuit reach user privacy deal

Written on 15th July 2008                                                                                                              COMMENT
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Viacom, owner of media channels as MTV, accused Google to facilitate copyright infringement on Youtube. The lawsuit that followed summoned Google to comprehend and give user-data to Viacom, data included the user playlists, IP addresses and time-codes. That was two weeks ago, today we find that Viacom stepped down from their original demand.

Google will not be obligated to provide the user-data to Viacom. “We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. Youtube will anonymize the data before it is published to Viacom, leaving out critical information such as usernames and IP addresses.

I am not in favor of copyright infringement, and I support the idea of a monetary stream back to the respective artist, but the original settlement was one step closer to Viacom suing everyone that watched the latest videoclip of Madonna on youtube, or worse, who has been Rickrolled for that matter! This settlement is a step in the right direction for privacy protection, congratulations.