Your personal YouTube Viewing Habits to be Handed Over to Viacom
YouTube owner Google has been forced by a New York judge to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube to US broadcaster Viacom, whose TV channels include MTV, Paramount and Nickelodeon.
The information is of more than 100 million people, their viewing habits, internet and email addresses, and enough data to identify individuals.
Privacy activists from the Digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday the order by Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York "threatens to expose deeply private information", calling the court order a "set-back to privacy rights".
In a response to the ruling, Google said: "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."
Although Viacom's move may be seen by some as a bargaining gambit to get Google to cough up royalties, it is a deeply unsettling development for privacy and personal liberties advocates. In 2006 the US Department of Justice demanded that Google hand over details of millions of searches conducted by its users, and although it was unsuccessful in its demands (Google challenged it and won), a collective shudder was felt across the Internet.
Viacom may be right to demand royalties for copyrighted material it owns, but if indeed, as it claims, it is only out to prove the case against YouTube, it should take up Google's offer to anonymise the disks of personal information before it scours them for evidence to support its commercial case.
Further reading:
Viacom lawsuit: Google told to hand over all YouTube user details (Guardian)
Judge orders Google to give YouTube user data to Viacom (AFP)
UPDATE (15 July 08): YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, has struck a deal to strip potentially compromising personal information out of reams of user data that it is being forced to hand over to Viacom (more)
Sue Tabloids in France for Privacy and in England for Libel – The Litigation Tourist Packs a Suitcase
The effects of globalisation on law and the accountability of the Media in other jurisdictions is growing (or in plain English - you can be sued everywhere, because you are accountable wherever your content is available online).
Out Law, the online legal site, reported the following case where French law was used to sue british newspapers: British newspaper websites liable in France for privacy invasion,
And it didn't start with privacy. In the past, libel cases were brought to England by foreign litigators, to take advantage of its stringent libel laws, including what became known as 'The Arab Effect'. Rachel Ehrenfeld of The American Centre for Democracy wrote a book Funding Evil: "How Terrorism is Financed, and How To Stop It", which implicates Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim A. Bin Mahfouz and others as supporters of terrorism. Bin Mahfouz sued the New York-based Ehrenfeld in the U.K (see J.D. Tuccille's blog).
And if England is a great place to sue for Libel, France is excellent if you want to sue for privacy intrusion. The courts there feel that under EU legislation they have jurisdiction over content published on the Internet, because it is viewable in France. And now a precedent has been set following the success of Kylie's ex, Olivier Martinez, in suing the Mirror Group and Associated Newspapers.
EU law has power over the Union's members, but in the US, libel tourism has evoked strong emotions and calls for the protection of what many Americans see as a breach of their freedom of speech. Some congressmen are campaigning to legislate against libel tourism, to protect the First Amendment. Congressmen Darrell Issa and Steve Cohen introduced a bill in May 08, to try and prohibit US courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign defamation judgments. (more details in The Hill's Congress Blog)
But don't worry for the wealth and welfare of tabloid journalism just yet. Courts in France traditionally order small payouts and, balanced against the popularity of a story, the likes of the EUR4,500 awarded to Martinez are hardly likely to be a deterrent. The paparazzi are here to stay.